(this page was last updated in July 2016)
Born in Salvador, Brazil, 1962.
Lives and works in Salvador, Brazil.
PIPA 2014 nominee.
Eneida Sanches’ oeuvre is composed of panels and objects made of approximately ten thousand metal etchings printed on paper and mounted on steel wire. Each etching, made using aqua forte and aquatint techniques, measures 5 x 5 cm. The resulting installations cross the boundaries between etching and sculpture.
Sanches’ production explores the idea of Trance as a religious phenomenon, and the collective social representation of Afro-Bahian culture and its histories. Her iconographic repertoire originates in the universe of Candomblé ritual and its functional order. Her ten thousand prints result from hundreds of copper plates and the convergence of the functional limits of etching and sculpture.
Sanches’ Trance work began in 1992, during a visit to the São Joaquim Market in Salvador, Bahia. Coming across bull eyes sold for Candomblé rituals, Sanches decided to create metal etchings and print them. Bull eyes are a ritual element used to neutralize the spell of the evil eye. The panels of bulls eyes, with their subtle impressions, are produced by successively printing the etchings without adding additional ink. Sanches alternates etchings made with varying amounts of ink to create an illusion of movement on the steel wires.
These animal eyes, trimmed and reversed, reflect the human gaze and behave like multiplying cells, thereby composing the physical body of the work. In the process of semiotic transformation, the displacement of the eyes from their sociocultural and religious origins produces new aesthetic objects and meanings.
Contrary to some of the fundamentals that drive the production of printed art, Sanches’ print runs are detached from the strict and invariable definition of printing. Instead, she prints to produce textures and discontinuities that allow for the variation of the objects under the influence of light, as well as to eliminate the restriction of serial numbers.
A few have commented on another technical aspect of printmaking, including Paulo Sergio Duarte:
“(…) What most attracted me seemed so natural for the artists who did not talk about it or went unnoticed: it was what was common to every printer when they make an etching. And what was common was this tremendous ability to conceive of the world upside-down so that we can print it right side up”. (1)
The specular nature of etching is the process of turning an image inside-out from the source in order to reconstruct it in the end and examine its inverse.
Trance is a passage beyond what can be told through words. Trance is what is missing from what can be said of an experience. It creates an image that conjures something of the lost sense, and the image is a place to record this.
The installations “Transe e Mergulho I e II” (2011), and “Transe e Deslocamento de Dimensões” (2013) are some of the works produced in partnership with photographer and videographer Tracy Collins.
In “Deslocamento de Dimensões”, using two Fresnel lamps, the artist built a landscape of etchings and their plates on the wall, consisting of matter and shadow. This highlighted again the subject of her research–the idea of Trance as the absence of matter, and as intensifying the experience of displacement of consciousness. From this perspective, Sanches’ pieces evoke the notion of ‘the horse’, a ritual term where the body of the initiate–or the artist–serves as the conduit to estrangement and otherness.
Here, the substantive solution of expository forms establish the completeness of trance as a poetic act: an invitation to otherness, an inclusive act, a polysemic act, a political act.
1. Paulo Sergio Duarte. A trilha da Trama e Outros Textos Sobre Arte, em “As Técnicas de Reproducao da Idéia de Progresso em Arte. p 201. Organizer: Luiza Duarte. Funarte, RJ.
The work of brazilian artist Eneida Sanches [b.1962] expands literal representations occasionally attributed to elements of Afro-Brazilian religiosity, embracing the conceptual and Despite strong artistic training in her childhood and adolescence, Eneida started her career as an architect. Such choice was an attempt to work around the repression on artistic practice imposed by the military regime, which ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985. “We were coming from a time in the 1970s when artists were being heavily cracked down on. So I graduated in architecture and worked as an architect until 1990,” says the artist. In the 1990’s, Eneida Sanches re-contact the field of visual arts by working as apprentice for “ferramenteira de santo” (3) rituals. Part of the same matrix as the Cuban Santeria, Candomblé is the Afro-Brazilian ramification of the Yoruba cult of the orishas. (4) “Cutting, hammering, carving, working with a blowtorch, I became completely enamored with the items and the symbolic realm of Candomblé,” the artist explains. (5) From her work with Candomblé tools, Eneida Sanches embarked on a lasting relationship with the international community of the African and Latin America Diasporas in the United States, which culminated in 1994 in a show at the Museum for African Art, New York, and developed into multiple residencies and shows at museums such as the Smithsonian in Washington DC and publications at Art in America (Sept `94) and African Arts (1994). In the early 2000s, influenced by the Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha and the study of Yoruba philosophy, Eneida extrapolates the symbolic universe of Candomblé objects, more strongly linked to the representation of orishas. To the artist, Yoruba mythology address inherent traits of human nature such as autonomy and responsibility, bringing up concepts that extrapolate purely religious experience. These issues later evolve in the direction of an artistic research more focused on contemporary Africa: “African philosophy and concepts, specifically Yoruba traditions are the source from which my production bursts out”, says the artist. In Eneida Sanches’ oeuvre, etching places these issues in greater evidence within a formal framework: “At the São Joaquim street fair (6) I saw a booth selling ox cuts: liver, brain, paws, eyes; those were items which were not meant as food, but rather as offerings. The eyes in some rituals are used for protecting from evil eye spells. Using images of the eyes, I started creating garments to ward off evil eye – a jacket, shoes, pants, underwear, dresses – and then I would hang these clothes in murals. Seen from a distance, these clother were unnoticed but as one approached, the piece would show its tridimensioal feature. Working with that displacement, I created a three-dimensional structure for the etchings with a natural result on the surrounding walls.”
Text by Solange Farkas for Bisi Silva
From “ferramentaria” (1) to trance: Symbology, concept and religiosity in the work of contemporary artist Eneida Sanches
philosophical realms, which inhabit this mythology. In installations such as Transe: Deslocamento de Dimensões [2007], for instance, Eneida uses small metal etched plates as building blocks to a three-dimensional structure that invites the spectator to experience trance as a powerful “alteration in the visual field”. (2)
Solange Farkas: In the 2000s you extrapolated the universe of “ferramentaria” to attain a less literal representation of Candomblé symbolism. How did that process occur? SF: You once mentioned that Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth (Terra em Transe, 1967) was a driving force for you to start dealing with the issue of trance as an immediate resignification of the symbolic realm. How do you incorporate the displacement and alteration of the senses evoked by the trance? SF: In the process of incorporating this displacement of dimensions into your work, how did the study of Yoruba philosophy enhance your research? SF: As a result of that expansion process, your work now constantly operates at the boundary between religion, culture, and concept. How do you elaborate the intersection between aesthetics and religions issues? SF: How does engraving, combined with other techniques, contribute to bring about the sensation of motion in your more recent installations? 1. Ferramentaria or Orishas Tools are sacred items used by the Orishas to augment the performance of their roles.
In this interview with curator Solange Farkas, the artist discusses how her creative process expands to bring in conceptual aspects of Candomblé.
Eneida Sanches: From the time I learned to write, I attended a school which placed a strong emphasis on the art curriculum, and that enabled me to move through various languages and techniques since childhood. Then in 1990, I became familiar with the Candomblé ritual objects, their aesthetics and the concepts behind their form. I began crafting items related to this symbolic universe and studying the art of Sub-Saharan Africa, especially the ancient Yorubaland (7). Etchings came as a natural replacement for the need of hammering metals in order to create image on them. Later, I expanded the formal use of etching as a traditional technique.
Throughout the 1990s, I started being invited to show my work in Museums and Galleries in United States on a regular basis and participating in artistic residencies for short
periods. At that time, “ferramentaria” was the focus of my artistic production and I was deeply committed to work with that symbolic universe in a very representative approach.
In 2000, as I got invited to undertake an artistic residency at the Smithsonian Museum in Washington, I felt that that cycle had ended. Umberto Eco’s book The Open Work was also decisive to that process. During that period I did research on artists such as Olazábal, Carlos Garaicoa and José Bedia, and I could realize that the need to break from directly representing those symbols would not disconnect me from the original pulsation it contains. It was the start, for me, of a fabric that combined my individual experience of Brazilian Africanism and what is shared through the essential experience as a human being.
ES: It was also during my residency at the Smithsonian that I watched again Glauber Rocha’s Entranced Earth movie. That’s when I realized how Glauber evidenced the symbol while diluting it into its conceptual expression. He would discuss these experiences with an intriguing skillfulness; he was not stuck to a fixed representation. From then on, in my work, “trance” expanded from the religious realm, becoming a state of “translator of dimensions.” In Candomblé, this is the function of Exú, an entity who dwells in the crossroads, continuously moving throughout the 7 different dimensions (left, right, front, back, up, down, inwards).
In my research, and I included a series of interviews with priests and psychoanalysts on the issue of trance and the unconsciousness. A New York based, babalawo (8) John Mason me a video where Miles Davis performed. After a while playing, one can notice his eyes and body moving as if he is “taken” by the music. At that moment, Miles no longer belongs to himself, but rather to the music that “passed” through him. John Mason points out for what he calls a state of trance in the art practice: a state of displacement.”
Back to Brazil, etching, then, starts to occupy a different space in my work and I move the etched paper to bodies (friends used as models) and show them as photographs. My production becomes a hybrid of etching and photography using body as the support, thus pointing out directly to an important religious foundation of Candomblé: the body as the orisha’s horse. I have been investigating this displacement of dimensions ever since.
ES: The concept behind Yoruba symbols is incredibly instigating. In Candomblé rituals, for instance, initiated followers of the orisha Oxóssi (9) carry two cross-strapped small purses. In the tales, each purse is said to contain a different concentration of the same potion: one used as venom and the other an ointment for the cure and depending on the need this substance will either kill or save a being. This mythology indicates the understanding of autonomy and responsibility in African religiosity. Displacement is, thus, understood as the need to be flexible and to use the tools available. Art as the exercise of polytheism.
ES: As I’ve said before, I went back to studying and investigating what lies before the representation of that mythology, and just like the “MilesDavian” blow, I was able to allow trance to have its say. Producing the mural with clothes (mentioned earlier in the article), was my first exercise on the reflections about bi-dimensional and tri dimensional experience is a means to speak about trance/displacement.
ES: Traditional etching observes formal aspects which I deliberately depart from. I reprint one single painted plate four or five times – serial number is not an important subject in this case – and the result is an almost dissolution of the initial image. They are all arranged and composed in the mural. The visual experience of the group, does not allow the eye to rest on clean, clear-cut images. They are not there, though, as repetition, confirming an idea. Neither does the whole of the mural swallow its cells. They work in tandem, creating a movement which exists only to the beholder of the piece. From 2011 all the etchings in the studio were chopped and used to build new pieces in the form of collage. Again pieces were called Trance, as a tribute to all that resist to the unknown. Once last vestige of fear is overcome, the pulsating idea can come forth. Hopefully we can allow ourselves to be ridden as horses.
2. 14th Salão da Bahia. Salvador: Bahia Museum of Modern Art, 2007. p. 112
3. Ferramenteiro de Santo: the craftsmen that manufacture the orishas tools.
4. In Yoruba mythology, orishas are divinities or demigods created by the supreme god Olorun. The orishas are guardians of the elements of nature and represent all of their domains in the aye (the physical reality humans are inserted in, according to Yoruba tradition). There also are intermediate orishas between men and the African pantheon which are not considered gods, but ancestors who were divinized after death.
5. 14th Salão da Bahia. Salvador: Bahia Museum of Modern Art, 2007. p. 112.
6. Created in Salvador de Bahia, in the 1960s, after the destruction of the old street market Água de Meninos, the São Joaquim fair commercializes fruits, vegetables, handcrafted materials, and specially products and animals dedicated to candomblé rituals and sacrifices.
7. The cultural region of the Yoruba, referred to as Yorubaland, gathers parts of the modern states of Benin, Nigeria and Togo.
8. Babálawó is the name given to priests of the Orúnmilá-Ifá Orisha, from the Jeje and Nagô cultures. They never go into a trance. Their main function is to initiate other babalawos and to convey the knowledge of the Ifá Cult to initiated ones.
9. The term “Oxóssi,” in Portuguese, derives from the Yoruba Òşóòsì, an entity that rules wilderness, specially forests. His cult has been preserved both in Brazil and Cuba.
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