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My Substack connects people interested in transforming everyday life experiences using Cultural Theory in service of Art-Making.
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I'm the kind of artist who equates art-making with play and theorizing with spiritual-thinking; the kind of artist who seeks to re-enchant daily life and re-indigenize our presence in the world.
I approach my art-making first through a counter-colonial conceptual and theoretical stance and follow through with the necessary actions with a bodily-carnal awareness.
As an art historian (PhD) by academic path, I seek to remember the knowledge of artists in my Brazilian lineage, such as Lygia Clark and Celeida Tostes. I center painting in my practice to dismantle the limits imposed on this medium by the disciplinary art historical framework. I focus on finding ways to invite my young children to paint in collaboration, transforming painting into a space of continuous spiritual encounter, play through experimentation, and the unveiling of ancestral symbols and gestures.
With the clarity that everyone is an artist, I gather groups of people to show and talk about what they make, merge academic talks with art-making time for those listening, and create art-making moments in daily life. By accumulating all these actions, I name my work "compositions," which now begin to invite the consciousness of the already-present voice and sound in my making.
Debora Faccion Grodzki has a Ph.D. in Art History from the State University of New York in Binghamton (2022) and an MA in Social Communication from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora in Brazil (2012).
