Jonathas de Andrade

Jonathas de Andrade was born in Maceió in 1982 and lives in Recife, in northeastern Brazil. Recife is a coastal city rich in contrasts, where old colonial buildings stand alongside modern skyscrapers and the failure of the tropical modernist utopia remains a tangible reality. Anthropology, pedagogy, politics and morality form the main lines of inquiry through which the artist explores the paradoxes of modernist culture. De Andrade collects and catalogues images, texts, life stories and materials relating to architecture and, through memory, pieces together a personal narrative of the past. “I dive into this field of recollections”, says the artist. “This is a past I have no intimacy with, seen as if it were a territory, a place for re-enacting a kind of amnesia, an often-violent brush between today and yesterday. Not being touched by this is what allows me to rework the nature of these imagines. Art helps me to approach and respond to what provokes me. It also helps me to experience more wholeness along the way.”