” The house is our first universe”

( Gaston Bachelard The poetics of Space, 1969)

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Verônica Alkmim França group of sculptures explore the house as the archetypal space of homeliness. “Body Architecture” represents the experiential relationship between bodies and the spaces they inhabit, a relationship that is at once objective and subjective.

 The structures she uses to investigate the phenomenology of architectural and bodily homeliness present an eclectic selection in keeping with the hybrid appropriations of contemporary Brazilian art. Alkmim França ’s work has consistently explored the unity of body and soul: “ When I made my first doll’s dress at eight, I discovered that our body is the only concrete form we have. Clothes are like a skin”. This statement reveals the holistic approach that is a significant mark of her work, revealing the limitations of the traditional Enlightenment opposition between mind and soul, head and hand. It is rather a Baroque sensibility, significant in Brazilian art and culture, advocating a unity of body and soul, that is more keeping with the concept of “body architecture”. Alkmim França ’ s work, therefore, should be seen and understood as, what Germano Celant, writing about contemporary Brazilian art, termed a “psychophysical aggregate of forma and volumes”. The sculptures in “ Body Architecture” echo the specifically womanly experience and conquest of modernist and pre-modernist spaces as contained within houses.

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