Maria Thereza Alves

Maria Thereza Alves’s projects focus on ‘decolonising knowledge’. The artist investigates strategies of survivance by giving space and voice to silenced histories. Una proposta di sincretismo (questa volta senza genocidio) presents the images of a lush garden cheered up by the presence of some parrots. The various plant species portrayed were chosen by the artist based on what grows on Italian soil today, particularly in Sicily, but whose presence tells a long story of bloody conquests by the first Western colonists. All the species represented in the image are in fact native to Latin America and their introduction to Europe follows for the most part Christopher Columbus’ travels. Made of ceramic tiles, according to a typical Sicilian Baroque technique whose traces in turn recur in the crafts of Brazil, Mexico and Peru following Western control, the work has at its base an inscription that wishes for a form of encounter between cultures no longer based on the violence of domination.