Krystel Ann Art view room of our AKAA Paris/ boot C3

The artists Giana De Dier and Leticia Barreto, presented by Krystel Art gallery at AKAA, Paris France 2021, offer mixed media collage artworks that show process of self-care, identity awareness and positionality.

De Dier’s works question the visibility of West Indian history in her country, Panama, Central America. She rediscovers her Caribbean descendance thanks to the haptic communication she entails with that act of creating frames from the archival images of unknown West Indians workers during the Panama canal’s construction. While using imagination as a healing tool to fill the gaps of the West Indian history in the country, she combines the “tiles” of archival images with her family memories. Her works show black Caribbean female sociability and their possible unwritten herstories. The collage allows the artist to unveil and discover “pieces” of herself that she is not aware of them, yet.

Barreto’s selected artworks started during the lockdown in Portugal. In Diário da Quarantena she shows her felt reality ripped by the feelings of fear and worry for her mother country: Brazil. However, the artists with her next Series, Kintsugi or Staring Over, decided to “mend” and heal her dissected, “pieced” self, appropriating the Japanese technique with the same name. She sutured her in-visible wounds, while connecting with the Brazilian action of "gambiarra", translatable as “a quick fix”. The artist’s work matured into the act of embracing her national ability and mannerism, allowing to fix herself in the final selected collage Viver é rasgar-se e remendar-se : “Living is a ripping and mending”.

Maica Gugolati