The artist considers the hands painted and stamped with ochre in stones and caves around the world as a symbolic milestone of the arising of performance, body painting and the act of stamping.
In the rock art of northeastern Brazil (approximately 10,000 years old) many hands are found stamped on the rocks with symbols that suggest they were created using body stamps.
From this notion, Anita proposes contemporary performances that reclaim the technology of clay stamps (widely known as sello precolombino or pintaderas) which are found in different archaeological sites around the world (such as Candide Cave Arena in Italy, Sardinia Italy, Island Canary Islands etc) and have been widely used by the indigenous cultures of the Americas.
Originally created in the Brazilian Amazon region (Sambaqui do Bocanga) over 6,600 years Before Present, clay stamps were later developed and adopted by different indigenous cultures throughout the American continent, especially by the native peoples of Mesoamerica and the Andes. However, during the last hundred years with the colonization process, clay stamps disappeared completely from the indigenous communities of the Americas along with many other elements of their cultures.
Either on the skin of timeless stones that live within us through their red symbols, or on painted bodies, yet another mysterious cave that lives solely in the time of blood, the OCHRE exhibition project aims to imprint a stain of life onto the existing connections between different times, cultures and spaces.
Support: Echoes of the South Atlantic Goethe-Institut (Project Wombs of the Atlantic Rainforest)