"As the audience enters the space, they encounter Metamorfose, a large-scale photograph by Thiá Sguoti that cuts across the room like a mystical monolith descending to earth to alter realities and bring back those who were erased. In the image, a natural landscape is intervened upon by the scales of a trans-species from the origin of the world, what the artist calls an artifact of fiction/non-fiction, a fissure opening in the sand of the beach toward a rebirth. In the desire to invoke a reference to lost ancestry through an archaeology of reinvention, the work extends onto the walls that sustain the space; thus, a new scale is seen emerging on the surface located to the left of the photograph. In the fragment of this kind of skin, produced in latex, we observe the presence of a sacred goddess who outmaneuvers the concrete and transforms the nascent world into a transcendental form of existence. It becomes evident that by excavating the structures of a society built upon forged forgetting, and by recreating the artifacts of lost links, the work announces the urgency of a new golden age, one that historically inscribes trans existences into the pantheon of eternity."
Curatorial text of the Portal exhibition.
— Bruno Cordeiro
Curator and Visual Artist
" (...) Thiá Sguoti, in turn, summons mythological beings and chimeras, especially the mermaid, to create metamorphic bodies, portals to ancestral memories and to non-human/divine spiritualities, where imagination is also an act of resistance."
Curatorial text of the Corpo Vibrátil exhibition.
— Lucas Dilacerda
Curator and Art Critic
"The geometric figure known as the Vesica Piscis is materialized in the amphora, which is being exhibited in an art space for the first time. This central piece, which connects all the others, presents two circles of equal size intersecting one another. It is a powerful symbol, part of the sacred geometry of many ancient civilizations. The Vesica Piscis also recalls Set Theory by indicating the possibility that something may belong simultaneously to two distinct groups. In other words, it creates a shared zone, affirming that something does not need to be either A or B, but can be A and B at the same time. It is a drawing full of implications, one that goes beyond the binarism linguistically expressed by the conjunction or, favoring instead a simultaneity expressed by the conjunction and.
Since when has the binary logic of gender become socially naturalized? Since when has it become the only logic validated by governments, institutions, and by the very writing of History? In this sense, the Vesica Piscis can be understood as a lost link now rediscovered, or perhaps re-presented. Not only because it displays the connection between two circles, the materialization of the very definition of a link, but also because it reconnects us to a past in which categories might have related to one another in different ways. It is a past fabulated by the exhibition, whose concrete existence will never be attested, yet which the objects gathered here nevertheless claim, in their own way, recognition."
Curatorial text of the Vesica Piscis: O Elo Perdido exhibition.
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— Thais Rivitti
Curator and manager of Ateliê397
"It was through the discovery of herself as a non-binary person that Thiá Sguoti emancipated herself from the paradigms of society. Her research looks at the body and its identities in a playful way, creating fantasies that merge real bodies and imaginary bodies, inviting a form of sensorial knowledge.
Her artistic practice emerges from the layers that shape ways of living, behaviors, actions, clothing, and the interrelations between bodies."
Text for Superbacana+
— Vivian Villanova
Creator of Vivieuvi and projects that think about art
"Drawing from extensive research into the imagery of the mermaid and its representations across different cultures, using both organic materials and resin, Thiá Sguoti addresses questions of gender, sexuality, and myth. The artist delves into this feminine and ambiguous figure, whose representations are found primarily within the popular imagination in dialogue with female sexuality."
Text for the Sustentar o Efêmero exhibition.
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— Tania Rivitti
Manager of Ateliê397
"Thiá Sguoti (São Paulo, 1995) is a trans artist with a degree in Visual Arts, and her research revolves around the mythical figure of the mermaid, which has interested her since childhood. Each person is a world, as Clarice Lispector once wrote, and entering Thiá’s world becomes increasingly intriguing and complex through the unfoldings and repetitions of our encounters.
The artist tells me about her research, which goes beyond classical mythologies and the more popular readings that mention mermaids, such as the famous Water and Dreams by Gaston Bachelard. She goes deeper, seeking to distinguish the theories, origins, and cultures connected to this ancestral mythology.
For the artist, it is important to move beyond Renaissance references and the constraints imposed by the Catholic Church on the figure of the mermaid, which came to be represented with its genitals covered. Its tail, which previously divided into two scaly legs, became unified from the waist down to the feet. Thiá Sguoti is interested in a more disruptive narrative on the subject and recalls the work of the surrealist René Magritte, who portrayed the figure of the “reverse fish,” with the head of a fish but with legs and genitals once again exposed. Ultimately, the artist seeks to connect with more progressive understandings of corporeality and its social performances, unraveling and fabulating hypotheses around the mermaid figure—one that has reflected spiritual and social questions of specific periods and that, under the artist’s queer perspective, continues to resonate in the present.
Like a memory game, her studio houses an altar filled with small mermaid statues from different nationalities and religions. One of these sculptures is chosen to occupy the first corner of the exhibition space, the vivarium. White and visually discreet, it almost camouflages itself against the color of the walls. The diversity of religiosities manifests in the works Oṣun and Yemọja, whose titles are written in the Yoruba language. Their metallic colors, like scales, take on gold and silver tones, emulating references to religious entities of African origin, expographically arranged one after the other, like sisters.
In the other corner, on the floor to the right, stands the work Fossilized Study of a Mermaid, which is nothing more than the mold from which the fins originate. These fins are also displayed in Vivarium, giving the space the appearance of a kind of mermaid observatory. Thiá expresses her strong interest in fashion and her skill with the interplay between mold and counter-mold, producing casts of her own body that give rise to striking mermaid tails, as seen in the work Land Without Sea, from the series Farsa-Fantasia, which stands out visually in the exhibition, hanging from the ceiling to the floor.
Her most recent production comes from ceramic work, resulting in the piece Portal, an emblematic installation that incorporates the shape of a vesica—a form based on sacred geometry that symbolizes the intersection of two circles. The work takes on a metallic silver tone and is overlaid by a fish head that seems to pierce the physicality of the wall, literally passing through a portal, almost as if connecting across a temporal arch between past and present."
Curatorial text of Vivarium exhibition.
— Núria Vieira
Curator and researcher
"This set of photographs addresses questions of gender and concepts of beauty. In the images, the artist poses as a mermaid, a mythological figure present in numerous legends. She personifies the sea and its dangers, since through her beauty and song she lures sailors, drawing them in only to embrace them and kill them by drowning. From a psychoanalytic perspective, the figure is often alluded to as a “devourer” of men, since, being frigid from the waist down, she would be unable to satisfy her sexual impulses.
The classical sculptural posture of the desired body, whether with a beard, sensual hair, makeup, or a mermaid tail, points to different possibilities of beauty, desire, and pleasure through perspectives that escape stereotypes and propose diversity as something to be experienced."
Text about the artwork: Transições.
— Oscar D'Ambrosio
Curator and Art Critic
"Aesthetics, understood as the way we apprehend the world around us through aesthésis, produces an impact, a kind of imprint of the external world that enters our interiority. For Aristotle, the external aesthésis of the world can affect us only because we are endowed with internal potentials, or dynamis, resulting from our sensory faculties such as sight, hearing, touch, taste, and so on. Therefore, affects, that is, what affects us and impacts us directionally from “outside” to “inside,” are transmitted through external aesthetics to be captured by our internal potentials and transformed into knowledge, gnosis, which differs from empirical knowledge, epistēmē, though it is no less significant.
The work of Thiá Sguoti is an invitation to sensorial knowledge, a kind of gnosis of the senses. Sguoti’s aesthetics affects and impacts the senses through one of the most ancient affective forces capable of activating our potentials: sexuality, or sex. When, for example, the roses of a rosebush “attract” bees to disperse pollen and fertilize new plants, they do so by using the roses as the sexual organs of the plant. This is why, when we give roses or other flowers to someone, we are effectively offering them the sexual organs of a plant. It is no coincidence that Charles Darwin wrote extensively about how sex and the reproductive organs of living beings become some of the primary mechanisms for the survival of a species. For this reason, what is aesthetically, or affectively, impactful is sex itself, the genitalia that awaken interest and thereby the reproduction of what is produced, poiesis.
By inverting the body of the mermaid, giving it the head of a fish and a human body with exposed genitalia, Sguoti precisely reengages this tradition of aesthetics as an affect capable of awakening interest in an ancestral way. While the Eurocentrism of modern tradition condemns the body, especially the female body, associating it with sin, ancient traditions often placed the body on a more expressive plane, granting it a position of summa importance precisely because it guarantees the affective interest necessary for the preservation and reproduction of life."
— Gabriel Frossard Barbosa
Writer and Master in Public Policy
