Conflict drives me

“People are a lot more than just people”, ponders Fernanda Giardino, in an attempt to explain that we are no more than references, influences and, as she defines herself, past contamination, that hybridize with life itself and become something new. The Brazilian artist is the synthesis of that, beginning with the signature of her works as Nanda Biot, a family name she never had, borrowed from her great grandfather. She avoids limiting herself only to photography, her art is much more diversified and embodies all sorts of imagery debate. She asserts her vocation comes from when she was little, and was really channeled through her fine arts course of study. In this interview, Nanda tells us a little about her conception of what it is to make art and her interest for the theme of conflict.

FLIC: You are a visual artist. How was photography as a launching pad chosen?
NANDA: Photography has been very important in my life since very early on. My parents are not photographers, but I have always been curious about the subject, I had that interest in recording the moment, it was an anxiety of mine. With time, I began administering it in an artistic way, because I realized that it was a way of communicating very personal things to myself, things I did not externalize. When the time to choose a career came, I was very young and had no idea how to carry this desire through, as a language, as my job. I ended up doing foreign trade and during college I terribly missed that artistic side. I started to understand that I wasn’t only interested in photography, but also in visual art, cinema, the interaction between them. To have that contact with image brings me great satisfaction. Photography represents me in a sense that it makes me have… as if it were osmosis. But my work transits through several fields of visual art. It’s my way of communicating. I was born with it and have been discovering it through time.

On your website, you say you build reality through fragments. What are those fragments and what is the visible reality you put in them?
Visible reality, in photography, is different from actual reality. Visible reality is the one built in artistic work and not the one from the real world. Regarding the fragment, my work is very focused on the hybridism that one idea and another have, one identity and another, which I organize as a photographic object. My photographic object is the splice of those influences, that we have throughout our lives and what’s left of them is what formats us. And that is a fragment. We come from a very confrontational society, where everything is the reflection of a past reality. And with artists it works the same way because when an artwork is finished, it doesn’t completely die, a fragment of it is left in the next piece. And so it’s a little of that. Invisible reality is a utopian reality that is in constant transformation. It’s a fragment, an action, a hint, it’s an identity that is part of another. It’s the hybridism of ideas, a contamination that people always have from something that is from the part, something that absolves the memory.

Art foresees the future. How does that come to light in your work? What is the topic of your work?
Conflict. Conflict moves me. Urban like nature, cause and effect. I worry about the consequences it has on society, I base myself on the effect […] they have on me. So, I use myself as an art object and when I see it in other people, that it is not just happening with me, I make an artwork. That is the thermometer. It doesn’t have a right, precise theme, in truth. I am always observing actions and reactions, conflicts of perception, how the things of this world reflect the artist. Every time I realize an artwork, I do it in a certain way, but it always speak with that reflection of perception, reflection of how, from a problem, the person is going to deal with it again.

Why conflict?
Because it is something that pulls you forward. When you have doubts, when you have an inside blow, when you need to make a decision, it is something that drives you.

What do you think about today’s contemporary art in Brazil?
It’s very hard to place it under one category because Brazilian contemporary art might have bases from so many different sources that you cannot say for sure that “that is Brazilian”. There are artistic movements here, but they will always have an artistic influence from somewhere else. I think there will always be outside influence, globalization creates a lot of language interaction, technology has brought a lot of things closer. It becomes hard to do something original, everything is everything. You don’t have a reference from Brazil, because everything is contaminated. My work is about exactly that, you have to take a step back to see what sort of contamination it is, you have to stop to understand what is happening and how these contamination processes occur, because it is somewhere along those processes that the Brazilian identity has dismembered.