Know your place - Carolina Piteira

Every one of us carries our own weights.

For Carolina Piteira, this was only the beginning of a process which took her on a journey through time and space. 

The first works came to life in the wake of a few uncomfortable questions, which left their weight on the artist. Inside these vases we find doubts and frustrations which Carolina Piteira revists in a humorous light. From an inconvenient interaction, flowers, laughter and strength can arise.  

These are personal questions but they are also moments any woman will easily recognise. The expectations we must live with are numerous and heavy. We must be good professionals and good mothers, we must be successful but not too much. We must know our place. 

As the narrative unfolds to a wider perspective, we find other women and other weights. In these works, we follow women weighed down by heavy baskets. They are filled with fruits and other marketable products, representing the mental weights women live with. In these baskets there is room for concerns about earning a living and taking care of a family, the need to survive in an unbalanced world and the legacies of previous generations. All of these weights we don’t see but which we feel. 

These are South American and African women, both very different from the artist’s background, but in these paintings we find recognition of this silent struggle and a clear admiration for these women’s resilience. Because even though they carry all these heavy weights, they never for a moment lose their gracefulness, in a delicate balance that is in itself very feminine. 

The expressive brushstrokes and the use of different materials - fabric, paper and organic elements - emphasise the idea of weight, solid and impossible to ignore. The colour also adds its own gravity to the work. Heavy and saturated at first, it becomes light and luminous as the narrative unfolds, an exercise in liberation.

This is the message of hope driving the whole narrative. We follow these women in their transformation, as they let go of their weights and become more and more ethereal, closer to a more elemental state. The colours become softer, the baskets lighter as they become filled with wild plants. 

As they leave their weights behind, the women return to Nature. By freeing themselves of what holds and weighs them down, they are finally free to find their place. 

Artist: Carolina Piteira

Texts and Curation: Inês Pinto e Sousa

Exhibition design and graphic design: Sofia Lucas

Photos: Simão Pernas, Miguel Portelinha and Márcia Soares

Video: Miguel Portelinha