Santa Cruz de Tenerife. Galería ATC is pleased to announce Blue Womb, an exhibition of cyanotypes, photographs, sound and video by the Cabo Verdean artist César Schofield Cardoso (1973). The opening will take place on Saturday, March 4th, 2023 from 11:00 - 14:00, at Callao de Lima Street, 39, Santa Cruz de Tenerife. The exhibition will remain open to the public until April 28th.
For his second exhibition at Galería ATC, César Schofield Cardoso confronts the sea. In Cabo Verde, the ocean is a marginal place for livelihood despite its large extension, which is fourteen times larger than its land counterpart. As a result of inadequate colonial food systems, and lack of population care, Cabo Verde has endured several famines throughout its history with catastrophic human toll, sometimes ravaging half of the population. Yet, the ocean has never been a place of imagined futures, providing alternative models for sustenance.
Driven by both the trauma and potential of the ocean, Schofield Cardoso’s current work is an artistic exploration into alternatives. Through the production of cyanotypes, the artist searches for a visual language that will articulate a more generative space. The source materials he uses are purposeful: fishing nets, plastic cages, rope fibers, plastic bags, plastic debris. His process is methodical, but indeterminate. The result is intricate and ethereal, where we see the traces of the things that bind or collect as broken and untethered; it’s detritus that hasn’t found form, but will somehow survive as something new – with or without us.
Blue Womb is part of a larger research project that considers the complex and vast ocean, ecology, economy, and aesthetics in a place/culture dominated by an agricultural mindset. It investigates the politics of food in history and contemporary politics, and questions the colonial continuities of marine extraction on the African west coast.
César Schofield Cardoso was born in Mindelo, Cabo Verde in 1973. “Espaços Vacilantes”, an exhibition produced for Galería ATC was featured in Phaidon’s African Artists, 1882 - Now, with an introduction by Chika Okeke-Agulu and a glossary by Joseph L. Underwood (2021). His work has been exhibited in Cabo Verde and internationally, including in "Islands Crossings: Between Myth and Hallucinatory Realities, African Mobilities - This Is Not a Refugee Camp Project” with Patti Anahory, curator Mpho Matsipa", Kulturstiftung des Bundes, Munich (2018); "RUST: A Glimmer of Freedom Project, Ex-Concentration Camp of Tarrafal, Cabo Verde", video / installation, apexart, New York (2017); “Arte Invisible Project”, ARCO´07 International Contemporary Art Fair, Madrid.
