Wisrah Villefort – residency at La Becque [CH]

An artist working on expanded notions of ecology, Wisrah Villefort [BR] developed visual, philosophical, and scientific research on the presence of plastic debris in Lake Geneva [CH].

During a residency at La Becque (located on the lake’s shore), they proposed to think of the semiotic divergences of pollution between the Global South and North and to address these objects’ ontology concerning the aquatic wildlife and protocapitalism.

The investigation unfolded into a broader ecology and led to works that also comment on territory, ownership, object value, material fluxes, and the condition of the artist and agency in participating in such dynamics – all presented during the residency’s open studios in July 2022.

In the sound installation «Tables», for example, one can hear their voice overlapped with found sound bits directly linked to the lake. While «Bottoms» is a set of piggy bank bottoms based on more abstract criteria choices such as colour, shape, and materiality.

Wisrah’s creations also led to «Set», a solo exhibition at BPA Space in Cologne [DE].

ABOUT

Wisrah Villefort [BR] is an artist living and working in São Paulo. Their conceptual practice incorporates photography, video, sound, and text into installations and hypermedia works that explore an expanded notion of ecology, especially considering synthetic polymers, the non-human, and the structures that propose to regulate them. In @mercado__livre, the artist investigates the agency of images of objects sold on online platforms based in the Global South, considering its impacts and questioning the medium that supports the work. Simultaneously, it offers the audience instrumentality to engage with the work broadly, in a formal decision to make the piece a narrative in hypermedia.