[FÔRMA, FEMININE SINGULAR, hollow piece in which a fluid substance is placed which, when it hardens, acquires the shape of that piece; mould]
Not many artists tell stories and tell them continuously, like long epic poems. This option, which Luísa Mota seems to have taken early on in her artistic career, implies the development of the work as a process of transformation (formal, but also internal), of recycling (of ideas and materials), of complicity (the summoning of fellow travellers who participate, performatively but not only, in the process of constructing the works). In this dialectic between the emergence of what is new and the persistence of old things, there is always the cyclical return of the same which, moving in the form of a spiral, moves forwards and backwards but never settles in the same place.
Only by understanding this modelling mechanism, which declines into successive patterns, and which is characteristic of the contemporary because it is archetypal, will we realise that this is a ritual work, which is based on the reinvention of repetition (of gestures, concepts, paradigms, forms) and which is renewed at each appearance with the common breath and contact of the bodies (of those who make, those who act and those who participate).
Based on a performative practice, on the energy generated by the encounter, guided by the idea of collective formation, the work develops from various internal unfoldings, like an inexhaustible source of fecundity - things are born, they emerge, from each other, in successive metamorphoses, as in the great mythological founding narratives, enunciating an idea of perpetual transformation, of modelling oneself, not necessarily in search of progress or comfort, but of self-knowledge.
In Luísa Mota's work, the images are visually exuberant but refer to a search for the invisible, the bodies are always present but the breath is spiritual, the aspiration is genetic, uterine - in this sense form should be pronounced, heard, with a circumflex accent, as form. The hollow, the egg, the eye, the negative, the "inside of what we see".
-Nuno Faria