Ser é Estar (Being is To be)
The subjectivation process is, contemporarily, indissociable from image. The way in which we present to the world, how we see ourselves and how we’re seen feeds back in a narcissistic form and makes us into allegories of ourselves. In Ser é Estar (Being is To be), image is fragmented to build the self-image, giving vent to all of the shapes that the self can become.
Trying to understand this complex self is to destroy each and every image of it. By manipulating photography digitally and physically, the artist crosses the mirror and touches the reflex, destroys it and, sewing up it’s pieces, crafts a new reflection of the inside. This new reflection shows what the technical image can’t capture. As if in an autophagy, the artist digests herself and her surroundings to understand her insides.
This process breeds the figures that inhabit Fernanda Corsini’s universe. Creatures that personify the human psyche, made of conflicting, uncomfortable and sometimes misshapen parts. The artist makes them into pieces, preserving those in the ether of memory, and later on sews them together, giving birth to her own Prometheus Modernas, that sometimes try to understand their own place in the world, and others times attack who brought them to it, much like in Mary Shelley’s work.
Fernanda’s work, on the other hand, does not take the visceral form that’s expected from this process of amputation and replantation. Like paper ex-votos, the artist stops the bleeding of this process with a promise of self awareness and consecrate them to the god Ego, planning all of the dimensions of anguish in a mesh of patchworks that becomes a single being, that earns their miracles within the bidimensional field of image.
Ser é Estar (Being is To be) proposes a dive into the subconsciousness through the visual reconfiguration of self-image. In a path that follows not only her work, but also the evolution of her creatures, Fernanda Corsini invites us to know the many versions of a self that can coexist, transform and, together, make a being as subjective as the human being.
Giovana Macedo
2023