Maria Thereza Alves

 
Land
Recipes for Survival
Communal
Destabilizers
Birds
Seeing you
Water
Utopia
We
Borders
Plants
X

Works

The works presented on this website are not alphabetically or chronologically ordered, but rather interrelationally – through ideas and topics. In this sense the website functions more like a living organism not following the traditional methodology of approaching an artist's body of work.

As Alves’s oeuvre comprises equally political texts, artist’s texts, videos, mixed media installations, drawings, photographs, performances, in situ works, talks and documentations of important moments in history, the approach of developing this website is more to place the works equally within each other’s relational ethics of how they came into being, what they focus on, how they grew and changed in space and time as well as how they relate to each other directly and/or indirectly.

Thus the rhizome-like logic of this website follows the intertwining of the works, and therefore the works are naturally part of several categories which are placed in a landscape, with the idea that you will jump between the categories, thus losing and finding works and ideas.

The landscape you walk on is Aldeia Campestre in Mato Grosso do Sul, Brazil. The photgraph was taken by Alves in 1980 and shows the Indigenous leader Tupa-Y Guaraní (also known as Marçal de Souza). He stands on the boundary of his tribe's lands, pointing at the mountain to which their territory once extended. In 1983, his brutal murder was orchestrated by a Euro-Brazilian landowner who coveted those tribal lands.
(If you are using the smartphone version of the website the background drawing belongs to Alves's Wake Guangzhou project, in which she is tracing and telling a "borderless history" of the world.)

The website’s content and mapping will be in flow because new works will come into being, existing works sometimes shift by their nature and will belong to a further category as well. If you wish to receive a chronological list of the works or a viewing copy of one of the videos, send an e-mail with your request to studio@mariatherezaalves.org