If I perceive a colour,
that colour constitutes me - the deep
purple that leaves
a burgundy stain,
the persistent pink that lingers after
rubbing my hands too long is me:
thin skin, soluble
to the touch, ready
to spill into any hand that holds (me).
In my language, we change
the words to indicate precision - it is called inflection.
“A” marks the feminine, but
we say o amor -
amora is love, made female: a
fruit felt sweet and persistent, like I
wished ours had been.
There’s a childish rhyme that links the taste of the berry to something forbidden
(carved in the threat of revelation: “Você gosta de amora? Vou contar pro seu pai que cê namora!”
to crave for amor-a is
a transgression!
Today I read a hypothesis by A. Varda:
if we opened-up a person, at the core we'd see a landscape.
Landscape is a more generous word than paisagem (the immediate noun that comes to mind when I transport it to Portuguese)
I’ll say territory. Even knowing that in territory, there might be room for even less.
a self-excavation where archaeology becomes subjection.
My hands went through 1,050 meters of line to create this place. A territory of origins, memories, narratives, and all that lies beyond my contours - what my skin cannot
hold back,
but shapes me all the same. A displacement sometimes barefoot and free, sometimes tight and constrained.
A place not to fit into or simply exist, but rather to resist and continue.
Funny how the things we are drawn to have nothing to do with them, and everything to do with us – I thought I was just heading back home. My body aching from all the movement (I never thought heat could make me dizzy. But here, it does).
I must have stopped hoping you’d be there waiting. The sun is gonna set soon. A kid was by the sand, collecting shells – I’m not convinced they are actually from the sea; maybe someone just had a sack full of them and wanted to get rid of them, there were so many! Got me smiling and curious.
I started noting these very flat rocks. Beautiful color. Dark. Sharp, but not in a violent way. Thought I could use them in my piece, if I could find a few. Didn’t take long – there were plenty! I was basically just moving around and back and forth to leave them in my bag. Must have treaded the same walking line a dozen times! Then all I could see was this other stuff: glassy, timed, fragile. What a pungent contrast they would make! But there’s no way I would have enough – had been over for almost one hour until I saw this one!
But then, all of a sudden, they were all I could see.
I got plenty. Until I realized what was going on.
Funny how the things that attract are really for us. About us.
And then there’s everything that follows: the going for it, feeling it, weighing it. Choosing it. Keeping.
Funny how there are things that attract us but then just aren’t that nice to hold. Funny how there are things that attract us and look perfect, but just aren’t right. Not for now.
The sun has set now. And I get it.
Funny how sometimes our hands are wrong for the things we wished felt attracted to us.
At first, I thought crossing over meant arriving
somewhere.
That it carried the promise of destination.
But being here, I've learned:
there is no line that truly marks a border.
It makes no difference if it’s here or there
Time and place, at their limit, are not measured—they’re felt in revolutions.
This midnight doesn’t trace an actual edge, doesn’t neatly close one chapter and opens another.
We can start again from right where we are—just by shifting our perspective.
for Dan de Carvalho's solo exhibition,
Amsterdam, 2023
To contemplate existence linked to a time-space to which we belong is a fundamental guiding principle of human thought itself. The human being has a desire for inscription and understanding. Our inherent need to translate our explorations and elaborations of the world into meaningful language, so that we can express and convey them, is also the greater work of our existence to carve out a place that identifies us and endures (ours, who share the Eurocentric notion that life is a progressive linearity from beginning to an end).
The act of creation encapsulates these two desires.
But what happens when we find ourselves displaced from this time-space that constitutes us? If, as the great Brazilian thinker Leda Maria Martins teaches, 'in everything we do, we express what we are, what drives us, what shapes us, what makes us part of a group, a set, a community, culture, and society,' what can poetic elaboration do in face of non-places that transition events impose on the individual?
In SIGNIFICÂNCIA, Brazilian visual artist Dan de Carvalho explores these premises. Starting from displacement, from Sao Paulo to Amsterdam (and all that it entails), the artist delves into our most primal organizational mechanism, language, to grapple with (himself) thinking of a new ensemble. In a game that uses the translating operation as a creative passage beyond language itself, as access and inscribing principle of new places—a reboot in palimpsest that simultaneously opens up new meaningful possibilities (and invites the viewer to propose them) and anchors its own origin by maintaining words in their vernacular.
Creating, in this logic, may ultimately be our search for permanence through constant redefinition. A way to deal with our finiteness through the communicative tradition that postulates that, in the fabric of existence, it is the other who completes us."
To contemplate existence linked to a time-space to which we belong is a fundamental guiding principle of human thought itself. The human being has a desire for inscription and understanding.
In SIGNIFICÂNCIA, Brazilian visual artist Dan de Carvalho explores these premises. Starting from displacement, from Sao Paulo to Amsterdam (and all that it entails), the artist delves into our most primal organizational mechanism, language, to grapple with (himself) thinking of a new ensemble.
unrelated image, shot by me, just because...
Rio Lento
for Zum, publication by IMS
Pr’além da significância do trabalho como emblemático das investigações de Smithson sobre suas questões de entropia e afins, destaco, aqui, o “apresentar”: em Hotel Palenque a percepção do espectador é claramente orientada pelo artista — o gesto de apresentar a imagem não é suficiente. Além de mostrar, Smithson precisa declarar: ali está.
Foi para esse trabalho — ou, ainda, para esse procedimento de apresentar um projeto visual com a adição da narração de um relato pessoal — que Rio Lento, da fotógrafa documental Camila Svenson, me levou.
Full Article
nbertazi@gmail.com
@nathaliabertazi
_
Not long ago, someone told me I didn’t have to be so faithful to my roots. Funny how even small displacements can crack open a core.
I suppose I’m always trying to hold onto a trace
of time,
a sense of place.
Is it in the in-between? Or maybe in the fault lines...
There is beauty in making sense of misalignments
trying to locate that precise point where our certainties dissolve and the stories we once swore by quietly fall apart.
A rupture is far from an absence. It is a latent space, charged with the tension between who we were and who we might become
- a space of tension and discovery.
Can I start over?
I believe in practice. Not just the overused, hollow noun we’ve grown accustomed to skimming past in texts like this. I believe in practice as a site of (re)existence, a space for repair.
(And how might the act of making - with all its detours and hesitations - offer a space for collective reflection?)
I see process as a way of thinking, not just producing
an invitation to dwell in states of uncertainty, friction, and unfolding.
Through fragmentation, I seek to create work that resists fixed readings and instead invites reflection, hesitation, or resonance.
I’m interested in how inherited knowledge is carried, broken, or reconfigured, and often incorporates open-ended, collaborative gestures into the work.
Navigating the porous terrain between narrative, memory, and materiality, I approach image-making as a discursive space:
one that reflects how we read, structure, and give form to experience.
Royal College of Art
2025
PG Curating Contemporary Art, The Art of Social Engagement
UAL: Chelsea College of Arts
2018
BA Photography
Escola Panamerinaca de Arte e Design
2011
BA Languages and Literature
Anhanguera Educacional
2009
Royal College of Art
London
2025
The Fall of Icarus
curated by Yihan Pan and Teng Wang,
Upper Gulbenkian Gallery,
London
2025
Ancestral Utopias
curated by SustainLab RCA,
Hangar Gallery,
London
2025
Rites of Ruins
curated by JJ Hellerman and Nathalia Bertazi,
Safehouse1 Peckham,
London
2025
In Betweens
Print MA show,
Southwark Park Galleries,
London
2025
Invisible
curated by Sam Josephs
Hockney Galler,
London
2024
Obra de Memória _room at Festival Imaginária,
curated by me with lombada
Edifício Vera,
São Paulo
2024
Significância _solo show by Dan de Carvalho
curated by me
LOVA,
Amsterdan
2023
Início, meio e início
curated by Amanda Melo da Mota and Virgina de Medeiros
Instituto Tomie Ohtake
São Paulo
2023
We Like Small Things v.6
curated by Anna Goldwater Alexander
FilterPhoto Space
Chicago
2023
Sinapses
curated by Walter Costa
Galeria Vão
São Paulo
2018
soslaios, arte e cultura
educational project (2018)
co-founder of
asdfasdfasdf
an art lab based in London (for now)
co-founder, executive producer and art-educator at
lombada collective
photobook and zine lab (2017-24)
executive producer of
Festival Imaginária
photobooks fair and festival
São Paulo (2023)
photo editor at
GQ Brazil magazine
edições Globo | Condé Nast (2012-16)
researcher at
Marie Claire Brazil magazine
editora Globo (2010-12)
2025 | RCA School of Arts & Humanities Show
London
Amor-a is my way of opening-up a person
a self-excavation where archaeology becomes subjection.
My hands went through 1,050 meters of line to create this place. A territory of origins, memories, narratives, and all that lies beyond my contours - what my skin cannot
hold back,
but shapes me all the same.
A displacement sometimes barefoot and free, sometimes tight and constrained.
A place not to fit into or simply exist, but rather to resist and continue.
The work attempts to visualise identity as a fractured and unstable terrain. I thought of the elements that constitute a sense of self — genealogy, geology, memory and social projections — as tectonic plates: always shifting, sometimes colliding, sometimes drifting apart, and often generating fissures.
presented as part of the MA Print graduate show at the Royal College of Art.
you're never ever ever ever there, nathalia bertazi, 2025
2025 | Upper Gulbenkian Gallery, London
curated by Yihan Pan and Teng Wang
A rupture is far from an absence. It’s a latent space, holding the tension between who we were and who we might become.
I was invited to take part in something beautiful: to rethink the fall (of Icarus, the one who dared to touch the Sun). It felt natural, it's something I always find myself doing—looking again, tracing again, returning to the same point even if the thread snaps or the paper tears.
I never thought of myself as a resistant person (I've done the word wrong, shrinking it down to a rigidity that gives me chills!), but I’ve been recognizing myself in this insistence on not closing off (myself or things): I resist—mostly alignment. I let myself be held by the instability of what’s been constructed.
Please, don’t read this as a monument to ambition (I’d never throw myself to the wind, heart open, without hoping for some glimpse of solid ground)—but to persistence within the unresolved
2025 | Hangar Space, London
curated by SustainLab RCA
In a quiet collision of past and present, this work traces the invisible threads of ecological grief and inherited dissonance. The limbs of family merge with the limbs of trees—gathers memory, distance, and absence.
A forest stands bare, brittle—haunted by what it has lost. The figures remain incomplete, suspended in time, their violet shoes the only rupture in a muted field.
Revealing what might otherwise remain unseen, I invite a sense of dislocation. What’s missing speaks as loudly as what is shown. The image performs an archaeology of feeling—each fracture, each thread, pulling us toward the unspeakable weight of generational memory and environmental disappearance.
There are no clear answers here. The work holds space for uncertainty. It asks: how do we grieve what we never fully knew? What language do we give to what was never properly recorded?
Seem Both Distant And So Close is a meditation on inherited loss and disembodied memory. It gestures toward the broader entanglements of gendered, racial, and ecological violence—asking us not only to look, but to stay with the discomfort of what’s unfolding, what’s fractured, and what urgently needs tending.
2025 | Safehouse 1, London
curated by myself and JJ Hellerman
Time erodes all things—places, memories, identities. Rites of Ruins explores the beauty and fragility of transformation, where decay is not an end but a process of becoming. Through material degradation, shifting narratives, and ephemeral traces, the works in this exhibition examine what is preserved, what fades, and what is reimagined.
Ruins serve as both relics and possibilities, holding the weight of histories while making space for new meanings. They remind us of the instability of personal and collective memory, the tension between permanence and loss.
Here, erosion is a ritual, a rite of passage through which we confront the impermanence of all things—inviting us to reflect on how we shape, and are shaped by, the remnants of the past.
What constitutes space? What defines a thing? What sustains an image? These are questions that guide my practice as I navigate the materiality of images and the conceptual weight of absence.
2023 - present
It began with a quiet discomfort—one that surfaced as I looked closely at portraits of women connected to my maternal grandmother. Constrangimentos (Constraints) was born from unease. First as a wall piece, then transformed into a book— and since then, expanded and reimagined with each presentation.
In the almost frightened gazes, the frighten smiles, the stiff postures, something felt
suspended.
Beneath the surface of these posed bodies is a silent tension—a sense that what we see does not align.
Through layered, abstracted imagery, Constrangimentos speaks to the pressures that shape women’s experiences in both public and private spheres.
These images do not shout. Instead, they murmur, resist, and hold. They translate discomfort into form, the persistent forces that shape female identity.