Júlia Ayerbe (w/ Dandara Catete) - Conversations on the Bed

This performance is part of the performance series INSIDE WOUNDS

Júlia Ayerbe researches the meaning of the bed in art history. She is interested in how disabled communities invented strategies, structures, and alliances to produce from one of the few spaces capable of comfortably accommodating their bodies. In those sick beds, the relationships between verticality and horizontality, standing, sitting, and lying down, are not so marked. They are more amorphous situations, with their own orthopedics. The artist Dandara Catete picks mattresses in the street and takes them to her studio. There, she gives them a new corporality, simultaneously endowed with formal sophistication and monstrous scatology. Conversations on the Bed is a video performance by Júlia Ayerbe and Dandara Catete, a dialogue about their attraction to mattresses and the stories they can tell.

Júlia Ayerbe works in the field of contemporary art with themes related to disability, feminism and editorial practices. In Brazil, she worked as a senior editor at the Pinacoteca de São Paulo Museum (2010-2016). She also collaborated with institutions such as Casa do Povo, Sesc, Prêmio Indústria Nacional Marcantônio Vilaça and Museu da Imagem e do Som, to name a few. She was a founding member of the independent publishing house Edições Aurora / Publication Studio São Paulo (2014-2018). Since living in Madrid (2017), she has developed projects for European institutions such as CA2M, Galerias Municipais de Lisboa, House of World Cultures, Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Sophiensaele, Tabakalera. She has published essays in cultural magazines such as Utopia Revista de Crítica Cultural, A*Desk and Nossa Voz. She is a PhD candidate at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid (UCM) and works at the intersection of contemporary Latin American art and disability with a grant from La Caixa Foundation. She is a disability justice activist in the collective Sickness Affinity Group (SAG).

Dandara Catete explores poetic readings of the everyday in her work with household objects and other objects of intimacy and daily life. She lives and works between Rio de Janeiro and Madrid, where she has collaborated with OTR Espacio de Arte, Tabacalera Promoción del Arte, ABM Confecciones and UFRJ, among others. She has also realized projects in the USA and the UK with the Ezra and Cecile Zilkha Gallery, the Davison Art Center and the University of Manchester. Parallel to her artistic work, she organizes the art and music festival Jardim Suspenso in a favela in Rio. She studied at the Escola de Artes Visuais do Parque Lage in Rio de Janeiro as well as at Wesley University in Connecticut and has been part of the Comunidad de Madrid research group “En los márgenes del arte: Ensayando comunidades” since 2019. In 2015 she received the Jessup Prize for promise in the field of Visual Arts and in 2016 she was awarded the Residence Favela Criativa - Residência Artística e Mostra de Artes Jardim Suspenso.