The body as a map, the city as a body. The surfaces of the streets, floors and walls; the textures of the skin. Mariana Maia Rocha’s academic and plastic research, a 24-year-old artist born in Porto, permeates architectural and sculptural thinking to explore a cartography of affection. Working with materials and processes like latex, leather, vegetable waste and frottage, Mariana Maia Rocha attempts to map personal archaeologies in the world and in her performative body.

Julia Flamingo: Do you have three exhibitions running right now? Let’s start with them!

Mariana Maia Rocha: Yes, this is a busy month! There will be four exhibitions I’m involved in in February. One of the most important is at the National Museum of Contemporary Art (MNAC), an invitation from Ana Rito and the curatorial students from Coimbra. This is a group show with a whole range of artists, from Paula Rego to Jorge Pinheiro and Marta Castelo. It is called Meanwhile//Meanwhile.

Then I also take part in one in Vila Franca de Xira, at Galeria Municipal Jovem de Vila Franca de Xira, in Quinta da Piedade, called Na Fragilidade do Que Persiste. This is a group exhibition with two other young artists. Not as young as me, I’m 24, but still pretty young, Jéssica Burrinha and Eduardo Freitas. In this show, I’m working with latex skins and waste that I scrape off urban surfaces.

Then I have one at COSSOUL, the Society of Instruction Guilherme Cossoul. This is a solo show entitled. Diz-me quem és, dir-te-ei quem sou. One of the most intimate exhibitions I have ever done.

Then, on February 22nd, I’m launching the group show Le Jour il fait Nuit following an invitation from André Cepeda, at Porto’s Kubik Gallery. This is where I’ll be showcasing large-format photography.

JF: Great news for you, so many things taking shape. And you are so young! About how long have you been exhibiting your work?

MMR: The biggest moment in my short career was when I was selected as one of the ten artists for CARPE – Prémio Arte Jovem da Fundação Millennium BCP, in 2023. When I received that award, I also won the Aquisição Millenium BCP prize and that was when I was first included in collections.

I also learnt that I had been awarded the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation’s 2023-2024 New Talent Scholarship Programme. Then, at the end of last year, as a consequence of the article I submitted, I won a PhD scholarship to study abroad. I still have no idea where I’m heading, but I’m thrilled.

I have a background in painting, although sometimes people say I’m a sculptor, a photographer or something else, but… first and foremost I reckon I’m an artist and, for me, the medium is not the defining factor of who I am. I’m an artist and I work with what I feel like working with at the time.

JF: What is your master’s thesis?

MMR: My investigation is focused on the concept of ruin, contemporary art and the notion of the skin. And also about a science-based process called ecdysis, where animals shed their skin, especially snakes. I am very interested in this skin, this trace, I would say this almost archaeological remnant, from a metaphorical perspective.

And sometimes my greatest question is if I were a moulting animal. Animals that shed their skin, like snakes, but there are also crabs, different species of animals. What would it be like if I shed my skin? In other words, what would it be like if I could keep all these skins that carry my existence? The skin of childhood, the skin of Mariana as an adult, the skin of Mariana when she was 5, when she was 10, when she was 15, in short it is a bit like this notion of the different metaphorical skins that we have throughout our lives and I wonder what it would be like if I could keep all these skins.

And for this reason I work on the ruin of the city itself. I studied architecture for a year at the University of Porto’s Faculty of Architecture, and it was an important time because it allowed me to start seeing the city through different eyes. I then fell in love with drawing, so the following year I went to the Faculty of Fine Arts at the University of Porto as well.

JF: The idea of memory permeates all of this. I feel that domesticity is very present in your work. More than the house as an architectural space, the house as a home. Which objects and memories fill a house?

MMR: Indeed… And this also emerged a little when I was going through a period of almost mourning my grandmother. I guess from then on that’s when my work began to be a little more honest with myself. I became interested in a process called frottage, in French, but in English it is sometimes called rubbing, although it’s not exactly the same thing.

For example, I began to frottage my grandmother’s clothes, my grandfather’s clothes, the family’s clothes, that is, I started using touch to imprint the memory that was my memory of those objects and the contact I’m having with them now. But this was the memory that my family had of those objects, of those clothes, in essence, but also of chairs, tables and everything else.

Basically, I’m looking to harness memories and keep the skins of people who are no longer here, or skins from a time that was not mine, because I probably was not even born. It is almost like archaeology, where you calmly try to decipher what lies beneath the earth. Using touch, I try to bring those memories back to my time and then turn that into my artistic practice. It is all very much like this, extremely material, highly plastic in its material sense.

One of my first projects came about in my own home, where I began to peel off skins from most of the paths that, for instance, my grandmother used to pass on several occasions. And it almost gives me an idea of cartography, of wound-cartography, of the bruises and scars of this architecture. It all begins in my house and then spreads to the city.

Something else is that many of my pieces are often ephemeral, many of the items I know will disappear not during the exhibition, hopefully, but sometimes a month or two after. For example, this happens with plant remains, liquids, moss, dirt from paving stones, the concept of dust, ash, graphite dust, charcoal dust. It is quite common for pieces to deteriorate after a few months, but that does not bother me. Actually, the piece itself works like this, it lasts as long as I think it should.

Anyway, I have already said a lot.

JF: You did, but I like that because artists – and especially young ones – are not often so aware of their own output. I think that you, perhaps also because you have a very present academic work, have created a rather clear discourse about your research.

For me it seems obvious that some of your works must be ephemeral. Because you talk about the passage of time. You talk about two things: ruins, which are monumental remains that last for years and generations and stay for generations to come, those ruins that are architectures, monuments. But there are also other ruins that do not consist of monuments, but are the archaeology of what is left of us as individuals, of our very short existence on earth. Objects, souvenirs, memories, traces. Personal ruins. You talk from such a deep personal place.

Can you tell us more about the piece Até que a porta nos separe?

MMR: When I was studying architecture, once a professor said something interesting: never add a door at the end of a corridor, but add a window. Why? They never use a door at the end of a corridor in retirement homes, because otherwise people feel they are closer to death than they really are. I mean, they always place a window at the end of a corridor, because this is the whole concept, which is that you can see beyond.

A door is made so that you cannot see what’s on the other side, right? But, if the door is made of latex, you can still partially see shadows of the other side. The door then loses its function as a door, because it ceases to be a pod and becomes a work in which you can see what’s on the other side.

The other interesting feature is that the door’s support on the floor is made of cement. And there is a negative of a carpet etched into the cement. Just like the door handle itself, or the knob, the negative of that knob is also what we see. And it is this idea of Até Que A Porta Nos Separe (Until the Door Do Us Part), almost like in marriages where they say ‘Until death do us part’. The duality. Ultimately, death, in this case, my encounter with death, did not separate me from my artistic practice, it separated me from a loved one, right? But it united me with my artistic practice.

My work has been a lot more consistent since that moment, because I realised that there are much more significant matters than the problems we think we have in life. I believe that what we must celebrate is existence itself, however short it may be.

JF: I enjoyed it, I found this piece interesting because, for me, absence is also what lingers in your work. The traces are always of something that is gone, something that has already been.

Another thing that is very clear in your work is texture. One piece is even a bit grotesque, latex that is a bit grotesque on its own. There is the texture of the street, even the skin of the street, then there is this snake skin that you put on yourself, in this slightly more performative work. The texture is always there, the matter is always there, that epidermis.

MMR: Precisely, and also with the idea of the body itself as if it were a map. Not just the city as a map, but the body itself as one. Finding these boundaries between all the work and seeing the city as a body in itself is very subtle. And even seeing the body as a city in itself.

JF: One final thing: who are your references?

I have a number of references depending on the work, but there’s one I’ve really enjoyed, and that’s Valie Export. Because of the way she interacts with the city, how she looks at the body, how she sees the city.

Later, when I started in latex, Eva Hesse is an all-time great in this field. Helena Almeida is an incredibly important artist in the way I began to see the body and the connection between matter and the body. Then I have a reference that is utterly timeless, that has been with me since architecture, which is Piranesi, the eternal Piranesi. It may seem far away, but I think he’s been talking about things I work on for a long time. The idea of the fragment, of memory, of maps. Perfect.

There was also a time when I was in awe of Francis Alÿs’ work. He now has an extraordinary exhibition at Serralves, the same one he had at the Barbican in London. There are many other artists who are important to my creative process, Erwin Wurm and his one-minute sculptures, Berlinde de Bruyckere, Rui Chafes, Pedro Cabrita Reis, for instance.