Núbia Fernamo

Núbia Fernamo is an artist from São Paulo who uses photography. Núbia’s interview happened through emails exchanged in June 2020. 

Tell me about why and how you became an artist.

I think everyone starts with drawing when we’re kids. I loved to draw people and thought I would become an illustrator. I remember being six years old and play-pretending to be a tattoo artist with my watercolor pencils, using my classmates’ arms as a canvas. Later I began to be more interested in fashion and, through fashion magazines and the internet, began my interest in photography. So I guess that I was always interested in creating images. The moment I finished high school I went after different courses in fashion, photography, and cinema, got more involved with local independent artists at the artistic occupation called Ouvidor63, and then went after graduation in photography. At university, I realized that just making beautiful pictures was meaningless to me and that I was more interested in contemporary art, artivism, transdisciplinary practices, and from there I started to see myself as an artist. 

 Your party photography shows a lot of trust between you and the people you photograph. They are not models. How do you build that trust?

This is how I believe portraits have to be. I studied anthropology to understand that. During the last century, we had photographers in a certain position of power in relation to the bodies they were photographing, mostly white men going after certain groups of people to create a narrative that was actually based on their own visions, which became the official narrative about those people. This is the colonial way of creating images. This relation of trust between me and the people I photograph happens because I am not suddenly showing up and taking pictures of people I consider different and leaving when I’m done. I’m part of the scene I’m registering, I’m photographing from the inside.

Boiler Room Vampire Haus, Núbia Fernamo 2019

Boiler Room True Music, Núbia Fernamo 2018

What are you working on at the moment? What are the concepts behind the art you are making?

I’m working on some different images and ideas that at the end of the day are all part of the same thing. “Hierarchies” started as a project focused on the relation between the church and the state throughout history. It tries to understand better how it affects the present Brazilian social scenario and develop visual representations about it. 

The more I developed my studies the more I realized that all my art practice is about investigating unseen systems of control that punctuate contemporary life and about the fact that all relations are political. The way I choose to create images is also a political choice.

What are some of the systems that have caught your attention? How do you begin to process those systems into a final piece?

The thing is that all of our society is built on systems, and they are all part of the same thing, everything has relations, and once you become aware of it there is no turning back. When I first started my art practice with this idea that hierarchies should not exist, that this vertical organization of society is how oppression is legitimized, I had in mind that the etymology – the origin – of the word “hierarchy” came from the church. This was just the first step to understanding historical facts and how they are all based on biopolitics, for example. I started to collect visual representations of those issues I wanted to talk about and reflect on it using juxtaposition and then overlapping images. That is basically my process to get into a final piece, it is all about the relations.

In the pieces you are talking about you have not been shy about showing genitals. Even now in our modern age lots of people are uncomfortable at the sight of genitals. Did that inform your choice to show them?

Yes, we are more used to the idea of being ashamed of the natural state of our bodies, our visual culture tends to portray the body in one particular way. I know only a few people willing to show their bodies in a way that is not “desirable”. The genital is used to define (or try to define) our identity when we are not even born yet, our families are already expecting a lot of things from us based on our genitals. At the same time, most people born with a vagina face a kind of disconnection with it.  By “disconnection” I mean that it is normalized to not have a real education about female genitalia while growing up, and this happens because we have traditions that perpetuate the notion of the female body as something dirty and wrong, having it called impure and sinful. I see that nowadays these ideas about the body and about all kinds of bodies are just starting to be problematized, rethought, and changed. As someone who is proposing to create and deal with images, I consider it crucial to deal with these thoughts on visual expression.

Exhibición de la tierra - fragment number 3

You also mentioned Artivism, and I wonder if you have thoughts on the responsibility of artists to shape the cultural and political landscape? How do you see the relationship between artworks and cultural and political change?

I wouldn’t say “responsibility of artists” but the responsibility of citizens who believe in new ideas for the future, and then use art as a tool or see art as a means. Art is social, so artists will never be taken apart from the time and space they are living in. The narratives will always say something about the society and historical moment, making the artist a boundary-crosser operating in culture. This act itself is political.   

What do the next twelve months look like for you and your art practice?

I hope to keep learning, creating, producing, getting in touch and exchanging with as many people as possible. I’m working on some new projects and hope to be busy with them from now on. The future is uncertain, when I’m connected with the present the unknown feels more exciting.

See more of Núbia’s work on Instagram.

Femasmicunilino – fragment number 1, Núbia Fernamo