Born in Rio de Janeiro, Sonia Andrade created her first works in 1974 by appropriating the video medium as an autodidact. During the 1970s, the most severe period of censorship under the military dictatorship in Brazil, a young generation of artists, including Fernando Cocchiarale, Anna Bella Geiger, Ivens Machado and Leticia Parente, went through an intense period of production where individual expression, deprived of words, was transmitted through a simple, direct body language. Overtly accusatory actions were revealed without technical or formal intentions, to the tight frame of the camera. Primeira Seria, a 'first series' of videos shot by Andrade in Rio and São Paulo (8 films, 1974-1977), is one of the major creations coming out of this movement. In it, the artist is seen winding a nylon thread around her face until it is disfigured, attacking her body hair with a scissors, driving nails between her fingers, trying to move about with her limbs and head enclosed in bird cages. This language where the artist's body plays the leading role is accompanied by a critique of television as a tool of conditioning, an echo of the political regime's authority, as in

Sem título (Feijao) (Untitled [Beans], 1975).Her second series of videos, A Morte do Horror (Death by horror, 7 films, 1981), made in Paris where she settled in 1978, films this subject with irony by making the television set, repeated ad infinitum, a torture box, with the murder of goldfish and combats simulated with toys.

The sense of absurdity and killing time visualised by the New Wave finds an echo in these short but scripted pieces suspended between horror and comedy. Intervalo, a single video shot in Zurich in 1983, symbolically empties the cathode-ray tube, retaining only the temporal thread of the film through the metaphor of film reels scattered in a landscape. These three series of videos for presentation on monitors constitute a specific corpus in Andrade's work. But for her, video is connected to a broader analysis of the image which uses the new media as well as drawing and found images. In 1977, she responded to the invitation of the São Paulo Biennale with the creation of a network: Os Caminhos, Os Habitantes, O Espetáculo e A Obra (The roads, the residents, the spectacle and the work), an installation based on a dialogue, via postcards, between the artist, the city's residents, and the organisers of the Biennale. In Hydragrammes (1978-1993), an installation of found objects which she associates with a word and their photographic representation, Andrade proposes an imaginative topography opening up a field of changing semantic relationships. The video image itself intervenes in a large number of her installations, created in galleries and/or outdoors, which similarly explore the continuity between language and perception, sparking associations which are both critical and poetic. From one culture to another, from the present to repressed forms of memory, from the amazement produced by technology to the enigmatic permanence of light as it returns in organic matter coming from invisible depths: the quartz and crystal which serve as the projection media and frames for her most recent works.

Marcella Lista, 2023
Translation: Miriam Rosen