Eva Rocha

Eva Rocha is a multimedia artist from Brazil, with a Brazilian and an American citizenship. Her experiences in performance and theater in São Paulo, Brazil, with notable international dramaturges, carries through her visceral forms and her development of a corporeal language. Rocha’s research in Cultural Studies and Arts in Brazil, the US and Peru in the the undergrad level, and MFA in Kinetic Imaging, inform her cross-disciplinary exploration on the embodiment of personal/collective disruption and its archiving in the historic and contemporary artifacts.

Rocha work emerges from her diverse set of life experiences working with indigenous communities, migrating workers and victims of forced migration. Her work surges from an aesthetic that refers to historical events while exploring current social issues. Her work, which combines elements of performance, sculpture, set design, and video installation, comments on the fragmentation of personal/collective memory. It has been shown in special exhibitions in museums in the US and Latin America.

Residency/Fellowship

Equal Justice 2017/2018
Labor 2020

Website

evarocha.com

Location

Richmond, VA USA

LONGING/ BELONGING // ALUMNI STATEMENT

Racial related trauma is constant, visible, or invisible. Throughout 2020, we are experiencing it in a magnified way. The focus on the Black Lives Matter movement is as crucial and urgent, as ever. The struggles of different groups of color parallel to the main cause of Black Americans; and, at this moment, our understanding of many groups’ issues have broadened and increased our ability to comprehend an undenied struggle for identity-rights.

I wrote the poem in my SFAI 140 presentation while reflecting on the amazing impossibility of many groups ever being able to get together to speak for their causes, and how all causes are somehow tied to each other. I wrote it in 2016 while walking in the Women’s March in Washington, DC. While walking, I would see signs that said: “We are the People”, and I thought about that concept – “the people” – not just as it relates to here but how it relates to everywhere. I started the poem by saying, “In me all races co-habit.” I am a combination of races and of the specificity of their struggles in time. Nevertheless, the issues of race at this time and during this world pandemic, confront the deepest fundamentals of our survival beyond race, as species. We came to realize that our shared humanity is tied and perishable. – Eva Rocha

SFAI140 Video Presentation

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