Amanda Maciel Antunes: I’ve Got To Tell You Something Now
Antunes creates durational work as a means to relate and understand the world we live in.
I’ve Got To Tell You Something Now, which consists of a film, an object, and an artist book, functions as a portrait of an action of resistance, and an appeal to the intention of memory and stillness. The artist spent 365 days walking up and down a mountain with a piece of cloth, an audio recorder, a cell phone, a GoPro, sewing thread, and a needle. The journey began on the first day of the Covid-19 mandated lockdown in Los Angeles. The text was written during the hike and hand-stitched upon reaching the summit each day. The trail leads to the oldest peak in the San Gabriel Mountains, and its elevation is one of the highest reached in the least amount of geographic time. Persisting in this daily action was a transformative mental and physical exercise of exploring the geographies of personal and ancestral territories.
Resembling the daily journey, the 90-foot scroll of fabric will be displayed in the window lobby area of the museum and fabric will be suspended in several parts of the lobby forming waves resembling the hills of the mountains culminating in an area where a monitor will display the filmed journey.
The final object created for the project is a handstitched and bound artist book, an assemblage of collected images and text encouraging readers to rethink the nature of our memories during traumatic experiences. It is the exploration of a particular time and place. It is a story beginning with loss and moving, finally, to acceptance.
The meditative nature of the techniques allows the artist to catalogue and reflect on her memories as she creates. The pauses in many of her works provide metaphorical spaces in which viewers can place their own memories for personal observation and reflection.
Amanda Maciel Antunes (aka dama) is a Brazilian artist based in Los Angeles. She was born and raised in the countryside of the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Her auto-didactic and transdisciplinary practice merges language and durational performance to create paintings, photography, writing, sculpture, sound, film and assemblage. She works in collaboration with public libraries, nature and communal spaces, reflecting on the selective nature of memory, inherent language and anthropological references written by women as points of departure. For reasons of political, historical and cultural urgency, her artistic journey aims to learn from the side of language that requires getting in touch with the unfamiliarity of times past to bring up the inner depths of the present.
Her sites of practice and study have included a former WWII military shelter in East LA, Sæborg historical theatre in a northern fjord, Iceland, The Crowley Theatre in Marfa, TX, a Dessana Tribe territory in Rio Negro, Brazil, the Los Angeles National Forest, the High Desert of California, and various public and private libraries and special collections. Her first book titled Second Birth was published in the Spring of 2023 by Hexentexte. She’s also a librarian at the Philosophical Research Society in Los Angeles where she founded and hosts a monthly Surrealist Study Group (SSG) focusing on women authors and artists, creating intergenerational community engagement, social practice and arts programming.