Diante do Sutil
2023 · 40 works · Socotra, 2023 · curatorial text by Marcela Bonfim
In February 2023 the artist travelled to Socotra, an island of Yemen in the Arabian Sea, isolated enough to keep a flora found nowhere else. Diante do Sutil gathers the photographs from that journey, in colour and in black and white: dragon's blood trees opening like umbrellas against the sky, the pale dune desert, work on the salt mounds, children playing with tyres on stony ground.
It is the series in which the human subject weighs as much as the landscape. Marcela Bonfim's curatorial text reads the island as a tunnel through time — the past installed in the present — and does not hide what was hard to see, such as the rigid control over women's lives. The native trees, resisting a severe climate, appear as the other face of the same resistance.
