Flavia Sampaio, a Brazilian photographer and Communication graduate who previously worked for major Brazilian newspapers, has spent the past six years developing innovative photographic projects that investigate memory, the passage of time, and transformation. Her unique artistic approach combines captured images with vernacular photographs to create compelling visual narratives that explore temporal changes and their effects.
Sampaio's work has gained significant recognition in both national and international art circles. She has participated in numerous project calls and exhibitions, including a notable group exhibition at the prestigious Iberê Camargo Foundation in Porto Alegre, Brazil. Her artistic achievements were further recognized when she became a finalist for the Best Photobook Award at the Imaginária Festival in 2022, highlighting her growing influence in contemporary photography.
In 2024, Sampaio continued to expand her international presence by participating in the group exhibition "Andanças" at two prominent venues: the El Rule Cultural Center in Mexico and the Página Gallery in São Paulo. Beyond photography, she also creates poetry inspired by her photographic projects, adding a literary dimension to her artistic practice.
Her current project, "Tempo Esculpido" (Sculpted Time), represents a groundbreaking exploration of life, death, and regeneration through bio-botanical art. The project presents beings created from bio-botanical fragments in a reinterpretation of what deteriorates and transforms. These created bodies possess unique and ephemeral physiologies that highlight evidence and traces indicating both a state of cycle closure, representing death, and the reformulation of matter, symbolizing life.
For Sampaio, nature serves as a source of discovery for life forms that are both familiar and previously nonexistent. The collection of natural remains has evolved into a poetic and playful task in her reinvention as a scientist-artist. She carefully gathers fragments to be manipulated and reformulated, creating new artistic possibilities from organic decay.
The materials in her work exist in a constant state of mimicry between decomposition and new configuration, resulting in hybrid structures that transition from raw nature to the realm of imagination and infinite possibilities of recreation. These forms appear sometimes fresh and vibrant, sometimes faded and dry, embodying the certainty of impermanence in all things. The invented creatures, now brought to artistic life, whisper their existences through carefully composed photographic portraits.
In creating these transient and fleeting sculptures, photography serves as both a tool of aesthetic and creative elaboration and an attempt to halt the natural process of decomposition of these rearranged organic fragments. The work exists in the space between what exists and what has not yet been created, with sculpted time representing a process of modeling in time, space, and form.
The artistic process involves combining fractions of different species to create a unique sculptural harmony. The beauty of freshness confronts natural wear and decay, affirming new perspectives of presence that focus more on journeys than destinations, thus proposing an entirely new mode of being. This approach represents a visual and conceptual investigation into the transformation and revaluation of perishable nature.
"Sculpted Time" integrates sculpture, photography, and poetry as interconnected artistic languages. Through the articulation of these different mediums and the openings and folds produced by contact between various codes and supports, the project promotes what can be described as a cosmogonic ritual. The beings are generated from an exercise based on the artist's body, which collects from nature its mortal remains—organic waste destined to decompose—and transmutes them into new sculptural realities.
These sculptural creations undergo additional mutation through photographic recording and are then reconstructed through poetic performance into verbal images. Through this multi-layered process, the species of "Sculpted Time" gain new life, revealing their fundamentally metamorphic nature and challenging traditional boundaries between art, science, and nature. Sampaio's work continues to push the boundaries of contemporary photography and conceptual art, establishing her as an innovative voice in the exploration of time, memory, and transformation.
