Jorge Menna Barreto, Ph.D. (b. 1970, Araçatuba, Brazil) is an artist and educator whose practice and research has been dedicated to site-specific art for over 20 years. Menna Barreto approaches site-specificity from a critical and South American perspective, having taught, lectured, and written on the subject; he has participated in art residencies, projects and exhibitions worldwide. In 2016, he took part in the 32nd São Paulo Biennial with his award-winning project Restauro: a restaurant set up to work with a complex system of environmental restoration in collaboration with settlements of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST); the project travelled to the Serpentine Galleries, London, in 2017. In 2020, as a resident at the Jan van Eyck Academie, Netherlands, he launched a periodical called Enzyme in collaboration with artist Joélson Buggilla. In Geneva, Switzerland, he has collaborated on the MFA in Socially Engaged Art at HEAD - Haute École d’Arts Appliqués, where he is working on a research project focused on ecopedagogy. Menna Barreto is presently working on a new project with the MST in Brazil called Voicescapes for the Landless.

 

ARI Supported project:

Dry Eye is a multimedia exhibition project to happen both in California and Brazil in 2023. It derives from the symposium Dehydrated Landscapes to happen in October 2022, which investigates the relationship between the ongoing environmental crisis, especially global warming, and the language we use to represent and talk about it. The project's hypothesis is that our ability to respond to the environmental crisis is entangled with how we represent it through art and language. By creating new forms of representation, or rehydrating our vision, we are also enabling our ability to respond.

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