Bildraum

Historians write histories from established stories, artifacts, and shreds of evidence, often finding themselves at the mercy of what remains. In her artwork, Fernanda Fragateiro reexamines these same historical remnants, from archives to discarded materials, rewriting stories as she transforms artifacts into sculptures. Gathering her materials from a variety of sources, some of which come to her purely by accident, Fragateiro’s encounters with cultural objects ignite the artist’s curiosity and result in an exhaustive aesthetic and historical investigation that reintroduces a rich and overlooked segment of history to a contemporary audience. One can imagine objects stowed carefully under floorboards for decades, or in a lockbox for safekeeping, coming into Fragateiro’s careful hands, where they are gingerly dusted off and carefully examined before becoming the fertile ground for research, imagination, and an aesthetic intervention that continues to bear the marks of its origin.