Cecilia Sordi Campos (b. 1989, Brazil)

Growing up in the countryside in Brazil, I wanted to be an astronaut.
Instead, I was given a camera at age nine as a prize for winning a contest at primary school. I took photos of everything and everyone. Unfortunately, many of the rolls of film I went through were never developed. I still think of those never seen photographs.

I have been living in Australia for the past 17 years, and I am now a Melbourne-based visual artist, writer and researcher. My artistic practice is positioned in the fields of socially engaged art and expanded documentary. My research is situated within the nexus of Practice-led research, Autoethnography and Sensory Ethnography.

My projects aim to recognise stories that exist outside of limitations of colonial narratives, and I develop visual vocabularies to represent complex experiences of being-ness, migration, and hybrid cultural identity, as well as sociocultural constructions centred on gender and the body. My artistic practice is often informed by my experience as a Brazilian migrant from Afro-Brazilian and Europe ancestry, in concert with my experience as an infertile woman of colour with its attendant signifiers in sociocultural and socioeconomic contexts.

In my practice I exploit the evocative and aesthetic capacities of materials - such as biomaterials, fabric, thread and paper - to disrupt traditional image-making conventions.
I work with photography, alternative processes, installation, moving image and performed creative writing to process my propositions.

Through my creative expression, I seek strategies in communicating complex lived experiences within a public discourse; therefore, proposing a parting from traditional systems of power and privilege to rediscover more inclusive ways of knowing, being and aesthetic expression.

For full CV, click here.

I respectfully acknowledge the Traditional Owners and Custodians of the lands and waterways on which I work, live and travel.
I pay my respects to Indigenous Elders past, present and emerging.
Sovereignty has never been ceded. It always was, and always will be Aboriginal land.