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 at the intersection of autofiction, 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 illustrate 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 art-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.