Camila Cavalcante is a visual artist from the north-east coast of Brazil settled in the UK. With a background in journalism she has a varied interest in investigating the conceptual, sentimental and social perception of art. Through the use of documentary photography, her work intertwines embroidery, collage and installation to create a place in which the idea of ‘private’ and ‘public’ overlap and complement each other, creating a space for empathy.
Camila holds a Masters of the Arts degree from University of Westminster and was awarded two photography national prizes in her home country. She has taken part in over 30 exhibitions and three art residencies in Brazil, Mexico, France, the Netherlands, the US, and the UK. In 2018 she was nominated for 100 Photographic Heroines, by the Royal Photographic Society, got an honourable mention on the 12th Julia Margareth Cameron Award and was shortlisted for the 61 International Photography Exhibition by the Royal Photographic Society and the Fix Photo Festival Awards. Camila currently teaches for the London School of Photography.
Nós Por Todas – Hidden Door Festival 2018
Camila’s long-term project Nós Por Todas, in English Us for All Women, became an interactive installation that explored the idea of the female body as a confrontational space bringing people together in the fight for women’s reproductive rights. She has taken nude self-portraits holding and hugging women that shared their experiences and opinions about illegal abortion in Brazil. The photographs were taken in their homes, with their back to the camera, while she revealed her face, exposing her body and her identity in their name. Hidden Door Festival gave the opportunity for Camila to show this project for the first time in the UK. After the installation, her images were shown in France, Amsterdam, Rio de Janeiro and London, as well as publications in the UK, India and the US. The project has also became the bilingual book For the Lives of All Women and will be published by Break the Habit Press in September 2019.
Scar – Hidden Door Festival 2017
Scar was an exhibition that aimed to imagine the city and the landscape as a living organism, displaying the marks of its development and bringing people together within it. It consists of two series of work that use documentary photography and embroidery to capture and relate different expressions of damage. There were intricate and subtle embroideries incorporated onto every single one of the 76 photographs of scars on buildings, skins and landscape.
