Sofia Gama and art as ancestral valorization

Feb 7, 2025

For

As a visual artist, fashion creator, model, and communicator, Sofia honors her ancestry through her work. Today, especially, we celebrate National Indigenous Peoples' Resistance Day, and it is through traditional techniques and materials that she brings forth her indigenous roots. “Ultimately, it is about resistance and defending these sacred elements that are constantly threatened with destruction and erasure, whether they are physical, cultural, or emotional territories,” she states.

We talked with Sofia about how art entered her life, her references and influences, and of course, the role of ancestry and indigenous struggle in her works. Check it out below:

Has your contact with the artistic universe been something that has accompanied you since childhood? Or did it arise throughout your journey?

It has certainly been something that has accompanied me since I was young. Art is something inherent in our culture, and I grew up watching my mother and grandmother create mainly through embroidery, which they taught me. I also always liked to draw as a child; as I grew older, I got closer to poetry, eventually studied photography, and now in a professional capacity, it was through photography that I first entered the fashion universe, where I returned to embroidery and visual arts. My first work was an embroidery on jute canvas, and my first authorial piece of clothing was also a fully embroidered coat.

How does your creative process work, and what are your references or influences?

When I am producing a new piece, I feel that I externalize a scream as a need to talk about something, to tell a story that I believe is often untold, to highlight or bring into discussion something that often goes unnoticed. Many times, they are stories, issues, and feelings that are not beautiful. However, something that comes a lot from the fashion area that I like is the ability to create beautiful things with what we have and to also value all the beauty and preciousness of cultures, bodies, and lives that are undervalued in the world we live in. Physical admiration and the

pleasant to the eye are subjects present in much of what I seek to create, from the features of women who look like me to the beauty of a plant, an animal, the living earth. Thus, the beauty and richness of the techniques and materials that I use, and the feeling of aesthetic admiration for the final result of a finished piece, having beauty as something I already like to work with and create, also bring a way to call attention to issues that should change or have more visibility and valuation, stories that should be heard more, it is also a way to bring relief and vent a scream that needs to be heard, whether it is personal to me or not.

I really enjoy combining different artistic areas, different materials, different techniques, thinking about the ancestral in the most respectful way possible in conjunction with my own current experiences. I research ancient ancestral techniques, all of which I learned from other artists, and the fact that they are ancestral technologies makes me feel that I always need to update these studies and train the practices. These are things that are learned and updated in community. Regarding the creative process itself, I feel that the ideas for the pieces come to my mind almost fully formed, and I build from that image in my head. I sense that these are pieces that tell stories or convey messages in a non-verbal way, but through image and technique. Making braids and embroideries, threading beads, creating clay pieces are processes that tell stories that did not start with me. Because I enjoy mixing and combining all these diverse types of techniques, the creative process usually requires a lot of planning, technique, and study to achieve the final result I desire. To place a ceramic piece in an embroidery on canvas or in a dress, for example, I first need to study exactly what the size of that piece will be, where its holes will be, the correct shape for it to enter the final work. I find it amusing how these techniques are often undervalued intellectually while requiring a huge intellectual and technical investment. Therefore, all my pieces begin with sketches or croquis, require calculations before I start producing them, and finally assembling and arriving at that image that exists in my mind. Precisely because they are collective techniques, my greatest references are the people who have taught me. My grandmother, my mother, the ceramicists Yaku and Ana V, the artist who works with beads Maria Guajajara, and all the other artists who developed the techniques I work with for millennia and so many others I find whose works are labeled as crafts without their names credited. Many artists I am in contact with also inspire me, such as singer Kae Guajajara, photographer Gustavo Paixão, and designer Abrilhante. I am also inspired by singer Luedji Luna and model Paloma Elsesser.

How do you balance your different roles as a visual artist, fashion creator, model, and communicator?

This is definitely the most challenging part. I believe that what facilitates it is my enjoyment of bringing all these things together and thinking of multi potentials, multi possibilities in various forms. I often use content creation jobs to combine with my pieces and express myself creatively through fashion imagery, art direction, and styling. The styling jobs I do most often consist of pieces that I create. I have modeled for a project that featured my works composing the art direction. I believe communication also facilitates this because I try to make my work reach new places by leveraging this vehicle of social media.

What role does ancestry play in the execution of your projects?

Many of the stories I tell through my pieces are related to my direct ancestry, the history of my family's arrival in Rio de Janeiro, teachings I received from my grandmother related to nature and life in general. One of my works that garnered the most attention on social media is an embroidery of a phrase my grandmother says, “The heart of another is land that no one walks on,” which I read as a direct relationship between feeling, land, and territory. In addition, I believe that ancestry is something intrinsic to my work concerning the techniques and materials I research and also the way I had contact with most of them, first through my family and then in contact with other indigenous artists. Clay also captivated me right away because it refers to this strong relationship I have with the earth, something I inherited from the planting culture my grandmother passed down to me.

How do you represent the duality between nature and urban environments in your works?

I believe this duality is present when I tell stories related to my ancestry but also represent issues from my current experiences at the same time, sometimes in the same work. I like to think about the different shades of clay representing different symbols: from earth to water, stone, and concrete. I mainly think about the duality and resistance of the earth—and everything that comes from it— in concrete-dominated environments; and also about the movement and life of the waters that flow through all these places and symbolize so many crossings of resistance. Through this, I always seek to speak about the need to defend the threatened territories where the earth is still alive and the lives that resist in those places, so that no family has to leave forcibly from where they live and has the right to good living, wherever they may be. Ultimately, it is about resistance and defending these sacred elements that are constantly threatened with destruction and erasure, whether they are physical, cultural, or emotional territories.

Art can be a means to generate discussions about the indigenous struggle. What do you intend to bring to light with your projects and as an artist in general?

I believe that the contribution of creative work in general, whether in art, fashion, or other image-related fields, lies in the capacity to bring discussions and issues in various forms, with diverse techniques, appeals to sensitivity, and attract various audiences to conversations that are touched in different ways by the same piece or image. With my work, I seek to demonstrate the value and cultural richness of traditional techniques and materials, and through that, bring to discussion the issues that permeate the places where these techniques were originated and handed down. These are lives and cultures that are threatened all the time without many people even being aware or having knowledge of their contemporary realities. So, in addition to talking about stories, feelings, and individual experiences of mine, my family, and my ancestry, everything that permeates my work is also related to cultures and stories that are collective and existed long before and beyond me. I believe much of my art speaks about how I arrived here and, primarily, that I exist here. In a collective manner and also in an individual manner. I try to break stereotypes and go against the notion that there cannot be indigenous people in the city, dressing as they wish, following their dreams, understanding and exercising their individuality and rights like everyone else.

But I also aim to convey the message about the importance of defending territories: in many of my works, I speak about the crossings of indigenous families away from their territories and far from the roots of their cultures, and how this exodus is often forced and the territories are sadly expropriated. Therefore, I understand that defending the well-being and freedom of indigenous families is also about preserving and respecting their territories so that they do not have to leave forcibly, as happens frequently.