Lúcia Prancha / HILDA (2025)

Solo Show “Hilda”, exhibition view Pavilhão Branco, Galerias Municipais, Lisboa

10/07–26/10/2025, Curator: Antonia Gaeta

In the exhibition Hilda, artist Lúcia Prancha presents a group of works that delve into the realms of the body, desire, and language, creating a fertile ground for dialogue between sculpture, literature, and critical thought. The title directly references the writer and poet Hilda Hilst (1930–2004), whose transgressive, introspective, dense, and radical oeuvre serves here as a symbolic and emotional axis for the artistic research developed by Lúcia Prancha.

The artist’s practice is deeply rooted in literature and archive study. The relationship with texts and traces of the past manifests in her work through multiple supports and materials, including films, fabrics, hair, and a diverse range of objects. Each piece seems to contain a vibrant corporeality, echoes, delirium, rigour, a layer of history, or a fragment of interrupted discourse.

The works are not merely shaped matter but a language that can evoke eroticism, distortion, and desires both vividly and ironically. They can express tensions between identity and normativity, to approach them as an aesthetic and political possibility, and to question established ideas on what is beautiful, complete, or functional.

In Hilda, Lúcia Prancha creates a space of resonance in which Hilst’s words become matter for the sculptural and filmic gesture, touching on the poetic, the indecipherable, and the body of the other.

Antonia Gaeta

Critique by Eliane Robert Moraes, Contemporânea Magazine, September 2025.

Corpo-Buraco #5 (Os Buracos e os dias),

[Body-Holes #5 (The Holes and The Days)], 2025

Cotton sheet, cotton thread, iron, 270 x 170 cm

detail of Corpo-Buraco #5 (Os Buracos e os dias), 2025

Corpo-Buraco #3 (Cu Perpétuo),

[Body-Holes #5 (Perpetual Ass)], 2023

Cotton sheet, cotton thread and iron, 260 x 190 cm

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Corpo-Buraco #1 (O Oco me Circunda),

[Body-Holes #1 (The Hollow Surrounds Me)], 2023

Cotton sheet, cotton thread, artificial hair, iron, and plastic anatomical models, 220 x 190 cm

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details Corpo-Buraco #3 (Cu Perpétuo), 2023

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Time on my Hands #11 and #12, 2023–2025

Artificial hair, wire and tires, variable dimensions

Time on my Hands (My Trash), 2022

Artificial hair, wire, iron and plastic bag with studio waste, 225 × 410 × 76 cm

“Throughout my life I read so much garbage that I decided to write my own.” Hilda Hilst

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Time on my Hands (Empordà #2), 2020–2025

Artificial hair, wire and wood, plant and metal support, variable dimensions

Critique by Eliane Robert Moraes, Contemporânea Magazine, September 2025.

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Time on my Hands #13, 2023

Artificial hair, wire and raffia, 175 × 65 × 30 cm

Time on my Hands (Coruche), 2021

Artificial hair, wire and raffia, 115 × 30 × 20 cm

Time on my Hands #16, 2024

Artificial hair, wire, iron and plasticine,

225 × 200 × 76 cm

detail Time on my Hands #16, 2024

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Time on my Hands (I Never Knew What Time it Was), 2018

Acrylic, newspaper, painted iron and artificial hair, 165 × 30 × 40 cm

Hilda por João, 2022

HDV, 16:9, animação, cor, som, 19’10” | HDV, 16:9, animation, color, sound, starring the literary critique João Adolfo Hansen. Experimental documentary in collaboration with animator Alexandra Ramires.

A probably false Latin etymology proposes that the term obscanum means ob scaena, “outside the scene”, as the interdict that should not or cannot be given in representation. In the text Sade, mon prochain, Klossowski recalled that the obscene only exists in a field of norms that give it meaning and meaning. In this excerpt from the essay: “Norma and obscenity in Gregório de Matos, Glauco Mattoso and Hilda Hilst”, the literary critic João Adolfo Hansen reads in his garden some particular poetic and political values of the obscene in texts by Brazilian author Hilda Hilst (1930– 2004).

Poem by Júlia de Carvalho Hansen, 2025

Vinil autocolante, dimensões variáveis | selfadhesive vinyl, variable dimensions