2025

Country: UK

Multi-channel video installation

Screen 1, 16 min, Performer Julia Testas

Screen 2, 6 min, Performer Olivia Bevan

Screen 3, 10 min, Ethnobiologist Hayana Freitas

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Willow Black (Roundel Series), 2025

Ceramics, glaze, dimensions variable

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Willow Black (Untitled 1,2,3,4), 2025

Drypoint, 29.7 cm x 42 cm

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Joanna Mamede’s multi-channel moving-image installation Willow Black (2025) explores the relocation of Latin American bodies—both human and botanical—within the socio-cultural and natural landscape of Britain. The film meditates on the lingering traces of colonial systems of categorisation and preservation, which have historically dictated how such bodies are labelled, catalogued and displayed. The work stages a visual and symbolic tension between colonial imprints, represented through exsiccatae and Gothic architectural and decorative motifs, and the dynamic vitality of natural elements in the British landscape. This juxtaposition exposes the reduction of living beings and matter to static specimens within colonial knowledge systems. Within the imagined terrain of the film, the choreographed movements of performer Julia Testas—granted a more permanent afterlife in the
accompanying ceramic roundels and prints—enact a subversive process of renewal, animating plants and symbols once destined to be preserved into static archives, opening them to new, unstable meanings. Through these embodied, speculative gestures of reactivation, Mamede proposes a hybrid sense of Brazilian-British identity rooted not in assimilation but in atravessamentos: the crossings of borders and environments that both shape and fracture the self.​

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Passing Traces, Group Exhibition at the Ruskin Gallery, Cambridge 2025