(para)sites | Rita Senra – A Parasite at the table

Rita Senra (Barcelos, 1993) lives and works in Oporto. She has a degree in Fine Arts from the University of Porto. In 2015, she integrated the studio of Jiřího Příhody - Akademie výtvarných umění v Praze, in the Czech Republic and, in 2019, she undertook an artist residency in Clermont-Ferrand, France, in a cross-residency project by the cultural association Saco Azul.

She develops her artistic work in the areas of drawing and installation, which she has been presenting in solo and group exhibitions since 2014. She is a member of Sismógrafo - an independent and self-managed space, programmed by Salto no Vazio Cultural Association, in Oporto - since 2016.

Rita Senra's work is particularly identified by the bold choice of using very fragile materials. Paper is the medium that she most uses. Her artistic and aesthetic options often follow a path that redoes that same fragility: sometimes she sews, sometimes she glues, sometimes she composes a structure and another to attempt at turning the work firmer, stronger, and resistant. Colour, line, sentences and words complete the creative act on paper, altering its meaning, bringing multiple dimensions to it. Rita's work could be defined as something profoundly human: the fragility of the material is our vulnerability; the interconnections that reinforce it are ours in the collective; the meanings and qualities that it acquires throughout the process of creation are the life experience acting on us over the days. When Rita begins a work, she doesn't control its final formal features and the result does not always reflect the original concept. The work is produced through the process and this one is as important or more, than the final result.

From the series "blue palindromes" 2016. Courtesy of the artist.

Edition of 10 artist books, 2019-2020. Courtesy of the artist.

Running stich, 2021. MUPI Gallery @ Saco Azul. Courtesy of the artist.