Vieira, Apt 1010

Using strategies of autofiction, my ongoing series ‘VIEIRA, Apt 1010’, an atypical family album, uses my own subjectivity – that of a middle-aged woman raising two sons – to sound out the meaning of womanhood within the social context surrounding me.

Marilia Vieira 

Evoking Chantal Akerman’s seminal feminist film ‘Jeanne Dielman’, my ongoing series ‘VIEIRA, Apt 1010’ appropriates its title from my own physical residence: a converted single-bedroom apartment on the 10th floor of a high-rise on Manhattan’s Upper West Side. It is here that I live with my family, a household of men, or soon-to-be men – including my husband, age 51, and two sons now, 9 and 16. Beyond indexing family name and home, I see this apartment as a stand-in for the psyche, mapping not only my own interiority but also that of my family – each member in relation to the other, just as each apartment comprises one part of the building as a whole.

At first glance, this series suggests a family album. At times, I present my photographs individually as tableaus. At other times, I arrange them into constellations of relationships, reworking their meaning to evoke something greater than the sum of their parts. Exploring cycles in the progression of my own life and marriage, and in the developing lives of my children and parents, my photographs appear amid snapshots and family archives, revealing intergenerational patterns that reflect broader cultural shifts.

While ‘VIEIRA, Apt 1010’ takes my personal life as its departure point, my approach favors strategies of autofiction over traditional diaristic photography. This approach hinges on using my own subjectivity to question the context surrounding me, staging a series of dialectics between the subject and society that reveal the psychological dynamics of my personal experience: that of a now middle-aged woman living in New York but originating from a far more conservative country, Brazil.

Playing with the numerous social roles projected onto me, my work sounds out my relation to frameworks afforded to other members of the family – my mother, my father or husband, not to mention those positions occupied by my two sons, who will in turn be weaned into similar roles by society. This approach responds to contradictions within the masculine order. By exploiting pronouncedly feminine excesses – the realms of feeling, nature, nurture, and self-examination – my work privileges the poetic over the rational. Spanning this work, it is perhaps vis-à-vis the children that masculinity is revealed to be most complex, presuming that my sons will, in time, relinquish what vulnerable traits they have to the female.

Employing contradictory roles with which the viewer may identify – mother/child, husband/wife, caretaker/dependent, self/other – my work aims to hold a mirror to society, exploring the contours of these relationships through reflecting the viewer’s own complicity. At the end of the day, my images are marked not only by the question of meaning within the social, but by the isolation and weight of responsibility, the trials and joys of parenting, and the search for self despite it all.