Samuel de Saboia.
“From Brazil to New York, then back to Brazil again; from Paris to Los Angeles, then Morocco then Paris; from Milan to Paris; from Zurich to London... Since 2018 I’ve been living some percentage of my years inside an airplane. However, after 8 shows I’m now writing this while sitting by the same desk where I did some of my first drawings and paintings”, says the Brazilian artist Samuel de Saboia. Very happy to finally see his family in Recife, his hometown, Saboia experiences joy despite the turbulent year of 2020.
At the bottom of their house is the church of his parents, who are preachers. At the top there is a small room, which Samuel turned into a studio when he was a teenager. Whenever his sister would go to church, he would go into his studio, where he realized that they both celebrated God. The desire to become an artist has satisfied the need to be a vessel for glory.
In this sense, imagination must be the cement of the world, because, as the co-editors of "Octavia's Blood" Walidah Imarisha and adrienne maree brown propose, "we cannot build what we cannot imagine". So, everything Samuel de Saboia built had to be imagined before concretion. His path is being carved daily, and his love for fashion, music, sciences and art add more and more layers to his work.
“My existence brings joy to Brazil, to our native people and to the black community. It is so important that now the art world and the public can see the intersections of culture, the different ways that we have of communicating common grounds without forgetting personal history, its storytelling and capsules of life. I honor all of those that made those steps before me while having also been paving the way for new dreamers. Sometimes it was tough to survive, but since I’m still alive I think that is my fate and that is Perfect”.
And there lies the power of imagination: Samuel de Saboia meditates on worlds that do not yet exist, while he tries to elaborate ways to challenge the normative constructions of the world we are in.
