Video (Color/Sound), 2’30’’, Loop (2024)

Work exhibited at L’INCONTRO, Venezia; ReA! Art Fair V EDITION, Opos Milano

In SOLO, Castro Lobato weaves together personal memory and a universal reflection on the process of learning to be. The work originates from an exploration of his family’s visual archive, a gesture of reappropriation that delves into intimate history to question how the body is educated, shaped, and domesticated.

The video shows the artist as a child, sitting while being guided by a doctor in his first attempts at movement. A female voice —his mother’s — urges him to stand up on his own, a persistent repetition that becomes an echo, a rhythm, and a command. This sound fragment, extracted from another video in which his mother was teaching him to walk, is layered as a leitmotif questioning the concept of autonomy and self-formation.

Castro Lobato reflects on the construction of identity and bodily movement as the result of a series of imposed or inherited learnings. The work problematises the idea of “making oneself,” revealing how every gesture, every step, is the product of a web of experiences, influences, and relationships that shape us. The repeated command, “Stand up on your own,” thus transforms into a provocation: can we truly say we are autonomous in our growth and development? Or are we the result of a stratification of teachings and conditioning?

Text by Valeria Conti