As our Awasi Artist Immersion program continues to go from strength to strength, we were delighted to host Amsterdam-based Brazilian designer Luiza Guidi at Awasi Iguazu.
This 14 lodge Relais & Chateaux hotel, minutes from Iguazu Falls and surrounded by thick Atlantic Rainforest in Argentina’s Misiones region, has hosted many artists as part of the program; the textures, sights and smells of the environment offer an opportunity for immersion in to the natural world that cannot be bettered.
A study in nostalgia
Luiza Guidi graduated from Design Academy Eindhoven in 2019. For her, design is a vehicle through which she can draw on emotions and sentiment; her work stems from her nostalgia, particularly for her home country of Brazil, amongst other things.
She uses various different mediums, including bookbinding, weaving and light sculpture, to pull together and make sense of her feelings and the world around her.
Shaped by the Atlantic Forest
Luiza saw her invitation to join the Awasi Art Immersion programme as a homecoming.
“Since moving to Europe”, she explains, “I always go back home as a daughter or a sister. Only now that I am back in the Atlantic Forest as an artist, I realise how much my work has been shaped by growing up there.”
Butterfly number 88
Luiza went directly from the airport to the Iguazu Falls. Stepping out of the car, she noticed a little butterfly with a clear number 88 on its wings.
“A long time ago in Brazil I found one of those on the floor of my house” she remembers fondly – just one of a treasure of memories of life in her homeland. “We kept it for years, believing it would bring us good luck.”
Carolina, Luiza’s guide throughout her stay – all guests at each of our three Awasi properties are allocated a private guide and 4×4 vehicle for the duration of their stay – told her that these eye catching butterflies can be found all over the Atlantic Forest; Luiza would go on to see hundreds during her Artist Immersion.
“It was the perfect omen, and the first of many things from my childhood that would emerge over the course of the week.”
A homecoming
Despite having never visited Iguazu before, Luiza recalled that “nothing felt foreign.” The Awasi Artist Immersion gave Luiza a new lens through which to see and study the country of her birth.
“It brought to the surface what was already within me” she goes on, as the rainforest and natural environment wound itself in to the artist’s creative process.
Working with a feeling
Luiza’s approach is to capture and instil emotions, making people feel a certain way through her art.
“I am not trying to replicate the forest, because you cannot replicate nature”, she explains.
“What I am doing is translating this feeling of getting lost in an environment and getting lost in your thoughts because you have so many things to look at.”
Luiza’s work involved exploring the forest to collect materials, textures and organic and inorganic matter, to lay it about for the viewer to weave together, and explore in their own way, at their own pace.
Reading Luiza’s Diary
Luiza is currently working on her Awasi piece; her ambition is for it to serve as a visual diary of her time at Awasi Iguazu.
As she wraps up her time in Misiones and returns home to complete her piece, she is conscious of the challenge she faces, having spent time in a land of such abundance.
“It feels impossible to choose only one experience amidst everything that I have lived there” she notes wistfully.
Luiza Guidi participated in the ongoing Awasi Artist Immersion program. She stayed at the 14-villa Relais & Chateaux Awasi Iguazu luxury lodge, located in Northern Argentina near to the Iguazu Falls.