Interview with Catarina Carneiro de Sousa: Multimedia Artists and Art Educator

Catarina Carneiro de Sousa aka CapCat Ragu is a Portuguese artist born in 1975 at Oporto, Portugal, with a background on Painting and Art Studies. In 1999 she was a founding member of the association Caldeira 213, an artistic coalition that self-managed a non-profit art space in Oporto, Portugal, which between 2000 and 2002 exhibited the most cutting edge projects by young emerging artists. Catarina was also in the feminist and artistic collective ZOiNA from 1999 to 2002, working on gender issues in collaboration with Carla Cruz, Isabel Carvalho and Ana Medeira. She has participated in several collective exhibitions since 1997 and has been exhibiting individually since 2005. Since 2007 she is a professor at Escola Superior de Educação do Instituto Politécnico de Viseu in Portugal teaching Visual Arts in several courses including the course of Artes Plásticas e Multimédia. She has devoted her artistic activity to the Metaverse since 2008, when she became a virtual photographer working individually and collaboratively in the Second Life virtual environment, holding several solo exhibitions and collaborating with artists from different fields and nationalities. More recently she has dedicated herself to the development of avatars and the conception of virtual environments. Together with Sameiro Oliveira Martins aka Meilo Minotaur she is the builder of the Second Life Sim Delicatessen, that held projects like " de Maria, de Mariana, de Madalena " developed for the fifth edition of the Real Life exhibition " All My Independent Women " in 2010 and " Petrified " in 2011. She continues to explore the metaphorical nature of the art language and the problematization of gender, but she is also interested in the possibility of a new kind of shared creativity opened by new media art. 1. How do you position new media in your work? I work with new media in two different ways: exploring virtual reality platforms, as Second Life, and constructing image digitally mixing