São Paulo, 1968

I wanted to be just like my father. He had a laboratory for cleaning photographic slides. A brush made from seal fur. I don’t even know if it was, but he said so and I believed him. I still have that brush today.

 

Since I was five I wanted a photographic camera. I began to photograph at the age of seven and I’ve never stopped. I took classes at Focus. My father died when I was 13 and around that time I bought a Nikon FM2. Since then I have organized all my negatives. At college, my final project was a photo documentary about the workers on my family’s farm.

I wanted to take photographs to be an adult, to be near my father in some way. He was a civil engineer, but photographed very well. He had a large collection for that time, with about four thousand slides.

In our home we had sessions of slide projections on the wall. The projector had a remote control, but was always getting jammed. Even so, we saw the trips that my parents took like watching a movie, we saw our own trips. My two siblings and I each had our own box of slides. We would fight over whose to watch first.

I had freedom in my childhood for being raised on a farm. My family does not have a relationship with art, they never brought me to a museum, but they always supported me in my artistic adventure.

 

I created a universe to which I wander in the memories of my childhood, under the roots of trees or above their tops. Inner places where I could dream about what had not yet happened.

 

Photography was a mystery for me, starting with the object, the photographic camera. But I soon perceived that it would help me to reveal my deepest self through the construction of the inner landscape that would be revealed externally.

I began drawing before going to school, as a need. The Waldorf school, of the anthroposophic line, was very important in my artistic training. Drawing there was a way of working; the important thing was not the final result, but the process.

 

Drawing reveals the sacredness that lives within us.

 

After studying photography, I decided to experiment with painting, drawing, and, finally, the construction of objects. There was a time when I painted over photographs. These experiments gave rise to the thread I was seeking to join drawing with photography. Thread began to be very present element in my artworks.

 

Thread, whether visible or not, is what sewed, sews and will always sew together all of those lost and found times of my existence.

 

I began to work when I was 16 or 17, designing jewelry at the Ornamentum store. I worked there for about four years.

I took the industrial design course at FAAP. This was important in my training as an artist because it gave me practicality, objectivity and systematization. I am very sensorial, and this more rational outlook was important for my balance.

My older sister is an architect. I made scale models for her.

I got married when I was 23.

I made jewelry, I set up a studio in the living room, and later moved it to the garage. But I soon started to have children and, when I already had three, I needed to arrange another workspace.

 

My children planted trees when they were seven years old. I considered these rituals very important.

 

For the fact that its roots delve into the soil and its branches rise up into the sky, the tree is universally held as a powerful symbol of the relations that are established between the earth and the sky.

Yes, the gods are powerful. They can steal what you thought belonged to you. Nothing is yours, the body is an object. The object belongs to you, but it is nonetheless still in object.

I believe in the myth, it is alive, it never dies. As long as there is human life on earth, the myth will be present. Beyond the influence of the mythologist Joseph Campbell, a source of answers and questions for reflection, I have also been influenced by artists such as Ana Mendieta, Louise Bourgeois, Max Ernst, Marc Chagal, Anselm Kiefer, Frida Kahlo, Adriana Varejão, Tunga, José Rufino, a poem by García Lorca, songs, newspapers, and various sorts of media. This entire set feeds me sometimes with answers, sometimes with questions. Crossing lines between thoughts, I sew together ideas and reflections. Life, death, the process of becoming… I condition myself to allow the intuitive energy to happen.

 

 The pink in some of my works is actually the back side of the skin, which is always the same.

The color of flesh.

I get indignant about any sort of prejudice.

 

Memory is a thread that connects the continuous series of memories and relations between the things and ourselves. I agree with Schopenhauer when he defines the crazy person as someone who has lost his memory.

 

Micro  macro

Day  night

Good  evil

Life  death

The beginning  and the end

Male  and female

Below the earth  above the earth

Inside  outside

Beautiful  ugly

Everything  nothing

 

 

The nature/human-being relation

Displacement

transformation

I like collecting the world!

biodiversity;

research in philosophy, psychology, history, artists, metaphysics;

The dream/the playful/the surreal

Absence

 

Nature is a great source of inspiration and reflection. I aspire to the time – slow in comparison with the urban time – that nature takes to transform itself.

The relationship of the contemporary human being with society and the natural environment attracts me very much. The landscape reflects this relationship, in both the countryside and in the city.

I think about the concept of the sublime. The human being is small before nature and her powers. Although we are part of her, the immensity of nature reveals our limitations, our powerlessness.

 

I research all of the trees that I photograph. Besides the curiosity that drives me, I like to create a familiarity by knowing about their cycles, similar species, the specificities of the seeds and the leaves… Sometimes, I see this approach as analogous to the way that we get to know and compare people.

 

The beings of mythology who live on the earth’s surface are the nymphs – figures covered by a veil. They are educators and linked to the feminine world. They are manifested, for example, in the telluric energy that appears in the flowers, in the waters, in the beauty of the surface.

The beings that live beneath the earth are the Cabeiri, the gnomes, the genies of nature. They serve to make the invisible visible. They bring revelation and inspiration.

 

“Each day the tree produces and abandons a shadow, as each year it produces and sheds its foliage.”

Water and Dreams (Gaston Bachelard).

 

Although I have never stopped photographing, I did not identify very much with the group of photographers. Neither did I feel part of the world of painters.

 

I am neither Zen nor hippie…

 

In 2001 I assumed my profession as this one; visual artist. I started to adopt new procedures, like ripping photographs. It was very hard for me to advance in this territory, because I was raised in a regulated environment, with great concern for image.

 

I like diversity.

I hate going to a restaurant where everyone is the same.

 

“The photographic camera is an extension of your body,” my oldest son told me.

With this hunger that I have for collecting the world, photography is always present in my strategies and investigations.

 

Looking at the same referent from two points of view and later joining them.

 

I saw a tree full of yellow blossoms. I went to photograph it, and my scale was tiny in its presence. The tree was huge – the power of nature was very strong. So I needed to lower myself. To take in the whole tree, I saw that it was necessary to take a photo from the other side as well. Without being aware of it at that moment, I was seeking a tridimensionality. I still didn’t have the idea of sewing.

When I put the images in the computer, they appeared side-by-side. Then I was startled: I had eliminated the trunk, the tree was floating in the air. I thought: could it be that now I have left the ground for good, I am no longer attached to the land? As I had already sewn some images together, the solution to join them was a natural step.

My images are aimed at generating symbols that can answer some of my personal enigmas… That’s why I so much like the work of Louise Bourgeois.

Is sewing a way to lend volume to the photos, to recover the tridimensionality lost by photography? I hadn’t thought of that… With the trees, the volume becomes a clear reference to the book… The book is paper, paper is a tree.