You often focus on scenes that most people pass by without noticing. What draws you to these overlooked moments, and what do they reveal to you about the world we live in?
In the beginning of my artistic practices, silent, static scenes were what I considered a preference. With studies and a deep dive into my story and experience as a person with a disability, the overlooked, the unseen, or the ignored became visual metaphors for the way I often feel treated by society. Not from a victim´s space, but from realisations I´ve been curating in my almost 42 years in this life. I’m also a psychologist strongly inclined to its more social approaches. For this reason, in my work, I try to bring poetry and beauty, but also social issues and my take on them.
You’ve described your artistic practice as a way of reclaiming roles historically denied to people with disabilities. How has creating art reshaped the way you see yourself and your place in society?
Like many of my kind, a life with plenty of rocky experiences is a reality, but so is creating. During childhood, I spent several occasions in hospitals or medical appointments. Art supplies became cherished friends for me to decompress, lift myself up, or travel through my childhood world when this one was too much. Such a narrative made me fall in love with art and its possibilities. It was pivotal for me to find myself in a positive light. My own life has its share of struggle and pain, but in art I find ways to dignify it, especially by trying to bring awareness and confrontation into conversations I find vital for our healthier existence. Our world and its state are what they are due to ages of erasure and silenced voices. I regained my voice by learning, studying, and creating and will no longer allow injustice towards me. Art showed me the self-value I nearly lost.
Share your art. Share your heart.
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As you work with images, memories, and fragments of lived experience, what does your art teach you—not about the world, but about yourself?
To pay more attention to myself, what I´ve lived, and choose to live from now on. I had a very recent experience in which I thought I didn’t have the artworks for an exhibition, but after careful visits to my previous works, I could find tons of pieces, and the body of work made me incredibly happy. This teaches me to give us more credit, to value our paths, and to be thankful for them. If art is construction, life is the cement! Lived experience, as it happens and writes itself day by day, gave me the confidence and curiosity to try new possibilities in art. As a result, I´m currently experimenting with AI, making an entire series of portraits of people with disabilities, especially black women, since the ones in my family are responsible for raising and leading us through better paths than the ones they originally had, due to prejudice. I´m both celebrating my identity and ancestry and hope to meet you with the finished series soon.
Nature, faith, and art seem to form an essential triangle in your creative process. How do these elements guide you when you feel disconnected or challenged?
My views on nature stem from African spirituality, which regards nature as sacred. As I often say, nature is my temple, with no walls. To conjure the images I want, long walks in natural spaces are necessary, normally alone, as my focus strongly depends on it. Art comes into the equation as I want to extract beauty from the ordinary. My process is deeply rooted in revealing not-so-obvious layers from daily life and the possible costs of ignoring them.
If someone encounters your work without knowing your story, what feeling or awareness do you hope they carry with them afterward?
This is pretty simple. With my work, I want people to be more present in the paths they walk by. Our emotional, physical, or intellectual absence from places results in people being ignored, chances being lost, or simply beauty going unnoticed. Life is waving at us, but we are too busy with our phones to recognize it.
We’re very drawn to your work, and since music is an art form so closely connected to emotion, we’ve always been curious — what kind of music do you listen to? It feels like another way of understanding you more deeply.
I listen to a lot of MPB, which stands for “Brazilian Popular Music” in loose translation. Especially the ones that refer to love, my Afro-Brazilian religions, and history. However, I listen to lots of different music. Growing up, my family always had some of Motown’s classics on the radio.