Past in Place

I’m a Brazilian artist living in New York City. I work with the relationship between the body and the different landscapes around the world. The pandemic forced me to understand what is an indoor landscape. As soon as the pandemic hit America, I took a flight to Brazil to be with my family in the house I grew up in. After the end of the second month I realized, I’m not just sitting in this same chair for the last two months, I have been in this chair looking at these buildings and eating this food since I was six, I had never left. I forgot all life I had as an adult outside that house, all the life I built for me in New York, it was gone, completely out of my mind. My identity was completely lost in the leather of that couch, on the wood of that dinner table, on the cotton of those sheets. When I realized I was stuck in the past, I started to use transparent tape to physically glue my body to the places I found myself spending most of my time in quarantine, in order to talk about the invisible ties that connected me to that house. In the process, I realized those were the same favorites spots of my childhood.”