Brazilian visual artist, working between printmaking, architecture and installations. She holds a master's degree from USP and is currently pursuing a doctorate at UNESP. Her works are in collections such as the World Bank (USA) and MAM-Rio. Since 2013, she has been developing “Casa Fortaleza” (Ubatuba/SP) with Renzo Assano, a steel residence that uses sustainable techniques and interacts with the Atlantic Forest. The house, unfinished and in constant metamorphosis, is a “body-becoming” where art, life and thought merge. In 2023, she completed her thesis “Casa Fortaleza: o livro de artista como transversalidade poética” (Casa Fortaleza: the artist's book as poetic transversality), a synthesis of a decade that intertwines architecture, memory and aesthetic events. Her process celebrates resistance as a critical force. In printmaking, she breaks with traditional matrices, creating unique impressions with overlapping colors. Co-founder of the feminist collective GOMA and the heteronym A, she questions gender hierarchies in art.
What is your creative process like?
My creative process is deeply influenced by a poetic research that unfolds between experience and practice. Over the years, I have sought to understand how the interaction between living beings and environmental conditions shapes living experiences (the subject of my doctoral thesis), understanding experience as a continuous and dynamic flow.
I believe that it is in moments of conflict and resistance that this interaction intensifies, transforming experience through the sensitive and ideas. These aspects of the self and the world, in constant dialogue, give rise to a conscious intention, which manifests itself in my creative work.
I recognize the importance of contemplating these practices and experiences as a power for creation. For me, the act of reflecting on what has been experienced and its meaning is as crucial as the process of living itself. It is in this balance between intuition and analysis, between the sensitive and the theoretical, that my creative process finds its strength and uniqueness.
What materials and techniques do you use most often?
My graphic research is extensive, covering various printing techniques, both planographic, such as lithography and silkscreen, and engravings, with an emphasis on woodcuts, but I seek to subvert them: I use drills to carve matrices in wood, exploring Mokulito (a Japanese technique that combines wood and lithography) and aluminum lithography – methods that challenge the predictability of printing.
In the installations, I work with insurgent materials: vacuum cleaner robots that criticize invisible labor, sculptures in rammed earth (compacted raw earth) that dialogue with impermanence, and sound objects that transform space into a living organism.
I am currently developing a series of paintings on canvas, in which I use encaustic (oil paint with beeswax), and for which I am producing my own paints and oil sticks.
Who are the artistic influences that have impacted your work?
MierleLadermanUkeles is central: an American artist who, in the 1960s, after becoming a mother, dismantled the dichotomy between art and domestic work in the “Manifesto of Maintenance Art”. In it, she proposes that; taking care of the house, children, and life; is a creative act as radical as sculpting or painting.
Ukeles transformed invisible tasks into performances and urban interventions, questioning why art celebrates rupture but ignores the persistence of maintenance. Her work is a beacon for me, a woman artist and mother, for whom maintenance is not opposed to creation – it is its geography.
Her legacy is revolutionary, but undervalued. While Robert Smithson was winning museums with SpiralJetty, Ukeles was sweeping galleries with performances. The difference in recognition reveals the patriarchal system that hierarchizes “masterpiece” and “women’s work”.
In my practice, this thought is translated into the engraving that records marks of everyday life and into the “Casa Fortaleza”, a work-studio built between diapers and paintings. I do not separate art and life: I reject the myth of male genius that excludes care as a raw material.
Ukeles taught me that art is an accumulated gesture – not the heroic leap, but the repetition of the hammered nail, the chocolate cake, the scratched matrix. And today, when I use a robot vacuum cleaner as a performance, it is art that reminds me: even in the dust there is politics.
