Welcome Dresses
2024 - present
Joy is Revolutionary! If we listen and look closely migration stories are majoritively based on courage, self-improvement, seeking knowledge, and opportunities, preserving different cultures and traditions, finding family, and love, and creating richer, more diverse, colorful, musical, and beautiful communities.
Although hardship is often associated with these experiences, no person should be defined only by their sacrifice, suffering, and traumas. The welcome dresses are an embodiment of the joy brought by and experienced within immigrant communities.
Medium: Mesh Dresses and custom-print ribbons with the phrase YOU ARE WELCOME HERE printed in several languages spoken by immigrant populations of greater Boston. Dimensions: variable approximately. 5x3x2ft each Year: 2024
Armor Dress
2019
The Armor Dress materializes a soft armor to protect delicate bodies and complex ideas. In times when the political theater is used to crush our sense of freedom and choice toward our bodies and affections, the armor dress offers shelter in love. When one slips into a state of mind softened by love, it becomes easier to welcome empathy and compassion. The ideas around love continuously evolve and are expanded upon. The Armor Dress is a reminder that when a mindset of wonder, self-caring, and unconditional love is attained, we become stronger and more capable of coexisting and affecting change.
Embracers
2019
These interactive sculptures change as they are manipulated. Every time they return to a stationary position, they take a new form. Viewers are invited to interact with the Embracers.
In our adult lives, we do not get to experience playfulness enough, especially in stressful times, where bad news seems to be the norm. These sculptures create spaces for transgressive enjoyment, hopeful perspectives of friendship and I daresay Temporary Autonomous Zones. Moments for coming together and enjoying each other's company and shelter.
Brazil, the country I grew up in, has been going through a worsening political crisis, in many ways similar to the one in North America. To better understand these sculptures, it is important to mention Carnaval, perhaps the largest countrywide Brazilian cultural manifestation, and a collective state of trance.
It is a moment of softening the boundaries of self, where collective catharsis is experienced and embraced. It is a time to celebrate, not any particular achievement or success, but perhaps the very simple/complex fact of existence. It is also a time of fierce political critique and satire. The acts of hugging and loving, caring and standing together become political acts of defiance.
That is how the Embracers came to be - an attempt to manifest even the smallest flicker of the collective catharsis that is Carnaval. Brazilian Culture, with all its contradictions and challenges, stands strong in sweet glittery bliss.
As the poet Ferreira Gullar would say, "Distraídos Venceremos" (Distracted we shall triumph).
ExXercise in Collective Balance
2004-2015
Exercise in Collective Balance takes place within the very process of figuring out actions, movement and decision making within the possibilities and limitations offered in a collective experience.
Exercise in Collective Balance consists of five garments bound together. These garments can withstand a much larger amount of tension than regular clothes. Once a group of five people decides to wear them, they are bound together for as long as they desire. Some participants may choose to stay longer with the group, others might quickly offer their place to viewers that decide to join.
There are no particular rules as to how long the group must stay together or what the participants can or cannot do, aside from being respectful and mindful to other fellow participants as well as the surrounding people and environment. The simplest tasks and movements become a complex study of group dynamics, collective movement, balance and collaboration between the participants. Interdependence is created within the group, every individual decision and action becomes a group negotiation and directly affects all participants.
This piece explores movement and sensorial aspects of human relationships, both important subjets in Brazilian modern and contemporary art history. Helio Oiticica’s “Parangolés” were seminal experiments in sensorial art activated by participation.
To Oiticica his garments only fulfilled their potential once activated and animated by a body in motion. Exercise in Collective Balance is also highly dependent on the participant's bodies and movement, but the collaboration between the participants naturally becomes the priority. Every participant needs to evaluate every personal choice while simultaneously taking into consideration the presence, actions, and input of other individuals involved in this experiment.
