texXtiles

2002 to present

Large black banner with the word "LOVE" written in colorful, rainbow-striped letters, hanging on a chain-link fence in front of a brick building, with a person standing on the left side waving.

My large-scale textile works integrate bright colors and text, exploring the relationship between form and meaning. Drawing on the visual language of flags, ubiquitous objects that are both portable and monumental, soft yet authoritative, these pieces engage with histories of power, collective organizing, and belonging. Designed for outdoor installation and collective architectural spaces such as public buildings, galleries, museums, and streets, scale is central to the work. Through layered texts drawn from governance, theory, and poetry, the pieces frame democracy as an ongoing participatory labor of care and resistance, creating immersive environments that are at once celebratory, welcoming, and defiant.

Medium: Nylon Flags and custom-printed flags, sewing. Dimensions: LOVE 10x24ft Year: 2025

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democracy is a verb, and so is love

2025

During my 2025 MassMoCA Studios Alumni residency, I explored scale through textile and flag works. The unfinished piece featured here includes custom-print flags with excerpts of the Constitution alongside Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s poem “I Am Waiting.” A partial installation of DEMOCRACY IS A VERB AND SO IS LOVE on campus allowed me to experiment with its impact in a public setting. The residency provided an invaluable opportunity to see how the expansive MassMoCA environment accommodates site-specific, monumental work. This piece affirms what a flag represents both to its people and historically, inviting us to reclaim the symbol as a reminder that the work toward social justice, human and civil rights, and upholding democracy is never done and is a labor of love.

A large banner with the word "Democracy" in letters decorated with the American flag hangs under a bridge or overpass, with a parking lot and a building with signs in the background.

Medium: Nylon Flags and custom-printed flags, sewing Dimensions: DEMOCRACY 5x27ft Year: 2025

I am waiting

I am waiting for my case to come up
And I am waiting for a rebirth of wonder
And I am waiting for someone to really discover America and wail
And I am waiting for the discovery of a new symbolic western frontier
And I am waiting for the American eagle to really
Spread its wings and straighten up and fly right
And I am waiting for the war to be fought
Which will make the world safe for anarchy
And I am waiting for the final withering away of all governments
And I am perpetually waiting a rebirth of wonder
And I am waiting for the second coming
And I am waiting for the grapes of wrath to be stored
And I am waiting for them to prove that God is really American
And I am waiting to see God on television piped onto church altars
If only they can find the right channel to tune in on
And I am waiting for the last supper to be
Served again with a strange new appetizer
And I am waiting for my number to be called
And I am waiting for the Salvation Army to take over
And I am waiting for the meek to be
Blessed and inherit the earth without taxes
And I am waiting for forests and
Animals to reclaim the earth as theirs
And I am waiting for a way to be devised to
Destroy all nationalisms without killing anybody
And I am waiting for limits and planets to fall like rain
And I am waiting for lovers and weepers to lie down together again
In a new rebirth of wonder
And I am waiting for the great divide to be crossed
And I am anxiously waiting for the secret of eternal
Life to be discovered by an obscure general practitioner
And I am waiting for the storms of life to be over
And I am waiting to set sail for happiness
And I am waiting for a reconstructed Mayflower to reach America
With its picture story and TV rights sold in advance to the natives
And I am waiting for the lost music
To sound again in the lost continent
In a new rebirth of wonder
And I am waiting for the day that maketh all things clear
And I am waiting retribution for what America did to Tom Sawyer
And I am waiting for the American boy to take
Off beauty's clothes and get on top of her
And I am waiting for Alice in Wonderland to
Retransmit to me her total dream of innocence
And I am waiting for Aphrodite to grow live
Arms at a final disarmament conference
In a new rebirth of wonder
And I am waiting to get some intimations of
Immortality by recollecting my early childhood
And I am waiting for the green mornings to come again
Youth's dumb green fields come back again
And I am waiting for some strains of
Unpremeditated art to shake my word processor
And I am waiting to write the great indelible poem
And I am waiting for the last long careless rapture
And I am perpetually waiting for the fleeing lovers on
The Grecian urn to catch each other up at last and embrace
And I am waiting perpetually and forever a renaissance of wonder

Lawrence Ferlinghetti

post capitalist dreams

2025

The piece POST CAPITALIST DREAMS is my takeaway from eight months immersed in the topic of immigration through conversations, interviews, and collecting testimonies from the general public. The buzzword "immigration" is used to simplify a global scenario of instability, inequality, and abysmally widening wealth gap.

The phrase invites us to think freely and dream about better ways to organize and exist collectively.

Large banner with the message "POST CHAPLAIN'S DREY" in big colorful letters, decorated with American flag patterns, hanging inside a spacious room with large windows and chandeliers.

Medium: nylon flags, sewing. Dimensions: 60x5ft Year: 2024

COLLECTIVUM DELIRIUM

2024

I spent December 2024 in my hometown of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, engaging with sites of personal, cultural, and historical significance to my multidisciplinary practice due to the generous support of the SMFA Traveling Fellow Grant.

Escola de Artes Visuais Parque Lage (EAV for short), formed generations of artists before and after my time as a student in the 90s. This was the first art school I ever encountered as a teen. The building was remodeled in the 1920s by Henrique Lage, to please his Italian wife Gabriela Bezanzoni, an opera singer.

Glauber Rocha’s “Terra em Transe” was filmed in this location, adding an even more surreal aspect to the over-the-top eclectic architecture. The tropical landscape and colors make the experience all the more surreal - with the statue of the Christ perfectly framed above the pool located on the internal patio.

The phrase COLLECTIVUM DELIRIUM is featured in Latin as a compromise between English and Portuguese, sounding familiar enough in both languages. Every day at 9 AM, a line wraps around the building, with visitors unaware they are entering a functioning art school whose main interest in the location is a selfie opportunity.

Medium: Nylon Flags, sewing
Dimensions: 10x33ft
Year: 2025 — Medium: Nylon Flags, sewing Dimensions: 10x33ft Year: 2025

Social Fabric

2024

A decorative American flag made of colorful, handwritten strips of paper arranged to form the stripes and canton with white stars, hung on a white wall.

social Fabric - ICE

2024

This gut-wrenching first-person account of a child being separated from her father at the Mexico border was submitted via the QR code of the Transcending Borders piece when it was installed in a public location in 2023. In most cases, immigration is not a choice but a necessity. "Seeking opportunity" is usually tied to fleeing a country ravaged by poverty, violence, and corruption, a country destabilized and drained by colonial and imperial practices. Immigrants contribute to a developed country's social structure - often as the base of a social pyramid.

Long fabric banner with white text on a black background, displayed in a bright room with wooden floors and large windows.

A blue banner with white text lying on a wooden floor. The text is a story about reunion, working since childhood, and a commitment to justice and paying taxes.

Medium: Custom-printed flag featuring a typeface designed by the artist with an unedited story submitted to the participatory Transcending Borders public art piece. Dimensions: 30x3ft Year: 2025

social fabric

Do you consider yourself American? where? why?

2024

Created during my Salem Public Artist Residency, this installation of custom-printed flags incorporates direct responses gathered from community members engaging with my public intervention, Transcending Borders. Each flag displays personal narratives answering three core prompts: Do you consider yourself American? Where is your family originally from? Why did you move to the USA? Rendered in a custom-designed vector font, the work amplifies multicultural voices and transforms personal stories of migration into a collective memory.

Medium: Custom-printed flag featuring a typeface designed by the artist, with excerpts from the stories submitted to the participatory Transcending Borders public art piece. Dimensions: 5x3ft each Year: 2025

Apocalyp

2022

What is the opposite of APOCALYPTIC?" Inspired by Tom Wolfe's "The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test". A chronicle of the civil disobedience-fueled adventures of Ken Kesey and the Merry Pranksters across North America.

The word is left unfinished intentionally, as if it could magically interrupt the catastofe in progress. This was the first piece I made at the Sculpture Space studio in Utica, upstate NY. It uses Trump campaign and fan base flags.

Seen here at the Sculpture Space Residency. Medium: Nylon Flags, sewing. Dimensions: 5x20ft Year: 2022

furthur

The landscape in Utica, upstate NY, was a post-apocalyptic Rust Belt. Abandoned farms, houses, and industrial buildings were everywhere, and after Trump's first presidency, the looming shadow of autocracy was palpable. Politics was not a welcome topic outside our small residency confines; Trump flags were everywhere, despite the trauma of lockdown, the gross mismanagement of the pandemic, and its unreasonable death toll.

The first piece I made during my Sculpture Space residency spells APOCALYP using cut-up Trump campaign and fan base flags. Once completed, it felt terribly bleak with only that word hanging there on all white walls. So I asked myself: What is the opposite of apocalyptic? Words can be tricky. They hold power, and I wanted to give the department store “Eat Pray Love” affirmations a wide berth.

Seeking an alternative, but nothing shallow, I started reading The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test (Tom Wolfe, 1968). I found humor, solace, and the inspiration for this piece. The bus that the Merry Pranksters called home on the road, often driven by Neal Cassady, was affectionately named "Furthur." In that moment, the word and the magic of psychedelic-soaked American counterculture resonated deeply as a humorous, upbeat countermeasure to apocalyptic narratives. Pairing this word with the sewn flags made me giggle. I had found my answer, even if imperfect: joyous defiance.

Each flag adds a symbol of inclusion, diversity, and peaceful coexistence: the Progressive Pride Flag, North American Flag, Democratic Socialist Flag, Black Lives Matter Flag, Antifascist Action Flag, American Indian Movement Flag, "No Step on Snek" Flag, and Trans Pride Flag.

View of colorful flags hanging inside a modern concrete building with a geometric ceiling design.

Seen here at the Boston City Hall atrium. Medium: Nylon Flags, sewing. Dimensions: 5x21ft Year: 2022

Seen here at the Sculpture Space Residency. Medium: Nylon Flags, sewing. Dimensions: 5x21ft Year: 2022 Video by Matt Ossowski

Anomia

2021

A woman standing in a white room with two large windows. On the floor, there are two large sheets of cloth with flags of the United States and Brazil.

Anomia is a medical condition in which sufferers are unable to name objects or to recognize written or spoken names of objects. It can be caused by severe trauma.

Since moving to America Csekö has experienced a double feed of information from her two homes in Brazil and North America. Frequent communication with family and friends living in Brazil offers a vivid portrayal of the current political scenario overseas, while she has experienced the United States political landscape first-hand for the past 10 years.

Cseko witnessed both countries spiral into an overwhelming narrative of misinformation, and gross mismanagement, that cost an insurmountable amount of lives, as a pandemic worsened the already dire situation of pervasive corruption, as well as deep-set social and racial inequalities.

A sense of helplessness and loss of words ensued. As both countries failed to care for their populations denying basic human dignity and rights to their people.

The national symbol held within the flag became detached from its meaning. What does it mean to be a nation? What does it mean to be a citizen? What does it mean to participate in the quotidian political life of a country? What is justice and whom does it serve? Do we feel safe?

In early 2021 Csekö immersed herself in the process of deconstructing the Brazilian and North American national symbols, in hopes that by reconstructing them, new meanings would emerge.

ODe to the Flag

2002-2008

A young woman with shoulder-length brown hair and a man with dreadlocks in a suit standing together at an indoor event. The woman is holding a red and black flag. The background is dark with other people partially visible.

With Gilberto Gil, Brazilian Minister of Culture between 2003 and 2008. At an arts advocacy event.

ODE to the Flag is a heartfelt and critical homage to the flag, in all its beauty and imposing presence, expressing the desire that it may truly represent the people it stands for. Created in 2002 in Brazil, on the occasion of the first left-wing president to be democratically elected after more than 30 years of military dictatorship, the work emerged from an exploration of the Brazilian flag and the significance of its colors. A simple alteration of a flag’s colors can completely change how the symbol is perceived. The red, black, and white combinations carry powerful historical and cultural weight, referencing Brazil’s past complicity with Nazi fascism, anarchist resistance in global history, and Afro-Brazilian spiritual traditions, among other meanings. Through this series, the flag is both celebrated and interrogated, questioning what it truly represents, whose voices it embodies, and how national symbols intersect with culture, politics, and identity.