Growing up in Brazil as a trans person and artist, when did you first realize that art was your survival mechanism, a tool that allowed you to breathe in an oppressive environment?
I believe that was in the first distortion I created in my image and in my supposed destiny… I like to trace that moment as perhaps one of my first moments as an artist. It was as if the first movement I made as a dancer, the first photograph I took, the first poem I wrote, were so incisively urgent and rebellious within everything I desired and regurgitated, that what was technically just an artifice also created a mark on
my reality, on my flesh, on the cornea of my eye. There isn’t a dance I do that isn’t a desire to transfigure what my feet dance on a daily basis, there isn’t an image I build that doesn’t carry the will to destroy or transfigure something my eyes see.
Your work has been described as a “glitch of perception” – but would you say it’s reality that’s glitched, or simply the way people see it? Where does this ‘glitch’ leave you as both artist and individual?
The glitch is perhaps the curse of my body. I say, there is a price to pay for deprogramming reality, when you sacrifice the failed structure of the human being and become an unknown abject. Often not by choice, but by a process of dehumanization that comes from the other. The glitch is this body that carries almost a carcass of its human meaning, it is an immigrant being of the futile truth. Walking through the world with this glitch is the sentence of violence and not belonging. But it is also a permission to exist for other realities, it is as if this body that lives in collapse with the world, becomes its vulnerability a sensitivity capable of inhabiting mystery and claiming its existence for other forms and knowledge. Not fitting in makes you inhabit other places. That’s why I say curse, the tone of this word is almost dubious, it’s like carrying something that will make you bleed one moment and transfigure you with its sap the next.
What drives you to distort the body so radically, and what truths emerge from these distortions?
I think my answer has different tones, truths and explanations. There was a time when the reason was a repugnance of my body and meaning, there was a time when obsession became a reason to blossom into new petals and sometimes I wanted to understand and also question the meaning of beauty to crush it, to cry with it, to cling to a form and understand that I exist. It seems almost odd to demand distortion to prove that you exist. But for a long time I’ve felt that I didn’t have a body. My dreams forged the bird I am through everything I’ve distorted and experimented with.
In using your body as a vessel for such intense transformation, do you feel closer to liberation or further entangled in the act of constant self-reinvention? Is there peace in this cycle, or only more layers to reveal?
The strangeness remains when I think of peace, it’s so unknown that it becomes a blur. It’s as if I couldn’t desire such an alien feeling. This abjection of the body in this process of transfiguration distances us from what is consolidated as a structure and consequently from everything that is architected within the score of what it is to be, feel and desire as a human being. I always think about feelings, the feelings that are so human and that are often denied to certain bodies. I think that sometimes the cycle of having to build everything in order to exist can be exhausting and unhealthy. Building a new love in order to experience love. Building a stage in order to have a place to talk. It’s either that or giving in, camouflaging yourself. But I’ve also felt that we’re learning to look elsewhere as a reference point for feeling and existing.
There’s no point in camouflaging ourselves, because one day what explodes inside us, the strangeness of having spat it all out, knocks on our door and we get even sicker. The power of this transfiguration is carried by the mystery of those who feed on the end of the world, it’s not easy.
From lichen to synthetics, your materials provoke and unsettle. Are they your armor, or something closer—tools to redefine the body itself?
My materials are my curiosity, my contradiction. I fall in love with the synthetic with the desire to be something else, and I find myself creating allegories of my existence with nature when I realize that everything I want to become already exists in some form. The objects I use, from a scenic construction in a performance to a painting technique that I translate into a photograph, are my most sacred semiotics. The sign for me is spiritual, it’s to circumvent so many images that have already been made and that hurt my existence and others. There’s a fascination that makes my mouth water when I think that a certain shape can change a person’s social imaginary. I have a lot of faith in this, because it’s what happens to me. Shapes, colors, they bring me freedom, they liberate me from what I used to believe to be true. I face the figures I create in my performance and see it as an iconoclasm of the world and of myself. It’s important to dare to destroy images.
Your exploration of beauty sits far outside the “comfort zone” of mainstream aesthetics. Is ugliness an intentional weapon in your work, a way to destabilize and make viewers confront their biases head-on?
Thinking about ugliness, I feel that for example I don’t believe that ugly is the opposite of beautiful. I believe it’s an extremely powerful scar in the concept of it. There’s an image I’m fascinated, taken by the Japanese photographer Nobuyoshi Araki. It’s from a series where he takes pictures of geckos next to roses.