Affectionate cartographies (and a forest called mother) - new work

In this work I look into my individual and collective identity, exploring proto-Brazilian origins in a land where the coloniser arrived as foreigner, and where indigenous people were made foreigners in their own territory. As a diasporic woman myself, who increasingly finds it difficult naming a specific place 'home', the feeling of belonging strengthens itself through contemplation of ancestral cosmologies, and through painting.

Affectionate cartographies (and a forest called mother) _ 110x170cm Acrylics, oils, oil sticks, pastels on raw cotton canvas

The writer Darcy Ribeiro ethnographically claims that our nation comes from an indigenous mother and a Portuguese father. Most indigenous languages are no longer spoken by the majority, with the exception of a good number of words giving names to places, fauna and flora, words that survive as if pressed into the land itself. Many places are named in kinship: the grandfather river, the mother forest. I look at women as carriers, mothers of the people and the culture, in affectionate cartographies: documenting ways of living with in close, familiar contact with the land. This geography of belonging came through the maternal line, through indigenous women who appear in no colonial record, who held the language and passed it in speech. I feel a strange affection for these women, this ancestry who signed nothing, yet mapped everything.

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