Could you dive into influential artists or artistic movements for your practice?
The one art movement I always talk about, is the Neo-Concrete art movement that happened between 1959 - 1961 in Rio de Janeiro (My hometown) with Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark being one of the creators. Their work was a criticism to the “Concrete” art movement that was dominant in Latin America (at the time), also they were creating works that were a direct reflection on Rio de Janeiro atmosphere and essence. For me, until this day, there are no other art making form that represents Rio’s essence better than this group of artists were able to create and experiment with. Rio de Janeiro cannot be better represented with any other word than the word experimentation. The city seems to be a never-ending experimentation ground. Most things don’t get done, turning this the beauty of the place, turning this the soul of the city and its uniqueness quality. We learn to live constantly on the state of experimentation. Nature provides the balance for "Cariocas" (this is how you call people that was born or live in Rio) to inhabit the city. Nature in Rio is essential and an opportunity to breath out of chaos.

As we see in the images throughout your body of work that Rio is an important place to you, in what way did growing up there influence your perspective? I feel there is a play on the ideal in nature, is there an objectivity that you wish to bring out of the images with your materials?
Nature in Rio is essential, its core and what keeps the city and its citizens grounded. Rio geography is surrounded between the rainforest (the Atlantic Forest) and the mountains in one side and on the opposite side the ocean. In the middle lives its people and the city life. In the middle its where “Cariocas” need to face the disturbance of a city that lives the consequences of bad political and economical decisions. “Cariocas” grow up learning how to live through all this and when we need to forget the unbelievable reality (that many times could be avoided), you have the ocean to breath and the mountains to look above all and believe in better days to come. Nature in my work is essential and when you live or visit Rio you understand. Doesn’t matter your economic situation we all have access to nature and see than from the window or from the street.

Nature is central to Rio de Janeiro, to me, and more than never to our world, to all of us. Nothing more necessary (now a days) than creating work that gives a chance to people to form a connection with nature.

Can you make the bridge on how your images explore identity and belonging as an immigrant? Can you discuss more about this experience of displacement?
I started to work on this body of work about identity and using images from my personal photo archive back in 2014, since than my experimentation continues to evolve through my curiosities and life experiences. Living abroad for 20 years (today) gave me a personal need to investigate the idea of identity and understand my perfective of the world and who I am in the world. In a world that things change so quickly, and we move faster than never, the need to find ground and talk about our individual identity is essential to remind people that we are unique. Through this curiosity, I started from the beginning, where I was born and raised, Rio de Janeiro. As I continue to experiment with my work, I realised, that everything else becomes a reflection from where I departed, Rio de Janeiro. Everything else mutates with time: my thoughts, people, opinions, perceptions, feelings, and places. But one thing doesn’t change and will never change, is the place where I was born and where I grow up, this is my base. Understanding the place, I come from, and why I look at places, people, and situations a certain way helps me to exist everywhere life takes me.

Displacement is everywhere outside of Rio. Identity will be a constant search. Using my artwork and process to investigate my roots has allowed my work to play with different materials, scale and forms via photo-based works, paintings, installations, and wall murals.

Can you talk more about the work titled Remain Open (2023)? What went into making it, and how does it fit into your body of work?
The piece “Remain Open” starts with a photograph of Leblon beach with a very characteristic view in my work the “Cagarras” islands. I overlap one image cut-out on top of it, hiding parts of the islands on the background and over the second photo I overlap with a yellow paper cut-out that I painted with light pink oil pastel stick. This piece and this body of work we will show at Expo Chicago brought a lot of attention to materials and overlapping, changing the way we look at familiar locations. The title stimulates the idea of allowing us to look at familiar places in different ways, because we change and our relationship with places change.

Is there another piece that you find to be representative of your practice? Why?
For an artist, every work is representative in one way or the other, especially on a body of work so important like this one. Recently, I have moved into a new country, so much is displaced, increasing my need to find ground in my work practise until I find balance in other parts of my life. I will share a bit more in regards of identity and displacement in my studio practice: My work involves a search for identity and the constant consciousness of displacement, via artworks that starts from photos I photographed in Rio but never ending there, as I mentioned before, Rio is my starting point, my base. My work carries images from multiple places I lived and visited. Rio is the common ground in my work that most people expect to see but they are not always there physically. My experimental geometrical forms are inspired by the neo-concrete movement that happened in Rio by “Carioca” artists as they were my first big influence and helped me understand the ideal of an artform in a deeper way. To wrap up, my titles bring the element of displacement in all my works. They are always taken from parts of books I am reading. I underline it, where it got my attention, to go back to it in a later point. The titles are lines displaced from their original texts and contexts allowing them to gain a new meaning and interpretation with my artwork. Perhaps I didn’t analyse another work, but I am sharing a bit more on how I am interested in identity and displacement throughout my artwork process.