Acordo (Fire, ink, marker, acrylic on Nepalese paper), 2019.

This work speaks to the album Trama by Antonio Dias (1979). The noun “acordo” means a deal, an agreement; as a verb, it means “I wake up.” In this series of paintings on Nepalese paper, I use the word in both its meanings to mark the 2016 impeachment of the Brazilian president Dilma Rousseff. I chose to mark the paper with fire as the beginning point in creating a round map, fire being the opposite of the water-based process used in artisanal paper-making; it also brings something of a surrealist perspective – which Dias so clearly avoided – to the process. I chose a round format rather than rectangular to accentuate the frames’ lines, and I use drawing/painting to emphasize the “self-making” of the “map.” Each map has paths of ink and points of paint and pen. I use the conversation between Brazilian senator Romero Juca and businessman Sergio Machado, which became famous for exposing the political plot behind the impeachment, as titles for each “map.” When excerpted from the conversation, the words attain certain poetry and, in relation to the images in the “maps,” become almost totalizing. I find other words like “Heritage,” “Memory,” and “Marriage” to relate to these phrases and expand their meaning.