Untitled

Digital print series of three

I dream of Brazil as a mythical place where i would be recognized and conforted. Where i would ‘belong’ since i dont belong here. I search for bits of myself in distant images of places I’ve never been to. I cling onto tenuous connections. My access to Brazil is limited and transcribed. Popular culture gets filtered through, distorted and pixelated in the wireless process of traveling to me. It’s the most commonplace things that feel the most like home, and yet in their mundaness they are the least documented. Nevertheless, I can only work with what I got here: trinquets that I bring with me and online content that, although out of context, comes close enough to blurry memories to temporarily soothe my nostalgic mind.


Following on from my project ‘Eu sou uma jarra’ (I am a jug), I combine on the scanner bed a Brazilean juice protector cover over collaged imagery from the online search results for ‘suco de laranja’ (orange juice). The juxtaposition of the real object (with all the tactile memories that it evokes) and the distorted low fi images underneath it, comment on the difficulty in feeling close to a place when far away. Relying on what is possible to transport with us and what we can attain from abroad to stand in for in person experiences when feeling homesick. Freshly squeezed orange juice can be found almost everywhere in Brazil, yet the emotional understanding of this phenomenon as a marker of cultural identity and recognition can be hard to access remotely. The juice cover is transformed on the scanner bed resembling the outline of a territory, demarcating who and what is in and what is left out of this insider knowledge.

The work aims to reflect on how the idea of a place or culture that gets constructed from a distance is arbitrarily determined by limited sources and online algorithms. How when, almost by chance, certain elements get highlighted and others hidden from the public view, what is available becomes representative. The 4d experience of Brazil gets flattened into a 2d scan, where the decontextualised and mixed together images exclude the nuances of the physical and cultural experience of living there. The transparent net acts as a metaphor for this in the way it acts as an invisible barrier. For the outside viewer, it appears as if they can see but actually cannot reach a full notion of a place from a distance.