Testimonial for the Art and New Media Catalog.

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“In terms of work, I came to articulate A Proposal for the House (xerox series), whose subject is the house, in Fortaleza and at MAC-USP, but it depended on the traffic within the space. I started xeroxing in 1974, and I still do sporadically, but that's not the heart of the matter. It is a house with cuts, in its floor plan, which has three geographical situations, three states: Bahia, Ceará and Rio, my residences.

Another important thing about this work is that there is always an element of technology of our time, which I add and try to contrast with the more poetic language: so, this floor plan, which is of a typical BNH house, with the letterset signs, for example, it is an arrow in an indication commonplace. I was putting comings and goings, twists and turns at the entrance, and instead of the conversation there are all these hands here (in letterset), desired dialogues and things like that. In the room there are seven beds in letterset, seven alternatives. In a mixture of sense, innocence and stereotyped signs – here codification rituals.

In Mulheres I was already in a slightly different line of testimony, which was a work on women. The whole woman's body written with her fissures, her gaze, her arms. The whole body on top of a terrestrial quadrant positioning, and the outline of the whole body made of the body's function itself – not in the sense of just the physical function, but of a social-human function.

The other was a sequence of wigs, of women's faces. The contradiction, the wigs, the women carrying wigs, the mannequins carrying the wigs and the women imitating the physiognomies of the mannequins – that stylized mannequin effect. There was a sequence of glasses: some that gave happiness, others that still had eyes and noses, sentimental mouths, all that consumer jargon trying to decipher the female psyche, at the same time using and conveying advertising.

The phase of the body that bears witness to cultural, political and social situations culminated in a video work that was the one that achieved the strongest acronym of all – it is called Marca Registrada. In this work, I sew the words Made in Brasil onto the skin with a needle and black thread. It's agony! It gives a lot of distress, because the needle goes in, hurts my foot – it could only be my own. There is a popular custom in Bahia in which a lot of embroidery is done with a thread on the palm of the hand and on the sole of the foot. This is the video work from 1975, which summarizes this whole phase.

In general, we have to go through this journey, a gestation process in a way, I can't say what it is – whether it's emotional, whether it's intuitive –, and then there's the reflection part. Thought really makes consistency, elaborates the bonds of things. And life is moment, it's passion, it's emotion, it's all mixed up. Thought is there fertilizing all these things and structuring them, because sometimes it seems to me that way. I was worried that things would have a lot of questions, because I was interested in the answers.”