Birthmark

Birthmark is an ongoing series of staged portraits that explores body, memory, lineage, and presence through water, stone, fabric, and gesture.

Birthmark is an ongoing series of staged portraits rooted in a personal experience of having grown up surrounded by Black women whose presence shaped my understanding of affection, strength, memory, and belonging. The work moves between homage and inquiry, exploring how body, lineage, and image can intersect without being reduced to explanation.

The photographs are fictional and staged, but they do not aim to illustrate a fixed identity or a single narrative. Instead, they construct a space in which individuality and collective memory can coexist. Water, stone, fabric, and ornament function not as symbols to decode, but as sensory material through which the image can hold density, restraint, and trace.

Although the work resonates with an Afro-Brazilian symbolic field and with female lineages that run through my own history, I am less interested in naming a specific rite than in creating a space of inscription. In these images, nature is not background but an active force in the construction of the portrait. Water does not dissolve, stone does not fully stabilize, and the body does not surrender to transparency. What interests me is precisely this zone of retention — where memory, surface, presence, and opacity remain in friction.