Chão de Histórias

Chão de Histórias is a poetic excavation of memory, land, and ancestry. Through archives, clay, and landscapes from the Brazilian back lands, I weave images that reflect how identity is rooted in what we inherit, transform, and choose to remember.

Chão de Histórias (Ground of Stories) is a poetic excavation of memory, territory, and identity — a project that unfolds at the intersection of personal absence and ancestral presence. Rooted in the backlands of Pernambuco, Brazil, and shaped by the silences of my family history, this work began with a need to reconnect with what had been lost or left unnamed.

I was born in Recife, but I grew up with only fragments of information about my father’s family. There were no stories told, no photographs on the walls — only a vague reference to the sertão as a place of origin. In 2022, I traveled to the region during the rainy season and was struck by the landscape: unexpectedly lush, green, alive. That same year, I came across a family archive I had never seen — images of my paternal ancestors, photographs of those same landscapes, taken nearly a century earlier. In that encounter, time folded, and the silence that once shaped my relationship to the past began to transform into image, matter, and gesture.

Chão de Histórias consists of three interwoven bodies of work:

• Álbum de Família presents close-up botanical portraits of native Caatinga plants, rendered as if they were family members. These images elevate the resilience of this semi-arid biome, drawing a parallel between the survival of vegetation and the persistence of familial roots. Like forgotten relatives, these plants emerge with quiet strength — their forms, textures, and presence echoing the idea that everything that once lived still leaves a trace.

• Dobra do Tempo (Fold of Time) explores the continuity of forms and memory through collage. I juxtapose my landscape photographs with hand-cut images from the family archive and fragments of Renaissance lace—a tradition introduced to Brazil in the 19th century by French nuns and passed down through generations of rural women. These compositions stitch together epochs, gestures, and materials, suggesting that memory is not fixed, but elastic, stretching across time, folding and unfolding with each act of attention.

• Encontro (Encounter) is the emotional core of the project. In this series, ancestral portraits are embedded in dry, sandy clay collected from the sertão. Here, the earth is not just a background; it is a presence. It absorbs and reveals, protects and remembers. The clay becomes both a symbolic and literal ground — the physical matter that connects body to landscape, memory to soil.

Throughout Chão de Histórias, I reflect on how identity is not simply inherited, but unearthed. It is composed of layers — botanical, photographic, geological, and emotional — and shaped by what is preserved, omitted, and rediscovered. This is not a nostalgic gesture. It is a reweaving of continuity, a tender resistance to forgetting.

By merging archive and landscape, silence and material, Chão de Histórias invites a meditation on what it means to belong — to land, to lineage, to the invisible threads that make us who we are.