floresiensis

floresiensis, (2024) Acrylic and pastel chalk on canvas “floresiensis” is the final work I produced before beginning an artistic residency at Espaço Delirium, in central São Paulo. It was developed within the context of the project Do Ilê ao Ateliê, created through a public funding programme in partnership with the Instituto Omô Naná, where I participate through its artistic branch. The project began with a central question: how can we understand artistic practices produced within traditional communities located on the peripheries of São Paulo, and in what ways might these practices also assume a responsibility towards the climate crisis? Along this path, discussing the environment necessarily meant discussing territory, inequality and environmental racism. The areas of the city that have historically been the most vulnerable are also those that frequently experience the most severe effects of environmental degradation, while traditional ways of relating to land, water and organic matter remain largely unrecognised within hegemonic discourses on sustainability. It is within this tension that “floresiensis” takes shape. The painting begins with a fundamental understanding present in Candomblé and in different Indigenous traditions: that the earth, plants, waters and natural elements participate in a network of relationships that sustains existence itself. The organic, in this sense, becomes a possibility for thought. The work therefore emerges from an attempt to bring ritual and environmental responsibility into proximity. If ritual establishes a relationship between the body, community, ancestry and nature, how might we think about this relationship when the territory in which we live has been profoundly transformed by human activity? How can we preserve a ritual memory connected to water when the city's rivers have been channelled, buried or erased from its landscape? One question begins to run through this process: how do we perform a ritual for the waters in a city that has killed all of its rivers? The proverb “Kò sí ewé, kò sí òrìsà” — without leaves, there are no orixás — runs through this research as a key to understanding. The leaf points towards a relationship of interdependence between the human and the vegetal, between matter and spirituality, between territory and ancestry. To think about the environmental crisis, in this context, is also to consider what happens when we rupture the fundamental relationships necessary for the continuity of life.