I was born in Brazil. I live in Oakland. The distance between those two facts is where my work begins.
Brazil gave me a self. America gave me the occasion to question it — and, eventually, to claim it. That claiming has a name: I am a woman of trans experience. My work does not illustrate that fact so much as it thinks alongside it.
What interests me is the tension between what a person inherits and what a place demands — between what insists and what resists, and what accumulates — and the choices made in that realm. Identity is not a possession; it may be a choice, perhaps a construct, and certainly something that keeps becoming. I make photographs, films, and writing from inside that becoming.
I am also interested in what art can do for others navigating similar ground — not as illustration or advocacy, but as recognition. To see oneself figured in a work is not a small thing. It can be the difference between existing at the margins and existing, plainly, at all.
The larger questions run beneath and sometimes inside all of this. Not every question wants an answer. Some only want to be held — against the silence, against the abundance of not-knowing.