Work

My Mother Edneia (Change of Structure) / My Father Manoel (Change of Structure)

2019

About the work

This work emerges from an absence. At my graduation in Art History, my parents, Edneia and Manoel, could not be present. Northeastern migrants in São Paulo, marked by a life of labor, distance, and material constraints, they remained outside the ceremony that, in some sense, also belonged to them — and the work reinscribes that absence. In the two photographs, my parents appear dressed in my graduation gown. Beside each of them, suspended on the wall, is their work clothing: my mother's domestic worker uniform; my father's suit and tie, worn as a doorman.