Who are we when we close our eyes and ask ourselves: what is love?

This project is about both an internal and physical journey. The first began when I ended a turbulent relationship of almost seven years during the pandemic. I moved back to my home state in Brazil, to my mother’s house. When I couldn’t move physically, I started reading a lot, especially stories about women. One of those books was All About Love by Bell Hooks. In a collection of essays about her life, she proposes love as action, a politics of emotions that removes romantic relationships from the center of our lives. This made me reflect more deeply on the importance of my family and friends and how crucial they were in getting me out of that abusive relationship.
Photo 1: I focus on the performer’s expression during a musical performance. Their expression of anguish and grandeur reminds me of moments of uncertainty in relationships and in the human experience itself.
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Relationships also became part of my creative processes. During this period, I began collaborating on photographs with my parents and sister. I began discussing my connection as an autistic woman with my family in autofiction. And second, when I came to Mexico for a photography production seminar, I met Barbara, a friend of a friend. She had returned to Mexico from Austria because her marriage had ended. We had similar stories of economic and psychological violence. I realized that it was not a coincidence. That our narratives were like those of many other people. And that it is politically important to talk about this journey in search of a life in which we prioritize our dreams and do not let ourselves be influenced by something that is not love.
Photo 2: Barbara told me she had an image that she couldn’t get out of her head: that of some fish in a cage. I felt that this unconsciousness of two worlds that don’t connect was about her unconscious. The desire to flow and, at the same time, be trapped. We looked for the cage in a large market in Mexico City and did several experiments until we achieved the desired result. Materializing the photograph was an important process, in which we valued the scenes that haunt us and learned to deal with them.

Photo 3: In this photograph, I once again seek ambiguity, which unfolds in different facets. I portray two Mayan painters and spiritual guides. They are twins. But this is not known. Seeking other ways of relating is to enter into what is hidden and, at the same time, longs to be revealed.

Photo 4: Deliberately seeking photographic error was a way of materializing the need to question how we are taught to narrate and love, what is correct. Unlearning photography as a metaphor for other ways of relating to life.

Photo 5: In this performance piece involving plastic and tape, materialized in the silence of the image, there is a woman who we do not know whether she will break out of her cocoon or whether she is trapped in her own shroud.

Photo 6: A game between the performativity of sex and not knowing whether it is a spontaneous action or an imaginary resource. Document or fiction.

Photo 7: The focus error is the blurred face we don’t remember. The promises that get mixed up between a bar table or a party. We are defragmented between narratives in which we are not the protagonists.

Photo 8: Cyber shot as an opportunity to reconsider photography as something unpretentious and as a capture of the moment. And without success, because the narratives we have learned do not disappear. And in the gesture, the understanding that everything is an archive, a document.

Photo 9: I try to capture things differently. I don’t get attached to the equipment. I live in the moment. In my search for love and photography, I repeat myself, because I am shaped by the narrative I am given.

Photo 10: I wanted to say that behind the question there was some kind of answer. I think about that kid. About the fleeting glimpse of his head disappearing and having captured it with the camera. The uncertainty. The anguish. And that months later I learned that he, and all the animals in those lands, had been burned. I don’t remember his face.

I’m going to write as simply as possible. But it’s not easy. I try hard. I write a line and then delete it. I get confused. Images and words are supposed to be a way to create cohesion and meaning. But linearity almost kills me in its fiction. That’s how it was with Barbara. I met her when I arrived in Mexico, through a mutual friend. We connected over our seven-year heterosexual stories. About the men who controlled our money. Our minds. The exit. The breakup. The awareness of the non-narrative. The movement. The journey inside and outside our bodies. Visually, the photographs captured between Mexico and Brazil are taken in different ways: natural light, flash, camera, and cyber shot, and are a mixture of actions in which we interpret the strangeness of amorous exchanges in scenes that arise spontaneously from sexual relationships and moments with friends. The result is a chaotic universe united by strangeness, mistakes, and imperfections, in an attempt to invent life as we want it to be.

Valuing sharing among women as an exercise in resistance against a society in which, beyond the change of nationality, the alienation and relativization of the violence we suffer at the hands of men remains: as if it were love.