Espinhal, 2020

The artist brings together a series of works that emerge from a deeply personal place: her family, like so many others in Brazil, confronted with forced displacement under the banner of a myth of development.
From this experience, she asks what persists. What remains is transmitted through the praying women of her family and her grandfather of Cariri origin: a relationship and conversation with the earth, languages that communicate beyond words, and knowledge of plants often considered “offensive” or invasive species, such as Alternanthera brasiliana, a natural antibiotic; Peregum, a plant associated with enchantments and rituals; Arruda (rue), native to the Mediterranean basin, prohibited in its country of origin and embraced in Brazil; as well as other plants from her mother’s garden, together with ritual baths of care and ancestral technology.
These transmissions are replanted within the works through their forms, botanical impressions, and gestures of care that re-root displaced histories in other soils, where they can take root and remake themselves.
By placing her head upon the earth in order to return to what she is, Da Silva Medeiros enters into dialogue with the invisible as an act of reclaiming, pointing to how fear of the invisible has long functioned as a colonial tool. This series is a reminder, a prayer to the earth from which everything comes and to which everything returns.

At this moment, a family revelation intensely reorganized certain structures within the artist. Moving through thorns, tearing the skin, the wound heals when we look closely to understand what is needed for it to mend.
In her mother’s backyard, while relationships diverged, a cleansing bath was being prepared, and stories of the family’s enchanted beings appeared in the plants. A presence accompanied this backyard for some time, showing what lay around the thorns and how to pass through them, preparing the skin so that the piercing is not painful, and so that we do not remain in thorny places.
Before anything, one must learn to pass through them. Spinal Thorn is a field of strategies for dealing with the blanks of memory when they are revealed. The red of urucum, of blood, of Pindorama, recalls what runs through the veins of a country whose colour is not the “colour of sin”, but of those who hold up the sky with the wisdom of plants and with struggles with the cosmos and with memory.