Retomada, 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.

In continuity with this body of work, in 2020 the artist created Retomada, the first canvas painted after the birth of her first child. Retomada appears as both rupture and continuity, observing and understanding the past in order to take care of the future.