I am a curandeira in a lineage of curandeiras from Brasil. My practice is a dialogue around spirituality, the body, and photography. Through performance and time-based media, I engage with materials imbued with personal and ancestral significance, exploring memory, reproducibility, and transformation.

In aurora, I merge 19th-century wet plate collodion photography with contemporary video techniques, creating an interplay of light, shadow, and time. Monitors embedded within wooden frames reveal an ethereal figure suspended in swirling silver nitrate, evoking alchemical processes. A second video—a music performance inspired by the oldest known Babylonian lullaby—is experienced through a Rolleiflex camera, emphasizing mediated vision and historical fragmentation. Sung in both English and Portuguese, the lullaby is recorded on a deteriorating magnetic tape recorder, oscillating between silence and feedback, underscoring themes of translation, distortion, and intimacy.

To expand the work’s sensory and interactive dimensions, a tape recorder and a small box made of Palo Santo wood invite the viewer’s engagement. Presence activates the installation’s performative space, requiring movement—walking around images and objects, leaning in, playing the tape recorder, and sensing the aroma from the wooden object.