Once I went on a motorbike trip. It was almost three months through the interior of Brazil - Minas Gerais, Bahia and Espírito Santo. I knew that at the end of the trip I would return to the same point of departure, my home. However, the journey, the daily practice of going, of choosing and bearing the consequences responsibly, leads to paths that are always unknown. That is its nature, but of course, we have choices. On journeys it is common to stop to evaluate the route and understand the next stops.
The map is open. Its distances measured in hours and kilometres. Routes redefined. The remaining time weighed. With the information in hand, we can align the expectations of our head with the courage of our belly and the desires of our heart and thus decide the course.
At times in my life I have stopped and opened the map to see where to go. Analysing the "hows" and the "whys". After much error, I discovered I had bought a map at an expensive price that still told me I was going slowly. I analysed this map together with my dusty compass and saw how to fit one thing into the other. I felt in my heart, regardless of the map, where the compass was pointing.
In that "orient yourself", where does the sun come from?
I consider this journey of mine an important starting point in this sense, it in itself as a compass. Not only because of the latent doubt about the next step, but also because of the lust for life, for a certain desire of rebirth latent in my chest and in a very central way through drawing. I drew it all, from beginning to end, I made more than 100 illustrations and even wrote a diary of my experiences. At that moment in fact I think I was chosen by the drawing, I even remember the moment on June 13, 2015.
I had been travelling for several days and went to a magical place for me. I consider it a portal to the centre of Brazil and our occupation of the territory. Congonhas dos Campos and the church of Bom Jesus de Matosinhos with the Prophets of the master Aleijadinho. I stayed there three days trying to draw and portray the seen and the unseen. To manifest the unmanifest. I worked with my head for some moments, I made studies and sketches of how I wanted the drawing but it did not come out.
Until a certain moment when I calmed down my mind, connected with the space and disconnected from the result. It was the magic of making manifesting itself little by little and I think I made my first conscious drawing (above). They say that drawing, more than knowing about the strokes, is an exercise in seeing. That day I saw myself, finally, seeing something.
This sensation came and went several times, but the seedling was already coming out of the earth. If this drawing above is the leaf coming out of the soil, there is one that I consider the seed itself, a map really for myself that I sometimes visit and would like to share. A few months after leaving my parents' house, I felt a great emptiness of practices that would lead me to myself - I bought a notebook, coloured pencils and allowed myself to express what came from inside. Ideas, images, sensations.
Today, looking back, I find it difficult to work in abstract, but that image always comes back to me as the beginning. I hadn't drawn for over ten years, and those strokes gave me the courage to try and play around a bit. Due to the fact that it was something raw, I still look at it trying to find something of myself that I don't know yet.