Stage of Migration

I developed this work during a month-long residency at PRISMA AIR in Lisbon. I had visited the city only briefly, more than twenty years earlier, so the residency gave me time to get to know it. I had recently moved to London after almost five years in the United States. Lisbon felt warm and welcoming, at times like a return home. The weather was warmer, the streets reminded me of Rio de Janeiro, and the food was familiar. I ate at least one pastel de nata every day and often had lunch or dinner at a tasca, where the meals tasted like home cooking. Among the other residents, I felt a small sense of pride in speaking Portuguese, as though the language gave me access to a Lisbon they could not quite experience in the same way.

That feeling of homecoming came with a quiet tension: even among so many familiar things, I had to make an extra effort to understand the place and find my footing in it. I sometimes struggled to understand the local accent and had to listen closely. In shops, people often addressed me in English, recognising that I was from elsewhere even before I spoke. News about growing hostility towards immigrants, including Brazilians, was also present during my stay. I was still a foreigner, though in a different way from how I had felt in the United States or the UK. Each city seemed to give that feeling its own shape.

I made the work from donated fabrics, fragments cut from my paintings, borrowed objects found in the PRISMA studio, and paint. As I stapled the fabrics to the wall, I began to see a window opening onto an almost familiar view. Tropical plants suggested home, while other textures belonged somewhere less recognisable. Working from the centre outwards, I gradually came to see the space as a stage: a setting in which we perform versions of ourselves according to where we are and whom we are with. I painted shadows directly onto the wall, letting the paint drip beneath the assembled fabrics. They made the stage feel fragile and temporary, as though its setting could change at any moment.

The signs around us shape how we feel and act, often without our noticing. As an immigrant, I find myself paying closer attention to them, knowing that a gesture or situation familiar in Brazil might mean something different in London, the United States or Lisbon. The work holds that shifting experience of recognising a place while still learning how to inhabit it.