aguçando alegria

2025

Samba is exhilarating.

Samba, the most popular Brazilian rhythm, is known to directly descend from batuque, a circle dance performed by African people forcibly taken to Brazil by Portuguese colonisers to work in colonial plantations. It is widely believed that in the early seventeenth century, enslaved Africans began to perform samba as rhythmic dances to disguise their religious rituals – samba is the prayer done through and by the body. 

To this day, samba continues to be used as a (joyful) form of resistance to marginalisation.  

This project has been made during a trip to my hometown in Brazil in late 2024, and fully realised once back in Australia in early 2025 for an artist residency titled Inciting Joy/ Aguçando Alegria at correspondences Studio in Brunswick. The works rest under the ethos of joy as resistance, and acts as a disowning of the anguish of marginalisation. It tells the story of my occupying my space in the world as a Brazilian-born migrant to Australia, a Latina, a woman of colour with both Afro-Brazilian and European heritage. 

The suspended imagery in the installation mimics a roda de samba, or a samba circle, in which the Afro-Brazilian communities gather in a ritual of music and dance. While in this work I invoke my ancestry through the ritual of dance, music and spirituality, I also invite the community at large to allow the bodily gestures from the textile works to touch them: to be touched by (and to dance with) otherness.
The embroidery acts as a mapping and (re)telling of my ancestors’ migratory movements that become interwoven with my own, while images and moving images allude to the rapture in discovering that instead of being trapped in a constant state of in-betweenness, I can instead be in multiple places at once.