Cosmic Studio. Casein and oil on unprimed cotton canvas. 78X60 inches, 2025.

This work presents a blueprint for my studio practice and continuation of my work in the coming years. I started making it during my Open Studio Practice at the Soil Factory and finished it in my home studio with Helena and Ulysses. It currently hangs in our dining room.

Pyrocolengos (2024-26) are wearable paintings designed for use by more than one person. These works draw inspiration from Parangolés by Helio Oiticica, inviting people to dance and incorporate the artwork. "Pyrocolengos" refers to the fire ignited in the body for dancing and the revolutionary power of dance to initiate social movement (pyro); through toghetherness (co); positioning the vitality of the body as a possible common language between people (lengos). I started making Pyrocolengos collectively in 2024 and have used them in a lecture at Cornell University in 2025.

Emocional - No Birth and No Death, 10X8 inches, gesso and oil on velvet, 2026.

A series of paintings on the velvet used in my latest Pyrocolengo, done at Cornell University. These paintings reflect a student's expression of himself as "emocional" (emotional in Portuguese) and his desire never to stop being that way. His sensibility and deep awareness brought me a new perception of emotions, which I linked to the heightened awareness in mindfulness Buddhist meditations of reaching a state of no birth and no death. The paintings seek to continue developing a visual vocabulary that merges texture and symbol formation.

The Real Exists, casein and acrylic on cotton canvas, 24X20 inches, 2026.

I have a growing body of paintings, which I am finalizing on canvases initiated during Open Studio Practice, a free program I held for several months for children and caregivers at the Soil Factory.

Untitled, oil and casein on unprimed cotton, acrylic on primed canvas, and cotton t-shirt. 11 X 14 inches, 2025.

Play Propagate was a social art project held at the gardens of the Soil Factory. Throughout three periods in Fall 2024, Spring 2025, and Summer 2025, we had weekly three-hour meetings with mothers and their children. These meetings included planting two garden plots with food to be harvested and distributed between our immediate communities. I conducted drawing experiences in the garden and collective painting sessions. We also remembered plays we had done in the past to teach to our children and created monthly art shows featuring our artworks and children's presentations.

In Food For The Spirit, I wrap myself on a large canvas and ask people to paint on it while I stay inside, as if in a cocoon. I move as I wish to, keeping myself always covered, and people paint as they can. At the end, we open the canvas to see what was painted on it. I created Food For The Spirit as a reference to Adrian Piper’s work, and as a way to think and experience a different kind of mirroring. The work has a play-based thinking, more than a ritualistic one, although being wrapped in the canvas, experiencing the creative acts of others, and coming out of it felt like a rebirth.

Winter Flowers. With Your Kiss My Life Begins, Casein and Oil on unprimed cotton canvas. 60 X 36 inches. (one in a series of three).

"Creative Thursdays" was a six-week art project I offered for free at The Soil Factory to create community around art-making. The project mirrored the "Domingos da Criação," organized by museum director Frederico Morais in 1971 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. While Morais focused on materials to structure each encounter, I focused each encounter on the work of one artist that would help us center our bodies in practice, such as Ana Mendietta, Lygia Pape, and Laura Aguilar. A text reflecting on the artwork can be found here.

The Power of Creation was a series of drawings I made with my daughter when she was two years old, which I later transformed into a collection of 12 digital prints. The collection sold out through my website while I was running an online art studio

I co-produced with artist Sarah Arriagada and interviewed 50 artists for the podcast Artist Praxis, proposing to discuss the creative process behind one recent artwork. The podcast became an excellent resource for people to hear how artists organize their feelings and thoughts in art-making. The podcast gave me insight into how one uses language to communicate about the space between experience and object. More importantly, it fostered new connections and professional relationships between artists from different countries and practices.

The lecture I prepared for the course was an introduction to the 1967-68 Brazilian Tropicália movement, and I used Prof. Colanzi’s question, “What does it mean for a nation to ‘devour’ the world and reinvent itself?” as a starting point. To connect theory with practice, I brought canvases prepared with casein paint, pastels, and tempera sticks, and proposed that each student would create one part for a flag that I would stitch together after the class. I asked them to paint any image that could — somehow —represent their individuality. Importantly, the painting proposition aligns with the philosophical premise of “Brazilian Anthropophagy”: we can culturally devour, transform, and critically create something new that represents our current reality. Additionally, the precariousness of the materials given to students, coupled with the brevity of our time together and the pressure to invent something that could respond to a deep question, prompted the emergence of creativity necessary to experience such a philosophical premise. In this way, the class not only explored theory but also enacted it through collaboration and art-making.

After the class, I took the individual paintings back to my home studio and began assembling the flag. In deciding the position of each painting within the flag format, I meditated on the meaning of each image as shared by the students. On top, I placed an image of a tree representing nature, with an owl on it, which symbolizes knowledge. Next to it, the phrase “Tutto Passa” conveys a message particularly suited to a flag for temporary collectivities and brief encounters. On the right of “Tutto Passa,” we see a map of New York City, centered on Queens as “the real” NYC, an image that at the same time locates the flag’s creation and displaces it with the question of a real territory for a representative culture. I placed the map upside down in reference to Joaquín Torres García. Under the map image, we see a representation of “empty space,” a concept that challenges existence itself, evoking the necessity of making containers for ideas and the always-present potentiality for life. To the left of the image of “empty space,” we again have nature, this time as a dreamy landscape that can be viewed from any direction, with plants, animals, and human life coexisting peacefully. Under this image of nature, we see two emoticons: one representing pain and a healing heart, and the other representing death. To the left of this image, we see water and fire meeting at the center to create life, representing the force and movement of life through elemental materials. To complete the flag, I stitched one canvas with only casein paint, like the ones I gave to students, as a way to include a “blank canvas” or an abstract image that shows painting as the basis for this flag’s creation—the anthropophagic stomach, where all ideas get digested.

One week after teaching this class and stitching the flag, I traveled with my family from Ithaca (USA) to Łapy (Poland) to visit the city where my husband, Marcin, was born. Here, we met family members from Berlin (Germany) and Lagos (Nigeria), and I felt this was the perfect condition to activate this artwork. In this new context, I have begun to understand art-making as a significant expression of the reality of my life. Furthermore, after becoming a mother, I’ve been interested in how incorporating art-making into everyday, mundane moments facilitates the spontaneous transmission of my life values to my children. I also enjoy the contrast of experiencing art-making with students in the institutional setting of the classroom and with family members in whatever leisurely moment. This difference allows me to notice which parts of the artwork’s history resonate most and are more effective at affecting others and activating the vitality I hope to enhance.

I brought the flag with me when we went for a walk together to see the building of a new road that cuts through the forest that marked Marcin’s childhood. When we first arrived in Łapy this time, we tried to walk along the paths he used to take as a child, only to be interrupted by the big machines and the large piles of sand and mud of construction. I was reminded that the assault of “progress” on nature isn’t happening only in Brazil and countries of the Global South, but is a continuous process in capitalist societies. This experience corroborated the understanding carried by the flag of our displacement from land and the interruption of the continuity between memory and present life, making our lives a stitching of brevity and limited shared realities. After the initial shock of seeing the forest destroyed, we took advantage of the construction pause during the holidays and ignored the prohibitive signs to explore the area. Marcin found a wooden pole for the flag among the construction zone’s garbage piles, and we crossed to the other side of the forest. I asked my niece, Justyna Obassi, to hold the flag for a photo, as I feel she embodies many of the ideas the flag carries: she is an internationally renowned film director who travels the world shooting commercials and short films, creating visually appealing narratives (often about love) with small groups of people.

After that, Helena surprised me with her understanding of the flag’s meaning and her excitement to play with it, settling my heart and, to me at this point, closing the experience of making this flag.

The unnatural and the natural in breastfeeding:

There is a steep learning curve that a woman must navigate quickly to start breastfeeding. Unfortunately, our society’s lack of preparation and understanding of this leaves most women stuck in suffering, and most babies unattended or very prematurely traumatized. The “learning curve" is the unnatural part of it, while, on the other hand, there is still a “natural," a mysterious part of breastfeeding that indeed happens only through the acceptance of the biological necessities and conditions created by our bodies. Here, the experience of “learning” (and consequently the creation of “knowledge”) as a cultural perspective collapses, as what we learn can only truly be achieved by following the instincts and demands of the natural world — aka my body and the baby’s body. Breastfeeding, just like pregnancy, offers the woman a diverse experience of knowledge, which ultimately deeply contradicts the intellectual stance of our previous learning experiences.

When I had Helena, I sought a homebirth with the assistance of a wonderful midwife. I trusted my midwife to guide me through the initial moments of breastfeeding Helena, and she followed the standard approach taught to most health professionals: stimulating the baby's mouth to open and placing the breast in their mouth. A gesture that, when described technically, seems harmless, ignoring the vast and deep sensibility of the birth moment. This technique, employed by doctors and nurses to introduce breastfeeding, is at least half a Century old, and we should have already identified its harmful consequences. With Helena, the shoving of the breast into the baby's mouth led us down the unbelievably traumatic industry of “lip tie" surgery correction. Helena went through the surgery, and I regret it tremendously. Truly, the only “solution" to breastfeeding is to provide time and space for mother and baby (considering their physical and material needs) to bond and figure out their way through the body positions and emotional needs of breastfeeding.

Luckily, with persistence, the breastfeeding journey can be long, and with Helena, I sought to remediate the very first few months of trauma by being with her full-time and giving myself time to learn what I needed to learn. In practice, this meant quitting my full-time fellowship at Binghamton University, postponing the writing of my PhD dissertation, and immersing myself in her new worldly presence, which in our case coincided with the COVID pandemic. As I invested in our relationship, I read so many books about breastfeeding, motherhood, etc., etc., with the disposition of a PhD student, researching a new topic that supposedly wasn’t related to my specific “Latin American art history” field. — yet, the Tropicalia in my mind managed to compose a beautiful song. Here, I want to bring a long quote by the famous psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott, who connected many of the dots necessary to develop a sensibility that sees the first years of life as fundamental to building our humanity (and creative capacities):

“My long experience has made me see that the pattern for relating to objects is laid down in babyhood and that it does matter what happens even at the beginning. It is only too easy to think in terms of reflexes. Doctors and nurses should never fall into the trap of thinking that because reflexes are a fact, they are the whole story.

The baby is a human being, immature and highly dependent, and is an individual having and storing experiences. This has immense practical importance for all concerned in the management of the earliest stages. A really high proportion of mothers could establish breastfeeding if the doctors and nurses on whom they are so dependent could accept the fact that it is only the mother who can properly perform this task. She can be hindered, and she can be helped by being given support in all other respects. She cannot be taught.

There are very subtle things that the mother knows intuitively and without any intellectual appreciation of what is happening, and which she can only arrive at by being left alone and given full responsibility in this limited area. She knows, for instance, that the basis of feeding is not feeding.

It is an insult, or shall I say a kind of rape, when an exasperated nurse pushes the mother’s nipple or the nipple of the bottle into the baby’s mouth and starts up a reflex. No mother left on her own would do this.

A period of time is needed for many babies before they begin to search, and when they find an object they do not necessarily want immediately to make a meal of it. They want to play around with their hands and mouth, and perhaps they want to hang on with their gums. There is a wide range of variation here according to infant and mother.

This is the beginning not just of feeding; it is the beginning of object-relating. The whole relationship of this new individual to the actual world has to be based on the way things start up and the pattern that gradually develops according to the experience that belongs to this human interrelationship of baby and mother.

Here again is a huge subject, one that even concerns philosophers, since the paradox has to be accepted that what the baby creates was already there, and that, in fact, the thing that the baby creates is part of the mother, which was found.

The point is that it would not have been found had the mother not been in the special state that mothers are in when they can present themselves in such a way that they are found more or less at the right moment and in the right place. This is called adaptation to need, which enables the baby to discover the world creatively.”

(Donald Winnicott, Winnicott On The Child, pp.52-53, Cambridge: Perseus Publishing, 2002).

This excerpt by Winnicott mirrored many of my experiences and confirmed the choices and thoughts I had while navigating my experience breastfeeding Helena. Winnicott is famous for his concept of “the good enough mother,” which reminds society that the mother is a human being, and that a human relationship is what is desirable for the proper development of a human baby — in contrast with the modernist desires of automation, total deliverance, highly machinic and mechanic productivist desires that he observed in the 20th Century and that nowadays became even worst with the seductive technologies of our times. Ultimately, as a mother, I felt that the “good enough mother” is useful in the specific (and limited, given the broadness of the mother/child relationship) field in which Winnicott was working, but insulting for real mothers, as we are not to be in any way compared with robots, and we are always way better than “good enough.”

With Ulysses, I had already studied enough about breastfeeding and about the baby’s capacity to latch if left undisturbed. I had watched the very few “breast crawl” videos available on the internet, which prove the newborn’s instinct to find the breast and initiate feeding. I chose to hold Ulysses close to me and not leave him to do the crawl by himself, but I had him next to my breast, and he found the nipple and latched independently, initiating everything in his own volition.

It’s now been three months since I stopped breastfeeding Ulysses, after more than six years of “breastfeeding on demand,” which, to me, truly meant being with my children almost 24 hours per day (including co-sleeping and breastfeeding at night) except for the few hours when their father would take them on walks and to events. When I look back on these six years of motherhood, it is hard to figure out how I have managed life, kept working, and established myself as a full-time artist. There is indeed a complex total-body/total-life transformation that happens with breastfeeding that one cannot fully comprehend, and science is certainly extremely far from accessing. Even as I write this text and know that I am almost completely done producing milk, I feel the effect of the end of breastfeeding in my own thinking, and how fast so many of the memories of it fade away.

Here, I’m trying to remember:

- While breastfeeding, I experienced a quality of thought unlike anything else, as if worlds were opening in my mind or as if constellations and connections were forming. The connection available through Helena’s and Ulysses’s eyes as they stared into mine was more than a view of themselves and me; it created new visions and new people in the world, and brought back many memories inscribed in my body (and buried away in my mind). This was perhaps one of the most challenging parts of breastfeeding: the many memories of what had happened with my body (so, with me) that were activated, and often came excruciatingly alive in my mind; the violence that I experienced in the past starkly contrasted with the necessity of keeping the safety of the baby in my arms.

- The sensibility that is deeply activated with this kind of breastfeeding is one of the rough materiality of life. The contrast between the quality of the touch on the body and the higher senses of our spiritual (or highly mental cognition, if one prefers) is at once highlighted and united. In other words, one becomes intensely aware of the consequential quality of being alive: everything has consequences. Another way to look at this is how this sensibility brings to the immediate reality anything that could be classified as “unconscious,” which might explain why Winnicott became such a good psychoanalyst by working closely with mothers and children, able to explain the reality of object relations.

- Breastfeeding also demanded a constant softness and a willingness to continuously let go of the previous systems that sustained my life, which I kept finding were in harsh contrast to that softness. At times, the contrast felt maddening, but I continued to choose breastfeeding and the softness, to a point that I have been realizing more recently, might not be socially accepted, given the current capitalist/productivist society we live in. Looking back, I also recognize my partner’s influence on this; his unwillingness to experience any of the evident suffering that any refusal of breastfeeding caused in our babies. He was sensitive to the babies’ need for breastfeeding and recognized their desire for it while he was caring for them. As the babies grew, he was attuned to the time he could manage to stay with them, away from me, from 45 minutes to two hours, then three hours or so.

- Now that I stopped breastfeeding, I am noticing an increased capacity for organization and clarity of intentional thought. I suspect that the need for softness that breastfeeding creates changes the configuration of our cognitive system. With both Helena and Ulysses, after I stopped breastfeeding each one of them, I experienced my first clear feeling of anger towards the child. When I first experienced this feeling with Helena, I misunderstood it, thinking I had such a feeling because I was caring for Ulysses, who was a baby. I thought that seeing Helena as a “big kid” compared to a three-month-old baby made me feel angry towards her. It was only when I stopped breastfeeding Ulysses and experienced for the second time the distinctiveness of the sharp-first-time-anger-towards-my-own-child that I could clearly link this feeling with the corporeal shift of stopping breastfeeding. Another clear difference I notice in the quality of my thoughts, within this soft/sharp quality, is an increased capacity to sort and organize material reality, something I have been trying to do over the years of becoming a mother, and that I felt was impossible. Now that I “woke up from the haze of breastfeeding,” I suddenly feel at ease again (and have desire) to deeply organize the bathroom cabinet, look at calendars and make plans, create budgets, etc.

I first worked on Pyrocolengos during my artist residency at the Soil Factory in February 2024. At that point, the work was entirely conceptual, beginning with the formation of the word that gave it its title. Pyro from the Greek “fire,” Co from the Latin “together,” and Lengos playing with the Portuguese for línguas and léguas, meaning “language” and “distance.” The core idea of the Pyrocolengos is to have a painting inhabited by many people who will dance together.

Pyrocolengos is directly related to Helio Oiticica’s Parangolés, which he began creating in 1964. Parangolés carried Oiticica’s ideal of the possibility of experiencing an artwork in its entirety, as he put it, “in-corporating the work in the body.” Unlike the Parangolés, Pyrocolengos are to be experienced with others, and don’t focus on the incorporation of an artwork, but on its making and fruition with others. In this sense, Pyrocolengos also relates to Lygia Pape’s Divisor (1968), in which many people share space under/inside a large cloth, and to Lygia Clark’s many “propositions,” in which the artist proposes activities for groups of people, and the making of these activities constitutes the work of art.

I approached my presentation at Cornell as an artwork in its totality, focusing on the making of a Pyrocolengo. However, the structure of a classroom and being invited to teach a class required me to think about the making of the artwork within the teaching framework. If I am in a similar situation in the future, I would be more explicit at the beginning of class about the steps for creating the artwork, and I would also introduce more experiences to help students feel immersed in an “art-making” situation, rather than just a lecture. Even though this wasn’t my first experience in this kind of context, the complexity of the artwork I intended to create made it challenging to navigate the connection between being an art historian and an artist simultaneously.

In the lecture structure, I favored the art historical component, introducing the Brazilian artists and the historical context in which they created their artworks, making it possible for students to work on their images while I taught, and then, at the end of the class, putting together the images they created on the piece of golden velvet I brought to compose the Pyrocolengo.

I taught the same lecture twice; however, in the first one, I wasn’t able to complete the entire process of making the Pyrocolengo, and in the second, even though I did complete the whole process, I wasn’t able to bring about the revolutionary capacity of Pyrocolengo. Instead, the challenging aspect of inhabiting an artwork together with someone else was more evident. In other words, my perception was that students, although willing to participate, weren’t fully integrated in the making of the work. Perhaps an extended period of making, in which we also made a circle for sewing their artworks together into the velvet piece I had to make a shared wearable, would be more successful.

Edit: After receiving the student evaluations from the class, I realized the art experience generated with Pyrocolengos was way more successful than I had imagined. Students were excited with what they created, had a deeper understanding of art-making with others and the potential for generating community, and expressed a clear understanding of the values I introduced related to Brazilian artists Oiticica, Clark, and Pape. The evaluations were also 100% positive regarding enthusiasm and a desire to create more art, which is one of my main goals.

Dancing Together

If in Coração I did a Pyrocolengo that focused on dancing, in this Pyrocolengo at Cornell, I only introduced the music and dance components of the work by the end of my presentation. I tried to teach students to play the samba rhythm with their bodies and encouraged everyone to do so, while others used the Pyrocolengo. A significantly longer time is needed to complete this part of the activity, or a more effective strategy is necessary to introduce people who are not interested in music and dance to the idea and desire to move their bodies. The classroom culturally requires us to make our bodies docile and disciplined, to sit and concentrate mentally on the lecture. It is tough to transition from a deep, conditioning mindset to a dancing, exposed disposition. This was, to me, a great reminder of the necessity of creating the right context and of clearly expressing to students the expectations and intentions behind the artworks. On the other hand, the difficulty of moving towards a dancing disposition clearly exemplified the potency of artworks like the Parangolés, effectively showing students, in their own bodies, the difficulty of actually “incorporating” the artwork. From a pedagogical and art-historical perspective, the “failure” of the artwork remains positive, demonstrating that integrating art-making and art-historical teaching is a successful strategy.

At the end of the class, I chatted with Prof. Osborne about teaching art and exposing students to different experiences. Prof. Osborne is a champion for students, and I discussed with her the necessity, as both an artist and a professor, to sustain the discomfort created by the diverse experiences we bring to our students. Experiencing diverse social interactions, like through the making of a collective artwork, or through watching a long artwork video like the one Prof. Osborne exemplified to me in our conversation, are pedagogical strategies to disrupt the usual perceptions of reality and create the oddness necessary to bring about new ways of thinking and acting in the world. For my own sake and for the sake of those with whom we live, finding ways to incorporate more dance and music into our learning experiences is fundamental to bridging the distance between thinking and relating to one another in the world.

I’m profoundly grateful to Prof. Osborne for this opportunity to think and make the Pyrocolengo in the classroom context, and to dance with me in the Pyrocolengo we created. These are experiences that will continue to reverberate in my practice and that I will continue to make meaning with in the years to come.

I’m writing you a note on this Thursday Painting series of emails to let you know that my painting Spiritual Anatomies, is currently exhibited (and for sale!) at Looking: 21 Ways, an exhibition curated by Rudy Vavra at Tyte Gallery. I am delighted that Vavra selected this specific painting for this exhibition, as this is a work that helped me bridge the public-facing and the private parts of my studio practice (read more about it below!). It makes sense to me then that this painting would come out of my home-studio walls to be sold by an art gallery and then go on to live in some other place!

Writer Tatiane S. Santa Rosa, in her text for the exhibition, aptly described: “Women read nature and create mythologies: (…) In Debora Faccion Grodzki’s Spiritual Anatomies (Cosmic Flowers), it is not only the symbol but also the soul that materializes in circles, breasts, and marks of wholeness.”

And here is the short text I wrote to accompany the painting in the exhibition:

Spiritual Anatomies is part of a series of works titled Cosmic Flowers, which carries a making process that begins with a group of people painting together and finishes with my practice alone in the studio. The first phase of making happened at Open Studio Practices I carried out at the Soil Factory (Ithaca, NY) to create space for communal art-making. From the large canvases painted with others, I extracted smaller pieces on which I identified specific gestures that could become forms. This series aims to unveil forms that situate a painting as an individual meditative space, still cultivating the presence of a collectivity. In Spiritual Anatomies, the form that emerges shows two polarities connected through an external line. They suggest physical or spiritual dualities that, when bridged, can complement each other, such as the body and the soul, the brain and the heart, the eye and the stomach.

**************************************************************************************

The practice of writing alongside painting can’t be rushed, so I have realized that I can’t currently keep up with one email every Thursday. Yet, I’ve been writing and updating my website/Substack as I can without sending out emails, so there are a couple of texts I could point you to if you wish to read more of what I’ve been doing.

As always, thank you for being here in this online space with me. It is heartwarming to know you read my emails — if you wish to, you can answer me by hitting reply!

Abraços,
Debora

This proposal for creative practice is a return to re-establishing an autotheory, considering that the “theory” in autotheory derives from researching and developing connections with the work of other thinkers and artists that precede and walk alongside our art practices. An autotheory is a crossroad, the improbable but inevitable meeting point where an artist encounters the experiences and concepts that compose their practice and existence. An autotheory implicates the personal in the historical, shifting on the one hand the anonymity created by History that identifies the larger systems of power governing society, and on the other the singularity established by history that invents geniuses and celebrities. With an autotheory, we rethink the basis of Knowledge, starting from how our perceptions and experiences connect us with the theories that already exist in the world.

The academic development of autotheory is recognized in literary studies, given the proximity of writing and theory-making. In the book Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism, Lauren Fournier connects the development of autotheory with the strengthening of decolonial and feminist debates in academic literary studies since the 1970s. She writes: “Autotheory is the integration of the auto or ‘self’ with philosophy or theory, often in ways that are direct, performative, and self-aware – especially so in those practices that emerge with postmodernism. This leads to the complicated questions of what constitutes philosophy and theory – the stakes of the term “autotheory” and its histories appear in the politics of who has access to writing in ways considered theoretical and critical – and of what kinds of knowledge are understood as legitimately critical or rigorous and by whom. (…) The very integration of auto or autos, the self, with theory into a single term is contentious, especially in light of the historical disparagement of self-reflective work as a supposedly narcissistic and therefore nonintellectual or fundamentally uncritical mode – and especially when the work is made by women and people of color. (…) Autotheory is tied to a politics of radical self-reflection, embodied knowledge, and sustained, literary nonfictional writing through the self that has been, and continues to be, suppressed and repressed by certain patriarchal and colonial contexts.” (Lauren Fournier, Autotheory as Feminist Practice in Art, Writing, and Criticism (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2021), p. 38.)

Fournier’s definition of autotheory contextualizes it in the present moment, pointing to its cultural and political challenges. Moreover, her analysis demonstrates the reliance of theory on writing. In my practice, I’ve developed a first instance of autotheory while writing my PhD dissertation. In it, I sought to establish first the autotheory that the Brazilian artist Antonio Dias might have relied on to develop his work in the 1970s. Even though Dias didn’t write academically to theorize, I identified in the text that he wrote on paintings and the arch and repetitive series of his work a framework of thought that I called an autotheory. By the end of writing the dissertation, I found it inevitable to recognize the projection of my own practice as an artist on my research as an art historian, pointing towards an autotheory of my own that, similar to Dias, also relied on painting.

Over the last two years, since finishing my PhD, I’ve continued to gather references and find ways to bring my work into the world. As Grada Killomba recently said in an interview, “I focus above all on telling my story, on doing the work I want to do. So this constant alienation of only existing through the other, and only allowing my existence through the dominant other, is not important to me. What truly matters is to know what my questions are. Now, I’ll experiment with how I can answer these questions. I try to build a vocabulary to answer my questions. We are at this moment as a generation to build something that doesn’t exist, instead of trying to answer questions of others. We must raise our own questions and work around them.” (Tais Araujo interviews Grada Kilomba for Inhotim, published February 7, 2025. <https://www.youtube.com/@inhotim>)

Some of the questions I desire to answer through my work are: How does the necessity of making art support the construction of theory? And by contrast, how can the clarity brought by theory perpetuate the necessity of art? In other words, why is making art necessary for building better theories? And what theories expand the possibilities and capacities of art? Within those theories, which ones are specific to me and my practice? Which ones are general or particular to my students?

At the core of these questions is the dialectic between necessity and freedom, as postulated by Karl Marx. While we have historically associated art and art-making with freedom, particularly the freedom of action reserved for artists (or, in Marxist terms, the freedom in leisure), my questions shift the notion of freedom towards the theoretical after recognizing that making art is more than a human capacity; it is a social necessity. By establishing art-making as a necessity, we determine an axis of choice and recognize the actual material possibilities of the present moment.

Through this research/creative practice agenda, I compose works that enable other artists to build their autotheories. The following annotated bibliography (organized in no particular order) indicates some of the texts that initiate my Research/Creative Practice Agenda.

Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. (Penguin Classics, 2020).

A collection of texts on prose by Lorde. In many of them, she deals with the questions of why to write, how to write, and how to be a public person. In different instances, she articulates something that I find incredibly liberating when making art, and she says: “There are no new ideas, just new ways of giving those ideas we cherish breath and power in our own living.”

Deborah Levy, The Cost of Living: A Working Autobiography. (Bloomsbury Publishing, 2018).

Levy’s writing style is noteworthy because it seamlessly integrates the present moment with memories and deep analysis, creating a stream of thought. The book’s subject matter is also interesting because it explores the evolution of an artist/writer's work over time, its integration into her daily life, and the impact of this process.

Michel Serres, The Five Senses: A Philosophy of Mingled Bodies. (Bloomsbury Revelations, 2016).

This book reminds me that there is much more to study and open myself to. Serres writes in a way that gives space for what feels like a topographical reading: you go to places, go up high in your thoughts, and then down low in your concentration while reading his ideas.

Clarice Lispector, Água Viva. (New Directions, 2012).

One of my favorite texts reminds me that in art, everything is possible! Lispector writes a book about being a painter who decides to write about painting. The book is poetic and intimate, yet fictional. Like the title, it is fluid like water and super alive.

Malidoma Patrice Somé, The Healing Wisdom of Africa. (Penguin Putnam Inc., 1999).

All books by Malidoma Somé and Sobonfu Somé are great introductions to other cosmologies and ways of knowing. Their texts shift the structures of Western knowledge by reintroducing the value of tribal social relations and spirit-nature traditions that include humans.

Anne Truitt, Daybook, Turn, Prospect: The Journey of an Artist. (Scribner, 2013).

These books by Truitt remind me that being an artist and defining ourselves as such is a lifelong line of thinking. Truitt started writing to answer the question of what an artist is, and I love one of the answers that she writes: “We are artists because we are ourselves.”

bell hooks, Teaching To Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. (Routledge, 2014).

I wanted to include a book about learning. I chose bell hooks because she writes in the lineage of Paulo Freire and because she shows how teachers think (or should think) so students can learn. I believe every student should also think like a teacher, so we can finally break free from any power relation that might arise between these invented roles (the “student” and the “teacher”). An artist always sees the person beyond their social roles and understands that these roles are human creations. Whenever we are studying anything, I find it essential to see learning as a “practice of freedom.”

Gloria E. Anzaldua, Light in the Dark/Luz en lo Oscuro: Rewriting Identity, Spirituality, Reality. (Duke University Press, 2015).

Anzaldua’s text is one of the most liberating books for witnessing someone working with and discovering their theoretical paradigms. The book is inconclusive, yet it brings up many cultural perspectives necessary to unpack any theory.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies. (Hill and Wang, 2013 ed).

Barthes is my go-to author for linking semiotics with theory because he wrote many texts for the general public, making them engaging and full of good examples. Mythologies has a chapter in which he unpacks the construction of myths in society from the language/semiotic perspective. It is, in itself, an excellent theoretical paradigm for organizing one’s thinking.

I came to realize that the Roda de Samba is a social technology that creates space to value each person in a group individually, forging an opportunity for each one to express themselves and be seen by all the others. The dynamic is simple: the person at the center stays there for as long as they wish and then chooses someone from the circle to substitute for them. The assumption is that everyone present in the circle will at some point be the one in the center, which creates a feeling of anticipation and wonder: “When will I be the one in the center?” For some personality types, being at the center isn’t desirable, in which case the Roda de Samba is perfectly democratic; some folks, when chosen to be the one in the middle of the circle, will simply walk by and choose someone else to take up the center position. By contrast, those who enjoy the attention can linger for as long as they wish in the middle, putting up a show and experiencing their visibility. Regardless, the Roda de Samba creates the possibility of being seen and the value of one’s presence.

The Roda de Samba is a technology because it brings up the value of one’s life and presence in its diversity. Through its simple arrangement, it offers the possibility of interaction while also upholding consent. In the artwork “Coração,” the painting establishes a suspended visual field in which people stop being concerned with how their bodies look while moving. The person at the center positions the painting on their waist, exposing their heart at the center of the circle. At the Soil Factory, I chose the song “Coração do Brasil” by Jards Macalé, which is a samba in which the singer repeats the word coração in a crescendo, followed by an expressive “ahhh.”

For a new iteration of this work, I hope to have a larger canvas that is more richly painted, allowing for a greater distance between members and coverage of their bodies.

The seaweed that covered the shore started telling me stories. I tried to document them.

I looked from the other side, the ocean in front of me instead of behind. This time, the seaweed was willing to dance.

I wish these photos could go somewhere, but somehow I’m glad they simply document a moment in my life, a moment of relief for seeing more than what meets the eye. Remembering that I’m a living being, not a machine, so that I find strength and vitality through meaning and purpose. That is enough for now, and maybe forever.

This week I’m sending you a painting that continues to reveal itself to me. It has a section done by Ulysses, with many of his finger-marks, another done by Helena with strong eyes and large eyelashes, one more done by me showing a new face accompanied by their hand, and a section done with cochineal. I hope you enjoy looking at it and uncovering its mysteries.

The Thursday Painting is for sale at a sliding scale, starting from US$111 and going up to infinity — I’ll be equally honored if you pay the minimum. Reply to this email to claim it for yourself with the price you wish to pay and the address where you want to receive it, and I’ll send you a payment link. All paintings are ready to hang, although you can always take them to your local framing shop if you wish to!

Recently I also wrote about the latest Art Share meeting that we had at the Soil Factory, and about an artist book I created with the help of students at Cornell. And I’m including here a slightly older post in which I show a few other works done with cochineal.

In gratitude,
Debora

After contemplating for almost a year the beautiful works that the students created, I came up with the right sequence for the book, using the paintings “Mulher” (woman) and “Criar” (create) as its covers, thereby incorporating all the other concepts as ways to define these words.

The poem that the book generates is:

Mulher (woman)

Alegria (joy)

Natureza (nature)

Cidade (city)

Arco-iris (rainbow)

Devoradora (devouring)

Ferradura (horseshoe)

Amor (love)

Gentil (gentle)

Saudade

Céu (sky)

Gradiente (gradient)

Fofo (cute)

Beija-flor (hummingbird)

Paralelepípedo (paving stone)

Natureza (nature)

Música (music)

Natureza (nature)

Identidade (identity)

Presente (present/gift)

Tranquilidade (tranquility)

Liberdade (freedom)

Só (alone)

Criar (create)

I love how, when related to “woman,” all the other words in the book acquire a changed concept, in a very simple way, introducing the necessary understanding of the continual transformation of what it means to experience being a woman. I also love that there are three different expressions of natureza (nature), expressing how even the “natural” aspects of being a woman can have diverse manifestations.

The artist Amanda Heidel was present at the first meetings of the first Art Share group that I created at the Soil Factory in 2024. She then joined us in creating the Play Propagate group, where mothers and children meet to plant two garden plots and play together once a week. With her presence, I decided to propose creating an Art Share within the Play Propagate group, and we hold it on the first Thursday of every month.

This kind of commitment (setting aside one day per month to focus on a specific task) can be very helpful when creating art projects communally, especially when gathering groups of people who need to coordinate numerous activities in their lives. Heidel has been a lighthouse in upholding the basic value of Art Share, which is to keep the meetings happening by showcasing works in progress.

Observing Heidel’s work over the last year has been helpful to me in developing the initial thoughts I am introducing in this text, and I hope to further develop them in the coming year. They regard a conversation between making and theorizing that I’ve been pursuing since my PhD dissertation. In my dissertation, I sought to unveil the theoretical background that sustains the creation of artworks, arguing that every artist draws from a well of knowledge to maintain a consistent artistic practice. My question has been how an artist can figure out this knowledge for themselves, bringing it to the intellectual level, and creating, then, an autotheory (citing Lauren Fournier).

In my own autotheory, art-making makes explicit a person’s theoretical framework. In other words, an artist activates infinite connections between (often seemingly disparate) concepts and experiences while creating an artwork, and it is precisely the work of the artist to unveil these connections through the artwork. When I extrapolate this autotheory with the premise that every human creation can be understood as art, my autotheory becomes one that, within art history, expands the limits and practices of conceptual art.

Within the discipline of art history and the art market, we typically trace the first artwork of conceptual art to Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain (1917), when he signed and dated a mass-produced porcelain urinal and presented it as an art object at an art fair. By prioritizing his thinking process over the creation of an object, Duchamp made evident the conceptual character of his artwork. One conceptual artwork, however, doesn’t make an entire theory, so although art historians can place the Fountain within the framework of conceptual art, Duchamp himself theorized about his work through the concept of the “readymade.” The readymade positioned the artist’s making on selecting a mass-produced object rather than on crafting, touching, or building an original object. The act of selection made explicit the artist's power to activate or create new connections between concepts.

Duchamp’s readymade theory is said to have transformed Western art history, but its conceptual emphasis created a radical gap that we continue to fill nowadays. Not for nothing did Duchamp need to create even the artist who signed the artwork. The radicality of the readymade is sustained by the distance imposed between the artist and the making, in order to sustain an intellectual capacity, making explicit an order of things, that is, an order of the art market that continues to exist nowadays: those who think don’t make, and those who make don’t think. However, as it is to be expected, over this more than one century since the Fountain, even though the art market continues to sustain these separations (we need them to determine the salaries and institutional positions), artists have continued to work beyond the market expectations, and particularly in conceptual art, a lot has been done to bridge meaning and making.

Heidel’s work relates to conceptual art because her art-making starts with isolating the concept of the mycelia, but then the way she has been making work, particularly after becoming a mother, greatly challenges any possible separation between concept and form, between thinking and handling. In our Art Share meeting, Frances Gallardo joked that Heidel got herself some assistants by using mushrooms in her work. Part of her making process involves creating the contents in which mushrooms can grow, which then become small sculptures with interesting shapes and textures. However, it isn’t the final object that makes the work, but the process of growing the mushrooms, and more explicitly, through her documentation efforts, the active intention of incorporating the making of these objects in daily life with her toddler Phoebe. Through participating in the Art Share group, Heidel is also highlighting the step in which the work doesn’t require her handling, when she needs to wait for the mushrooms to grow on their own.

The question of daily life isn’t missed in Duchamp’s Fountain, after all, his choice of object was an urinal, pointing to one of the most basic, necessary, and daily life activities. In fact, throughout the 20th Century, many conceptual artists dealt with daily life and the question of how to extract, or how to notice, “art” in life. There is, however, something else, something that I’m still trying to figure out and that will remain underdeveloped in this text, regarding what is missing in conceptual art and its perception of daily life. I need to bring in more artists to this study/conversation. But I find hints of it in my attempts at daily artistic practice on the book “Art as Life” about Allan Kaprow.

My thinking process searches for a total integration of art and life by following the desire to understand for myself how a person can be an artist in all moments of their life. That is, I seek to reject the premise that certain activities are labelled as “art” while others are mandatory, professional, or otherwise. The same applies to thinking of certain objects created by humans as “art,” while others are less important and disregarded as utilitarian, up to becoming trash. This question, I believe, goes to the core of the capitalist material excess that drives our current culture, promoted on spiritual poverty, and leading us to environmental collapse.

Heidel’s work somehow sustains all these questions, too: an artwork that decomposes doesn’t become trash, it grows in nature and continues to live in other forms. A making process that takes place in the home with children holds the conceptual certainty of the existence and continuity of art that can’t be captured.

I still want to write about:
Madness. (Carl Jung, "Madness is a special form of the spirit and clings to all teachings and philosophies, but even more to daily life, since life itself is full of craziness and at bottom utterly illogical.")

Collectivity in art-making - Making with.

The making/not-making.

Motherhood – My body made the child, but I didn’t “make” them.

After many months of delving deeply into my painting practice without sharing much of it online, I am now excited to commit to a new rhythm for my newsletters, one in which I’ll bring one painting per week into your inbox every Thursday. I’ll continue to post other texts in which I discuss my theoretical insights and collective practices in my art studio (with my children and with other people), but I won’t send them as newsletters. These texts help me document my studio practice and give continuity to my intellectual path. I believe they are an offering to anyone interested in exploring the workings of an active artist studio, so I’ll link some of them in the Monday newsletter if you wish to catch up!

The Thursday Painting is for sale at a sliding scale, starting from US$111 and going up to infinity (which is truly the price of any artwork done by anyone, but we need to continue playing this capitalist game for now — I’ll be equally honored if you pay the minimum, I’m over the hump of my first experiences pricing and selling paintings in the past two years)! Reply to this email to claim it for yourself with the price you wish to pay and the address where you want to receive it, and I’ll send you a payment link. All paintings are ready to hang, although you can always take them to your local framing shop if you wish to!

One of the ways I arrived here

I turned to painting through my PhD research in art history, when I was trying to understand why an artist decided to use only black and white in his work. I somehow knew then that I was already a painter, even though I had never studied painting specifically. That was back in 2016, and since then, I have continued to approach painting through research, considering history, then materials, and finally social relations. Yet, every time I paint, I experience an unbelievable amount of pleasure, and that inevitably guides me more than the intellectual frameworks I set for myself beforehand.

In many ways, the paintings I want to do “publicly” through these weekly newsletters bring together all these steps in their making: the faces that appear now are a response to our historical moment, when I feel that we need to value human life more; the canvases were painted either with other people in my group programs at the Soil Factory or with Helena and Ulysses in an almost two year long exploration of nontoxic paint to use with the children; and the sewing and use of textile leftovers is an emergent practice bringing together my grandmother and mother’s expertise, some important encounters I’ve had with other mothers in Ithaca who are also sewing, and the values made clear through Make Mends Meet created by Kathrin Achenbach. In all these “steps” for making this painting, I’ve experienced the pleasure of painting, so these Thursday-paintings-newsletters are also a reminder for myself of how much joy the continuous pursuit of artistic practice creates!

I have so much more to write about the Thursday paintings, but I need to stop here because this text is already too long. I still want to link a few past posts I've written on my website without sending them as newsletters. If you've come this far reading this as an email, please consider forwarding this to a friend who you think might like my work! And thank you for being in touch with me through this platform.

If you wish to read more, here are some of my latest writings:

Those creating war/ The basics

\

Don’t they know that life is the only thing we've got?

Don’t they know that peace can’t be created with war?

Don’t they know it takes a lot of work to be alive?

Don’t they know they could be creating something else?

\

Let them learn to plant food

Let them learn to sew and dress themselves up

Let them learn to breathe until air reaches their elbows

Let them learn the right thing to do with their feces

\

I wish I could look deep into their eyes

See if my soul can touch theirs in any way

They light up the skies as if there are no consequences

Even the seals look up to the stars to find their way

\

I hear she stayed in an empty building

After the warnings that the bombs would come

Empty street and empty neighborhood

Because who would water the plants?

I learned about cochineal recently; it is a natural material that opens up a wealth of knowledge about indigenous, colonial, and ongoing history. I had access to some of it at a workshop with master Zapotec weaver José Buenaventura Gonzalez Guitierrez at the Soil Factory. José let me take the workshop leftovers home, and I used them to dye raw cotton canvas and mixed some with glue to create a paint that would fix on paper. The paintings were done in Arches watercolor paper, preserving the original cochineal color, while the text was written on an acidic paper panel, darkening the cochineal to brown. I did a series of 12 cochineal paintings on paper under the sun, and I’m using the canvases for other paintings over time.

Over this time, I have felt that most of the conversation about motherhood and art-making revolves around the early mothering experiences, much of it centered on the impossibility of making art while caring for a baby. In my own early days as a mother with Helena, I found help with Lenka Clayton’s project "An Artist Residency in Motherhood", and did two (or three?) rounds of six-month mentorship with her. I was interested in how Lenka phrased that she wasn’t doing work “about motherhood, but out of it.” To me, Lenka’s perspective offered the possibility of framing the activities already happening in my life as art, shifting the value one gives to actions of care.

As I step out of babyhood completely, with Ulysses completing three years old, and as I continue to explore the idea of making art with, I notice, however, that the conceptual weight of Lenka’s Artist Residency in Motherhood is very different from what I have been pursuing. My long-term project is relational and based on the curiosity of what each person brings to the making. In other words, I have been learning with and making with each mark, decision, and creation that each of my children does, looking to incorporate their actions and personalities into my art-making.

The Faccion Grodzki Studio

This leads me to reflect on the construction of my professional life as an artist. When I married Marcin, I changed my name and replaced my father’s name with Marcin’s last name. The name change contradicted my feminist perspectives to favor a childhood memory: I loved that my mother had the same last name as my siblings and me before my parents divorced. Somehow, the fact that we had the same long (in Brazil we add the mother and the father’s last names, so my name used to be Debora Faccion e Ferreira Pinto) last name meant to me that the children and the mother formed a unit. I wished then to have this unit with my (future) children, and decided to change my name.

After seven years of marriage, the name change is still an ongoing bureaucratic nightmare that hopefully I’ll manage to fix within one year. However, as my home studio practice continues to evolve with the children, I feel grateful for that move. Having a home studio that we titled as Faccion Grodzki Studio has meant that we are continuously finding ways to work with each other, and that, for as long as Helena and Ulysses wish to, they can participate in the making of this work.

I realize that I started this section of the text with a phrase that introduced the reflection of my “professional life as an artist” and then wrote about my family experiences instead. This is a contradiction that I’ve been working through personally. When I look back at my life, I like to think that I was always an artist. I look for the moments in which I was interested in visual art, when I made things to sell, when I entered art school, and the academic research I developed, always looking for ways to form myself as an artist. Throughout this path that I walked with enough intentionality and a heavy dosage of seriousness before having children, I understood art-making as an almost entirely abstract action, focusing mainly on the conceptual premises of art. Going through pregnancy and bringing my children along to make art with me shifted my professional stance on how and what I hope to accomplish with art-making: I see my actions becoming more concrete and evident in the material world; these last years I was focused on the types of paint, on the textures and potentials of textiles as surfaces for paint, on the spaces where we can make and exhibit art, on the physical positions we adopt for painting, and finally on the shapes and visual vocabulary we create.

This week, I only stepped into the studio and painted in moments that Ulysses and Helena asked me to paint. Sometimes, their desire to paint is stronger than their desire to go out or play on the tablet, which shows the impact of these shared moments on our lives. This morning, Ulysses did a series of circles with watercolor on paper while telling us a story of people playing around volcanoes. The circles were the movements of their bodies as they ran around the craters and jumped from one mountain to another. The final painting was just lava erupting. Over these years, I’ve had countless moments of painting like this one, and my intention is to document more of them here through my website, to help me consolidate the collective making of our Faccion Grodzki Studio.

Similarly, Helena drew on her arm this morning, and I decided to take pictures of it. Helena has a deeply inspiring artist soul, and she is wildly creative. She is also extremely photogenic, with an iconic aura. It is a privilege to take pictures of her, so I want to share more of these here, too, as part of my effort towards the vision of our shared home studio.

The question of technique can be a central one for mothers who aim to stay with their children and continue making art. Just as there are many ways to be an artist, there are many ways to be a mother; It might be helpful to clarify that the mothers who have been meeting at the Soil Factory and have held two Art Shares so far are homeschooling and unschooling their children. Through this way of mothering, making art often becomes a shared activity, and we blur the limits between art and life almost to complete erasure.

Within the mother-child shared world, expression takes primacy, while technique must follow the speed of human physical development (in the case of children) and the (often limited) time-space possibilities for practice in highly disputed daily schedules (in the case of mothers but also of children who have to learn, grow and play so much!). Artistically, the best results of this scenario are the experimental attitude and the profoundly attuned sensibility shown by everyone involved, opening new pathways for play and dreams.

The following images document two Art Share encounters, which happened on April 3, when only mothers showed their work, and then on June 5, when mothers and children exhibited their creations.

Art Share is an alternative pop-up platform for exhibiting art held in groups at the Soil Factory. Through it, we create space for artists of all practices to talk about and show their work. The first Art Share group was created in 2024 with adults only, meeting every third Monday of the month, 5-7 PM. This second Art Share group is forming within another project titled Play Propagate, which meets every Thursday morning to plant two garden plots at the Soil Factory with children. We decided to hold an Art Share on the first Thursday of each month and to include children's participation.

Art Share - April 3, 2025:

Art Share - June 5, 2025:

I had a few times throughout life looked for the meaning of my name, and had only found that it meant “bee", but now, with the root origin in Hebrew, I could search for it with more detail.

I’m quickly writing down this so it is marked on this day. Here is an extended excerpt from the website “Abarim Publications:”

Excerpted from: Abarim Publications' Biblical Dictionary

The name Deborah is identical to the word דבורה, meaning bee, and both come from the magnificent root דבר, meaning to speak or pronounce:

דבר

The verb דבר (dabar) means to formalize: to deliberately establish and pronounce something's name or definition. This causes the thing to become "real" in the mind of whoever understands this word, name or definition, and this in turn explains why all of creation was spoken into being, and Man in turn "named" all the animals by their name and finally his Wife by hers (Genesis 2:19-23). This principle sits at the base of nominal reasoning and thus human awareness and ultimately Information Technology.

Noun דבר (dabar) means word. It also means "thing" since the naming of a thing causes the experienced reality of the thing. All thus created "things" together form the whole of experienceable reality, which in turn is called the Word of God.

Noun דבר (deber) describes any deadly pestilence, which is a "word" that breaks unstable compounds apart. In nature this occurs via the Weak Nuclear Force. The ability of unstable compounds to break apart sits at the heart of all progress and thus all reality.

The rare noun דבר (dober), refers to a pasture; probably a well-defined fenced-in field upon which sheep graze. Figuratively this word obviously refers to some specific Holy Book from which a community feeds (the books of the Bible originated as separate works, with their separate adherers). Noun דברה (dibra) means matter or issue, and the similar noun דבורה (deborah) describes the bee (this probably because bees make honey, and "milk and honey" denote essential sustenance). The noun דביר (debir) was a nickname for the Holy of Holies and means "place of the word".

The noun מדבר (midbar) literally means "place of wording" and is used once to mean mouth and 270 times to mean wilderness, and because a wilderness is a place without cultivation, any cultivation needs to spring up in a wilderness. And anybody serious about the quest for true insight needs to leave the culture (or religion) of his heritage behind and spend a stint in the uncharted wild. All major players in the Bible did so.

This excerpt helps me to trace so many aspects of my work that I’m involved with today: the importance of speaking up, the search for the right words, the impact of words on reality, the participation in social systems, the formation of compositions and understanding of layers of meanings and actions, and the creation of sweetness in life.

A note on the image on the cover of this post: That is a photograph by Tahila Mintz that helped me make a work in corporeidade titled “Blue Mud" (2022). I was pregnant with Ulysses, and I chose this image because my children told me their names when I was pregnant. I had never thought of Helena or Ulysses before, and at some point during their pregnancies, their names became clear to me.

Corporeality Manifesto

Debora Faccion Grodzki

Our body is our first and ultimate reality.

Corpo-Reality. [1]

A mani-festo, a celebration of hands: a text in which I make obvious what I bring with me, what I make, and what I offer.

The only True Knowledge is knowledge of who I am. To manifest is to act through this knowledge.

The first inevitable Truth: We were all born out of a womb.

Remember the placenta.

Before us, there was desire.

A manifesto carries in text the form of knowledge that expresses the desire for the continuation of life. I speak of what I know to be Truth, without the need to prove it. Like the Goddess Mother, I affirm.

Life has a way of working out.

There are already many goddesses. As many as we need to liberate ourselves from coloniality.

Osun. Maria. Mãe Terra. Shakti. Manat. Pele.

We can create Others.

The Goddess of the Soil Factory.

The Goddess of Belly Laughter.

The Goddess of the Fruit Tree.

The Goddess of You Are the Dancing Queen.

I want to remember everything that kept me alive.

Meet the mother who undoes the knot. She, who knows how to be still until the only necessary movement is clear. My grandmother's hands touched all that brought me here.

We need every-Body. No one can be wasted; Every-Body is an artist; we can't afford to lose anyone. The mad turned shaman; the weak, a reference for all we need to give up; the lazy, our hero.

Like Bartleby, I'd prefer not to. Unlike him, after I refuse the formula, I consider my only choice. [2]

The only True choice is the one that doesn't paralyze me. The one that flows through my breasts. It generates the energy. Desire again. It is emergent in the body:

The gut, the heart, the goosebumps, the lightness on the legs, the furtive smile.

The body is not only political/biopolitical, it doesn't simply keep the score, it isn't merely the home of the spirit. Yet, "The Spirit refuses to conceive the spirit without a body." We cannot be disembodied. [3]

The body is.

resourceful

lovable

apaixonado

malleable

humorous

pure fun

alive.

Before it decomposes, I compose, add layers, compost, use, and reuse. The reality of the body is the present moment that transits all the consequences of the past into the future. Its Nature is trans: it is constant transformation. The consciousness that reaches the muscle forms it in stretch or relaxation.

In corporeality, performance doesn’t exist. The brain plasticity recycles the microplastics. The revolution has been happening. Some never stopped planting the food forest.

We were animals.

We were cannibals.

We were humans.

We were gods.

We were scientists.

And we were cyborgs.

We are natives.

We are immigrants.

We are anthropologists.

We are artists.

We nourish the Body with matter and meaning; we dream and build with Others.

History is written in the Body-. Art reads it in each -Movement. It is Corpo-Reality.

[1] The word in Portuguese that precedes this manifesto is “corporeidade,” which I encountered in Leda Maria Martin’s work, making a difference between North American performance and the work of Brazilian artists as “corporeidade.”

[2] Here I’m referencing Gilles Deleuze “Bartleby; or, The Formula,” which appears in “Essays Critical and Clinical,” trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997, pp. 68-90.

[3] Andrade, Oswald de. "Manifesto Antropófago." Revista de Antropofagia, no. 1, 1928, pp. 3-7.

I am doing an online course with Brazilian writer Edmilson de Almeida Pereira, in which he introduced to us the concept of "mundo encaixado" or what we could translate as "fitted world." Today, he wrote to me that he hopes I'm finding happiness in my intellectual pursuits. His phrase made me cry.

For some time now, I've been writing to practice Truth. I jot down everything that I currently Know to be True (intentionally capitalized). I am understanding that when I reach Truth, I fit into the world.

In each phase of our lives, we know something, which means that in each phase of our lives, we can contribute something specific. In the phase of my life when I was pregnant and having babies, there was a boom of Knowledge I had never seen before. I wished more women had written and spoken about everything they learned at that phase. Now, Ulysses is turning three, and some things are fading away.

Of what remains: 1. Women need to invest a tremendous amount of energy in learning and figuring out how to care for their bodies and, consequently, their children's health. In our current society, none of the necessary Knowledge is given to us; on the contrary, we are miseducated, and we learn the wrong narratives and the sickening information. One needs to fight for health and then learn how to relax in true Knowledge despite all the doubts and judging eyes that will come as a consequence of the deep misogyny we live in. 2. Our society, especially the society in the US, but all the societies that live in cities and function within Western capitalist colonial structures, don't have anymore Knowledge of what childhood is and how the spirit of the child functions. All the structures we have in the rationalized, modernized, technology-driven worlds suppress the imagination and wildness of childhood, expecting organized and hierarchized actions that do not support human growth. As a consequence, people pathologize children and then, as a consequence, continue to pathologize themselves later in life. They never fit in. They were never given a chance—a true chance to be happy, to know themselves by first fitting in, and making sense to their parents and the world. Children don't make sense to these adults in this North American society.

When I was in Brazil, everyone acted like my children's cries, sufferings, and childish misbehavior made total sense every second.

What a relief. They ARE children.

I do not obey in advance.

The main lesson of this time in my life has been to follow desire. To learn what True Desire is.

The word true, the search for Truth, has been central to everything in my work in the last eight years. While writing my dissertation, I touched on it only to be called naive by my academic advisor. Truth, he said, is a philosophical term with a long history that can't be approached lightly. I disagreed and kept it in my text, and I am proud of this act of dissent. I carry that Truth is actually the basis for sanity and health. Not only the so-called mental health, but also the biological bodily health. The experience of Truth sustains human life, so we all have it at some point.

However, the experience of Truth can be corrupted; it will especially be undermined for women and anyone who doesn't fit in colonial/capitalist societies. In the fitted world where I come from, everyone fits somehow. In colonial societies, few are artificially made to fit through power and money.

The American society doesn't understand poetry. Here, people think poetry isn't true, that its base is metaphor, and therefore, only brings up comparisons that aim to expand our linguistic capacity, flexing our muscles for representations. They don't know that every word is a prayer. That every word that we utter builds the world anew.

Poetry only exists through Truth; it is effective prayer. Everyone who prays knows that true prayers are effective and that repetition out loud makes the prayer stronger. Poetry is on the path to becoming prayer; it uses words to solve problems and find ways forward. Through poetry, we discover the true potency of a specific word in a particular situation.

The incapacity to understand the word Truth in English might come from a lack of language that reflects the lack of experience in the society. In Portuguese, the word is "verdade," which has the same suffix as "felicidade": "dade," which serves to create abstract nouns that denote an impermanent state, a state of being. The word "truthiness," which would serve the purpose, had its meaning transformed into the incapacity of some to put together fact and Truth, those who so greatly lost touch with reality that they confuse human-invented narratives with experience. So, there is no word to describe the state of being Truth in the sense of its instability, with "truthfulness" having a stable meaning too close to "truth."

What I confront here is that only happiness delivers Truth in the sense of Knowledge, while in this distorted Western world, we are often led to believe that it is through suffering that we learn and that through pain, we achieve clarity. Happiness, however, doesn't depend on privilege and comfort, another misunderstanding sold to us. I see happiness in my children; they only know the Truth because children don't mislead or manipulate. They test the world; they experiment with everything available to determine what is true. Despite everything, children have so much happiness because their connection with Truth hasn't been alienated.

I need to stop now.

My goal with this text is to comment on how my family of origin carries keys for my creative life and how deepening these relationships is fundamental for strengthening the clarity of my work.

I have recently noticed how I enjoy transforming my experiences into overarching lessons of life with a totalizing tone. For example, I spent the last three years working with the notion that "everyone is an artist," after many years in academia studying art-making and avant-garde art from the 20th century. I'm not a traditional academic in that I am not successful in separating my research from everything else in my life, so I started to treat everyone I relate to as artists, searching for what they are already doing in their lives that they feel is art. During this trip, I recognized how this view of everyone as an artist heightens my expectations of others, putting pressure on our relationships, while at the same time, it gives me the privilege of listening to people's deepest longings and most creative ideas.

The realization of everyone being an artist also comes from the understanding that art only exists within relationships, so making art is always an act of being with someone else. The contemporary realization in the art world is that this someone else can be a non-human, often as a way to focus on our relationship with nature. However, much of this contemporary discourse highlights a hyper-independent human being who can relate with nature alone and find in nature, instead of in other humans, what we need to fulfill life.

Assume complexity.

The term Ubuntu is a concept that helps me think about this. Ubuntu is a Nguni word that can be translated as "humanity to others" and often is understood with the phrase "I am because you are." In the first definition, there is a recognition that we project our humanity in the world, in others (not only human beings!), and that projection is fundamental in creating dignifying and uplifting relationships -- The risk here always being that if I don't care or know much about my own humanity, I am not able to project a positive humanity to others! The second definition then brings more clarity to it, with the understanding that others are also projecting their humanity onto us, and when they do so, they give us the chance of Being. Again, the risk is that if one projects a lower sense of humanity on us, we suffer with it, creating the need for a higher and stronger conscience of who we are and how we stand as humans.

I am glad to have a word like Ubuntu and hope to find ways to use it without the definition of "humanity" in the future. Being a human and focusing on humanity is a European categorization, which historically tends to separate us from nature, and gives origin to all sorts of harmful classifications like the civilized and the educated, not to mention being at the root of the invention of race by dividing the human from the animal. Yet, the word Ubuntu, the way that we translate it, helps us to recognize that we are this particular kind of being that depends on relationships to live, that our existence depends on being with, on projecting ourselves onto others, and being projected on.

I'm using the word project and projecting a lot because in the back of my mind, I am working with the notion of family, thinking about my trip to Brazil, and seeing my family of origin. The family of origin or the people we related with while we were children are fundamental because they are the ones we first project onto and are projected from. These foundational relationships acquired a pathological tone over the years, I believe, especially with the manipulation of psychiatry within the capitalist world, but I defend that our capacity to deepen and activate the many layers of relationship we have with those who gave us life are important acts for our sanity and creativity.

On this trip, I was attuned to the things that I encountered while I was with my family, which showed me ways to take steps forward as an artist and find clarity about my work. I collected many items and photographs and did a couple of actions while I was in Brazil that I want to return to with time in the coming month in my home studio. This text marks the first attempt to bring this effort to my website and those who read it.

As always, I hope my efforts to enhance my creativity are helpful to others. Ubuntu.

At a very low point in my life, back in 2017, when I had suicidal ideations, I learned two things that I want to share here as a way to finish this text. The first is the only strategy that kept me alive, which I am still thankful for today: don't do anything, stay still, and don't act until the feeling passes and the best, most beautiful, and alive actions come to the mind and the body. Life wants to continue, it wants to thrive, and it will as long as we don't interrupt it. The second is that I already have everything I need to succeed in life; it was all handed to me when I was born and throughout my childhood. I believe firmly in this -- again, making a totalizing assumption for everyone: we were all given everything good that we need to live life to the fullest, no matter how hard our childhood might have been. It pains me to write such an affirmation in times when we are seeing so many children suffering the unimaginable in Gaza, so I want to note that I don't disregard any of it. This affirmation is, in fact, a recognition that at some point, everything that we have lived sums up and comes together to help in the making of life.

I read this morning in the Brazilian newspapers the twisting of reality done by the Israeli leaders, continuing to commit genocide, and I want to write more about how war creates the narrative that we only need food and a certain material structure to live life. At the heart of it is the cultural perspective, which recognizes that the Capital cannot provide the continuation of life. Here I locate the perpetual value of the Palestinian struggle: our home is where we cultivate all the relationships that strengthen our lives and connection to this world. Our home is not only the material structure of our house, but the relationships that define us, our family, other humans, and not-humans too, especially the earth and our immediate environment. Through war, one can manipulate our notion of basic necessities, but eventually, war has to end, and when it does, we remember that what sustains life is more complex than bread and water. Our culture is a basic necessity for the continuation of life.

I took these pictures one morning in Cabo Frio, a beach town where we spent one week in Brazil. Helena was eager to go to the beach and defined the place we were staying as "our new home." We had rented an apartment, so as soon as we arrived, I unpacked all our belongings and put the suitcases away, as a way to help us feel as at home as possible for those few days. Today, when we woke up in our bed at home in Ithaca, I felt the deep comfort of waking up particularly rested in our familiar mattress, pillows, and sheets. Yet, as soon as we got up, we had to search for the magic that was right there in our temporary Brazilian home.

While writing this text and looking at these photos again, I feel a sense of relief in finding that I did manage to make art (even if not as much as I wanted, not as explicitly, and not specifically painting) while traveling. There are many preparatory steps to making art, which are in essence already making art; something I need to remember so I can always stay home within myself.