Olho da Terra

This performance and its consequent installation are the outcome of a one-month residency in São Paulo, Brazil, reconnecting me to my hometown and allowing me to develop research on the city’s foundational site. My studies of the knoll where the city began started in 2013 for my first solo show, where I conducted investigative walks from the center of the knoll to the city’s outskirts. Inhampabuassu (the Eye of the Earth in Tupi-Guarani language) is a location where displacement, bloodshed, and their subsequent monuments teach us about historical amnesia and the shared stories of colonization across the Americas. 

During this residency, I delved into the symbolic force of this ancestral site and the symbology of its original name (information that is still uncertain and unknown by most of the city’s inhabitants). The work relates to my ongoing research on “navels” of the land: sites that give birth to places and their myths across multiple cultures. Reflecting on São Paulo’s navel, I created a symbolic knoll in the center of the residency exhibition room with the city’s natural soil (found in waste from construction sites). While creating a direct relationship with raw earth, this performance also reconnects body, place, and matter — an act of reunion with the land, its ancestrality, and one’s sense of belonging.