Is it possible to think forest without agriculture? Where is agriculture in the city? And where is art in agriculture? In the struggle for land? In the struggle for agroecology? In the struggle for health? How can art support emancipatory, life-affirming – and therefore health-producing – knowledge production processes?

Based on these triggering questions, Manto do Recolhimento was created as an experiment prior to a cycle of plastic arts workshops organized by the artist in Morro da Providência (RJ). During the residency, another mantle was created with the women and children of the favela Morro da Providência, as part of the work I do for the NGO Providência Agroecológica. Together, they make up a series of capes that began in 2022.

It also invites us to the possibility of life that is agriculture, in its very human sacredness. The Manto do Recolhimento is inspired by urban agriculture. Everything we call forest, inside and outside the city, is an ancestral gift, from agriculture, from the management done by people who came before us, who today we call “traditional peoples”.

Finding ways for subjectivity to be expressed still seems to be very important. Hence the need to share the transformative power of art in a series of workshops. The proposal is also connected to my doctoral research in Public Health (Ensp/Fiocruz) on the production of knowledge connecting art, urban agriculture and collective health.

From the dual position of visual artist and researcher, I investigate art in its vocation to intervene in social practice. An ethic of production is always brought to the fore in my creative process, in order to realize something human – in the sense given by Paulo Freire, of human as the dimension of loving union between criticism and beauty. Criticality and beauty hand in hand, in dialog, and in dance. Criticality (understood as political living) united with beauty, understood as a way of living with others, in a sensitive, emotional, hopeful and utopian dialog.