Rosana Paulino’s practice spans drawing, embroidery, engraving, printmaking, collage, sculpture, and installation to explore the history of racial violence and the persisting legacy of slavery in Brazil, deconstructing the production and dissemination of racist theories that served as justification for European colonialism and the slave trade. The drawings of the Wet Nurse series (2005) examine the role of Black enslaved women who breastfed their masters’ children. Entangled networks of veins leading from reddened breasts sprout from nipples, indicating milk while also suggesting blood. In the Weavers (2003), roots grow from women’s breasts, vaginas, eyes, and mouths – the tendrils bind and torture their very maker. The series Senhora das plantas (2019) depicts webs of roots and plants spreading from women’s bodies. Trunks emerging from the ground rise to amalgamate with bodies that in turn merge with, are wrapped by, and grow flowers, plants, and trees in the Jatobá series (2019). In the series Carapace of Protection, made in the first decade of the 2000s, bodies emerge from cocoons, the process of metamorphosis granting the human-insect a momentary sense of euphoria. Revealing the promise of transformation and the possibility of avoiding fixed paradigms, the skin becomes the relic of an earlier time and the shedding of constraints.
Liv Cuniberti
