It is with great joy and gratitude that I participate in this international art competition dedicated to vitiligo. When I began my research, the idea of creating from and through my skin was something entirely new to me. I never imagined that one day this journey would lead me to be part of an event like Vitiligo Day.

Absences and presences make up my skin. Islands of pigment, seas of patches, continents of uncertainty. Like the movements of the African diaspora — the flows of different peoples from the African continent who arrived in the Americas carrying embodied knowledge and technologies — my skin maps a history of transformation and reinvention.

This project explores vitiligo through these mapped routes. I use the contours of the patches to compose perspectives alternative cartographies, seeking new for this skin condition that causes depigmentation.

In the piece Travessia (Crossing), I combine photography and digital collage, printed in fine art on canvas. The material evokes the flexibility and softness of skin. The proposed installation uses clips and steel cables, without a rigid frame — only a wooden stretcher bar at the top for support.

As in an Afrofuturist utopia, this image symbolically repigments the voids. And perhaps, in doing so, it might also reactivate melanin — and our collective capacity to imagine and reinvent ourselves.