Travessia / Crossing

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 alternative cartographies, seeking new perspectives 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.