Lacuna

For more than ten years I have told Jun Matsui that I wanted to make visible on my body the massage my maternal grandmother Maria gave me when I had breathing crises, following the hallucinations I have had since childhood: seeing animals and people entering the house whom only I could see made it impossible for me to breathe. In my family she was perhaps one of the only people who truly saw me, apart from Aunt Bel. My grandmother worried about where I was. In that context, and in so many others, she would never have called me mad: it was all a spiritual entanglement, a depth of flow that not everyone wants to understand.

One day she took a handful of herbs and macerated them with a powder; there was a basin of hot water and smoke in my cousin's room. The drawing of this tattoo is the movement her hands made.

My grandmother was my curator, my benzedeira, my healer. I have an entire performance in my head in her honour; I only need to wait for the tattoo to be finished, because it is the central point. And thank you, Jun Matsui, for understanding everything from the beginning, even the erotic, profound and grotesque nuances involved in the simple 'where these hands have passed'. When I see black I feel something deep that can be plunged into — the dark part of this story that does not need to be told in words. Everything dances in me, even the psoriasis that appears when the body truly needs to dance. And there was no one else but you, because you followed so many of my self-processes up close, reinventing them through these pains.