“2025 As a first-generation nonbinary trans American of Brazilian nationality, I often think of the pearl as it relates to queerness. In the same way that the nacre of the pearl takes years of gradual deposits to build into an iridescent sphere, queerness is a life-long practice of becoming. The thinner and more numerous the nacre layers in the pearl, the finer the luster. Life experiences accumulate and shape our queerness, our soft-glow luster. I create altars for queer and trans people called Anti-Monuments. I use discarded materials such as broken granite and broken tile, lost Legos, Brillo pad, and recycled textile samples, juxtaposed with materials like semi-precious broken cabochons and ethically -sourced pearls. The adjacency of low-value items to that with a high inherent value calls into question the idea of VALUE in the first place: who is ascribing value to these objects, and to ourselves? What makes an existence valuable versus not? As a queer and trans person, who is ascribing value to me? Who is telling us what we are worth, what we are made of? We must ascribe that value to ourselves. We must see the beauty in our own divinely mundane. Assemblage is my craft. It is one of the most important life skills that have been handed down to me generationally: the process of gathering and saving (trinkets, treasure, trash, fragments of my psyche). I come from a long line of (junk) collectors. Epigenetically, I understand this develops as a result of times of scarcity. In this vein, pearls will always form as a way for the creature to cope with an irritant, or pain. My sculptures defy traditional monuments and their stationary state, their phallic structures, and most importantly, their false sense of closure, as if something has been done, finished, resolved, or fixed (re: Alabama’s Confederate Soldiers Monument). Traditional monuments come with baggage: usually, it is an overarching political force or idea telling the viewer HOW they must be interacted with and what one ought to believe when faced with such monuments. Instead of mirroring these qualities, I aim to do the opposite: my sculptures do not take up one’s entire line of sight, instead, they are miniature and require a commitment from the viewer of close-viewing and extreme inspection. In my work, there is no imposing force or overarching ideal telling a viewer what they must believe in order to ‘correctly’ interact with such sculptures. My altars are dedicated to the celebration and uplifting of queer and trans people, especially those who have passed away at the hands of transphobic violence. Where are the monuments to them? Where are their sites of remembrance, exaltation, and tributes to their resilience? My work is about reassigning value to the devalued, under valued, value-less, and the socially discarded. I believe the way my materials are used reflects the idea of queerness by challenging societal norms in similar ways that a gender non-conforming person would—just by existing.
2023 My family immigrated to Houston in 1997 in pursuit of a better life. As a child, I remember rarely playing with toys and instead opting for the hobby of taking things apart and glueing them back together. Armed with dollar-store superglue and an eyeglass repair kit, I would take apart alarm clocks, jeans, trash, dolls and little dollar-store trinkets, before gluing them all together in a new way. The act of gluing disconnected items together assigned new meaning and relevance to physical objects in the same way that an immigrant child often must organize and assemble foreign information in order to make meaningful distinctions. This material translation has evolved to include miniature toys, miscellaneous jewels, textile samples, and other objects representative of both (a) a timeline of a transforming psyche and (b) the devalorization of materials once something has become broken, or singular, or used or discarded. This body of work questions capitalistic value and repositions a melee of found objects into representative monuments erected to reflect the fantasy of building The American Dream.”
