The search to fill the gaps in memory has driven the art of Laíza Ferreira, from Pará, since childhood. Even before she saw herself as an artist, she was drawn into the world of images and came to view artistic creation as a survival strategy, “an escape route, a way of transforming subjectivity, my imaginaries of myself and of other people.”
Faced with the cultural and historical erasure of her community, Laíza learned about her quilombola origins only through the oral accounts of her maternal grandmother, Cassiana, with whom she shared a special bond. Her grandmother told her stories about her past, the places she had lived, and her wish to return to the quilombola community where she grew up, although she could not say exactly where it was. Laíza only learned details about Vila São Manoel, in the Jambuaçu Quilombo, in Moju, Pará, after her grandmother’s death, while working on her undergraduate final thesis at university.
“My grandmother always talked about the territory, but she didn’t know it, she didn’t know where it was. So it was when I did my final thesis that I started discovering the places, because she didn’t remember many of them, and it was from the stories she told me that I began investigating.”
The late discovery made her realize that the gaps in her personal history, which she had so long sought to fill, ran even deeper. Researching the Jambuaçu Quilombo and seeking to learn about Dona Cassiana’s past, in a process she describes as immensely painful, she came to understand what she had already sensed: the scale of the cultural erasure of the Amazon’s original peoples is immense. Laíza says that to this day she has not been able to find out whether she still has relatives in the quilombo, although she imagines she does.
“Our stories were erased. We don’t know places, people, histories; we don’t have access to historical archives. The official, colonial historiography erased everything.”
Even before this awareness deepened, Laíza’s art already sought to fill the gaps in memory and to spark questions, reflections, and poetics. Her creations drew on her grandmother’s stories, her own imagination, everyday experiences, and political issues that trouble her, through analog or digital collage.
“I access these memories as a force field where I create other possibilities of existence. It is a way of weaving alternative paths and of understanding one’s own narratives.”
Born and raised in Ananindeua (Pará), the artist came into contact with the world of collage at a very young age, when she began making fanzines with friends, an activity that soon became her first professional work. Besides enchanting her, the technique had the advantage of being financially and materially accessible, since she already had plenty of research material on hand: old books and magazines, yellowed pages, elements that strongly appealed to her. It also allowed her to move on to different combinations and new paths.
“I nurture the imaginary to reconnect with those who came before me through the displacement of images and the layering of planes.”
Her awareness of the gaps in her own history and of the invisibility of the Amazonian territory was already expressed in her work through the imaginary, which, in her words, is “this place of reconstructing narratives, in which ancestral memory is a process of subjective reinvention.”
“My works are based on investigations that begin with memories, fictions, territories, and distinct temporalities, drawing on images that evoke the political imagination.”
Building on what she absorbs from this ancestral memory, from literary references, and from everyday experiences, Laíza seeks to intersect these elements and create a conception that is new to her, an intimate technology. “An ancestral technology.”
In this way, her works propose a break with Western temporality, which is linear, Cartesian, and violent toward Amazonian realities and subjectivities, and which kills human sensitivity. She believes this rupture can show us other paths for creating, reflecting on, and discussing the Amazon, allowing Amazonians to imagine new possibilities for dreaming and to have their subjectivities and identities affirmed, recognized, and respected.
“The territory and the forest are part of my own body. Why destroy something that is part of your body? This is also something the original peoples bring us: teachings of respect and reverence for nature.”
This creative effort has already earned the artist the Margem Potiguar Photography Award (Prêmio Margem Fotografia Potiguar) in 2020 for the series Ancestral Memory, and a nomination for the PIPA Prize in 2021, as well as exhibitions in Brazil, Colombia, and Spain.
Sadly, Dona Cassiana passed away without fulfilling her dream of returning to the quilombola community of São Manoel, but her granddaughter Laíza intends to honor that dream in her place.
A clearer sense of the extent of her own erasure produced a shock, a “crossing-out” (rasura) in her art. Realizing she had been deprived of a part of her life, she began to ask: how to move forward? What to build now? Today, already feeling better, she realizes that a fertile process can emerge from this.
On another front, Laíza is an advocate for art education, an activity that she believes must be part of artistic processes, since our relationship with images is deeply problematic.
“We are constantly bombarded by violent images that wound our daily lives and our mental health. That is why artists, as active, thinking people, have an important task: to bring into education a new relationship with images, one that can fit within the social and cultural context of different groups, as a path toward building something political, collective, and self-managed that does not harm our imaginaries.”
To advance this educational work, the artist, who holds a degree in Visual Arts from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), is now pursuing a graduate degree in Visual Arts Education and carries out activities in this field alongside her artistic practice.