Alexandre do Anjos meets Karlla Girotto

Alexandre dos Anjos: Thank you for agreeing to have this conversation with me. We’ve known each other for, what, about twenty years? Our stories have long been intertwined.

Karlla Girotto: More than intertwined. We’ve shared so many stories—trust, and a real openness to each other’s processes—first through Oficina de Criação, and then throughout life. Actually, I think we’ve known each other even longer. Twenty-four years, Alê!

AA: Wild, Karlla. I was recently browsing the G>E Instagram and website—[Grupo de Estudos e Pesquisas em Processos Criativos, coordinated by Karlla Girotto]—and I realized it has become such a strong network. Oficina de Criação came before that. Were you coordinating that project too?

KG: Yes. Oficina de Criação was closely tied to my work in fashion. Back then, in the early 2000s, I was deeply involved as a designer—doing runway shows and all of that—and I could see there was a lot of talent, but very few opportunities for people who weren’t part of the dominant class. There were hardly any public policies or affirmative action programs yet, and going to college was simply unimaginable for many.
So Oficina de Criação was created to offer at least a minimum level of access to study and opportunity, so people could develop their potential. I had the chance to grow because of a scholarship—I was one of the few who “made it out of the neighborhood”—but a scholarship benefits very few. My intention was to reach more people, by creating a council of professionals who could teach and support those talents. At one point, we negotiated a support partnership with Faculdade Santa Marcelina. A lot happened. And that’s where I met you, Alê.

AA: That’s right!

KG: Ten years after Oficina de Criação, in 2013, I started thinking about creating a collective. G>E began as an art research group—a space to discuss process—and it gradually became something much larger than me, larger even than the idea of a collective. Today, I still do one-on-one meetings and artistic mentorship. I have so much affection for these projects. I see them as collective force: a force that produces life and thought. A place to reflect on who we are, what we’re doing here—and also why we don’t gather more often to talk about what matters most in artistic practice, which is relationships and how we elaborate our presence in the world. That shapes artistic production.
You, for instance, are an artist who came through Oficina de Criação, and whom I reconnected with through G>E. Our relationship continued—it became friendship, partnership, shared life. And we keep crossing paths in other places too.

AA: Yes. And it’s interesting to hear you talk about Oficina. I had such a strong desire to study fashion and art—maybe even to hold both at once. I wasn’t actively thinking about that intersection at the time, but it ended up becoming part of my current practice. That experience generated a lot of questions and curiosity, and a desire to investigate life through creative process.
The hegemonic system tends to separate art from fashion, but both occupy a space of performance, exposure, and visuality. Fashion was my first livelihood—my first way to make a living. So it wasn’t only a process of understanding my own production; it was also a place of survival. Initiatives like Oficina create movement and exchange that expand our world.

KG: Absolutely.

AA: I’ve been reading Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, where he talks about this context of alienation imposed by the white Eurocentric system—a system that deliberately alienates Black subjects and confines them to a space they’re not meant to leave, as if it were the only space they could occupy. That ends up shaping people psychologically, until they begin to believe that certain places and forms of access simply aren’t for them. I still bring that psychological imposition into therapy.
And I’ve been thinking about it a lot in relation to my work now that I’m finishing an MFA, because race cuts across my entire trajectory.

KG: It’s a very carefully constructed project of domination and white supremacy. It runs through patriarchy and capitalism—not just runs through them, but is structured by them. It’s hard to imagine a project like that not shaping people subjectively, especially those for whom it was designed. So how does someone separate themselves from that project in order to return to what they are? What does a racialized person have to do to remain not only alive, but vital?

AA: Yes!

KG: I come from a working-class background. So in terms of class, I saw that project of the world attempting to assign people to certain activities and certain kinds of life. Rejecting that destiny and building your own life is enormous work. And if we don’t have our peers for that—if we don’t build alliances over a lifetime—it becomes harder, more exhausting, and it drains our vitality. Because it’s not just a scholarship that solves a life. You need food every day. You need transportation to get to where you study. You need the means to buy materials—paper, paint—that the dominant class can purchase without difficulty. It’s not only the thing itself.

AA: Exactly.

KG: Over time, though, we start recognizing other ways of producing our lives. When I look at your work, I see you in the MFA, fully embodied—your skin, your practices, your knowledge. There’s the material aspect, but there’s also this whole dimension of subjectivity: self-perception, self-knowledge, and even self-unknowing—our most mysterious parts, which we aren’t simply given access to, and yet we still communicate with them on a molecular level.