When I arrive at the studio, I light a candle. I spend some time in contemplation, make coffee or tea, and only then do I touch the stone. Process is a word I rarely use; I tend to think of my practice more as a ritual.
My studio is in Barbalho, a neighborhood in Salvador’s historic district. I have been working there for five years and living in the city for six. I think of the studio as a space for learning: I learn there, as do the people who share the space with me, and it is through this exchange of knowledge that the work unfolds.
My relationship with materials is one of negotiation, and it begins in the street. I walk a great deal, sometimes for kilometers, as a way of fabulating, and it is through walking that things appear. The pitch I use is asphalt emulsion, the same material used in roadwork and to waterproof concrete slabs and roofs. I once passed a crew paving a street here in the neighborhood and found myself looking at the tone of that black, at the movements of the people applying it. The exchange came later, on a Friday: twenty liters for a few cases of beer. The blue comes from leftover printing ink; the iron comes from scrapyards or the streets; the stone comes from Minas Gerais, arranged directly with the people who extract it. I call this escambo: currencies created through workers and communities.
Inside the studio, the negotiation continues because the material responds. The pitch that paves roads and seals roofs on the street becomes a thin skin on the stone. When the blue encounters the charcoal, it reveals the quartzite held within the stone, and the surface begins to shine in a way I cannot control. I oxidize the iron with salt, water, and vinegar, or sometimes with chemical solutions, and on those days the entire studio smells of vinegar. For me, painting the stone means having a conversation with it.
Soapstone is soft; you can scratch it with a fingernail. I remove it point by point: the tool strikes, dislodges a grain, leaves a hollow. On one small piece alone, I counted more than ten thousand strikes. This repetition belongs to the ritual. There is music playing and food nearby, all the time. Cantaria is the name for the craft of working and carving stone, and within that word I hear canto—song.
The technique has a name, apicoamento—a form of point chiseling—but I call it scarification. When the cut runs along the length of the stone, it becomes a groove, a continuous scarification. A keloid moves in the opposite direction: it is a relief that grows outward. The first one I ever knew was my own. When I was five years old, I fell chin-first onto a stone and cut my tongue. There was no hospital, and it healed on its own.
I have three places of birth, and all three enter the studio with me. Recreio, in the Zona da Mata region of Minas Gerais, is the one on my birth certificate, in 1991. It is the town of my grandfather Sebastião, a shoemaker who lost his sight and for whom I made drawings in relief so that he could read them with his hands. The wall reliefs come from those drawings. Curumaú, in Rio de Janeiro’s West Zone, is where I was raised, in a flat neighborhood of alleys and narrow passageways, built collectively through mutirão. From there came the bricklayer’s verb—the trade of my father: assentar, to lay, set, or place. Salvador was a choice. It was there that I learned to float, which means surrendering your weight to the current, and the balance of some of my sculptures comes from this: stone and iron chain supporting one another through weight alone.
In what I make, all three places arrive together and contaminate one another. The festivities do too: Folia de Reis and Mineiro-pau, bate-bola, and Nego Fugido form the same triad for me. My grandfather led Folia de Reis processions and planted the ceremonial flag during the festivities, which is why I call my freestanding sculptures bandeiras—flags. I encounter my work because I am constantly encountering myself.
Writing this text feels like a diary to me. I hope that these paintings, which are still being born, can awaken memories and a reconnection with the lessons we have learned from our ancestors.
You can find out more about Larissa at @azuolarissa // www.simoesdeassis.com/artistas/larissa-de-souza
Photos: Anita Goes
