Can you tell us a little about yourself and how you first began creating art? Was there a particular experience or mentor that led you onto this path?  

I was born and raised in São Paulo, Brazil, in a working-class family. My father came from the countryside, where he experienced hunger throughout his childhood, and eventually moved to the city in search of better opportunities for himself and his siblings. In São Paulo, he became a factory worker. Thanks to Brazil’s social policies and economic growth in the 2000s, my family gained just enough stability for me to access a basic education, though they still worked long hours.
I spent most of my childhood in an all-day school, which meant I learned to take care of myself early on. Those years were challenging, and art naturally emerged as a form of escape and self-therapy. My artistic practice deepened in my early teens, when questions around gender and struggles with mental health grew more present. Art became a space where I could process, sublimate, and transform those experiences. It remains the language through which I understand myself and the world.

Your artist statement asserts you materialize “violent fantasies from an infantile imagination” alongside “reclaiming lost innocence” - I am curious to hear more about what this means to you and how these seemingly opposing forces co-exist and emerge in your work

Growing up, I spent long periods of time unsupervised. My parents worked constantly, and the people entrusted with caring for me often became sources of negligence, violence, and abuse. In that environment, I gravitated toward the only things that offered both escape and coherence: cartoons. I was mesmerized by their exaggerated violence — anthropomorphic animals chasing each other with TNT, anvils dropping from the sky, snipers hidden behind bushes. That odd mix of innocence and brutality became the starting point of my artistic investigations. Even today, my work blends soft, playful, “cute” imagery with undertones of paranoia, impact, and threat. It’s a way of reconciling two emotional realities that shaped me: the childlike impulse toward wonder and the darker, more chaotic forces surrounding it.

The child has long functioned as a figure of innocent perception. Artists such as Jeff Koons tap into this sense of youthful marvel, though in his case “innocence” often merges with a kind of joyful embrace of consumer culture rather than any escape from it. Others adopt an infantilized posture to mock or destabilize paternal authority. Regression has historical precedents, and their political charge is anything but consistent. This dynamic aligns with my own attraction to ordinary, mundane symbols as portals into more complex psychological terrains — taking an image that appears straightforward and revealing the hidden structures beneath it resonates deeply with me; an inviting surface that slowly exposes the instability and violence embedded within.


You often work with found materials which you describe as a “lumpen” of  toys and tatters from childhood. I am fascinated by the way in which you describe these objects as “lumped”, which seems to use deliberately anti-precious, intimate language. Could you tell us more about what draws you to these specific objects? Are they autobiographical, taken from your own past?

I first came across the term through Hal Foster’s writings on Mike Kelley, a formative influence on my work. Foster suggests that Kelley’s critical strategy hinges on a kind of deliberately childish provocation directed at adolescent dysfunction… a way of acknowledging that art, for the artist, often functions as its own distorted and unruly reality. In ‘The Return of the Real’, the author describes how Kelley evokes the maternal body in toys and blankets: comforting objects that, once defiled, expose traces of aggression, abandonment, and the psychological debris of material culture.
“Lumpen”, German for “rag”, threads through my practice: rags, refuse, waste, the remnants of all classes. Misshapen masses of filthy stuffed teddy bears, blankies draped over grotesque shapes, dysfunctional figures refuse to settle into tidy formal shapes or to be redeemed by cultural meaning. This aesthetics of abjection, failure, grunge types, speaks to a deeper weariness not only with identity but with desire itself. 

Indistinction takes on a schizoid quality: bodies splintering, the gaze overtaking the subject, the self thinning out into its surroundings. And yes, they are drawn from my own past. Everything I do is autobiographical or autofictional. I also incorporate the “dirty” as an ethical refusal to participate in the sanitized presentation of art as a polished symbol of status.



There is a strong uncanny quality to your work as you manipulate and distort children’s objects subverting their innocence into violence and decay. In some works it is subtly expressed through small rips or smears of red paint, but in other works, such as “Autopsia” and “Centopeia”, this distortion becomes a lot more explicit and grotesque. Can you expand upon this juxtaposition? I also wonder whether your process of manipulating these materials is intuitive or more deliberate?

Within psychoanalytic frameworks, the uncanny often surfaces through early, foundational fantasies, when repressed infant complexes are stirred back by some impression, or when the primitive beliefs we thought we had outgrown appear confirmed again. Something once familiar returns in a distorted, ambiguous form — the boundary between what is real and what is imagined blurs; the distinction between living and lifeless objects becomes uncertain, as we see with dolls, mannequins, or automatons; and the sign can overtake the referent, with psychic reality overshadowing physical reality. This often feels like the subject falling under the spell of a symptom.

Childhood can also access an idyllic space that denies the harsh reality of the world. I own a personal collection of “toys and tatters”; found objects, gifts, and things from my childhood. Whenever I go to the studio, I just try to assemble things in a way that makes sense to me, I suppose…

I am drawn to how your work explores the gender expectations forced upon children -  can you tell us more about this and what led you to focus on this in your practice?

The uncanny is ultimately symbolized by castration and death. And since the death drive is charged with eroticism, pleasure can be felt in the destruction and desire stirred by death. The Surrealists, for instance, are fascinated by sadism, which they treat as a method: the destruction of the object itself. Typically directed at feminine figures, this sadism is often the materialization of the patriarchal subject’s projections. Some women artists such as Cindy Sherman and Tracey Emin complicate beauty by turning it into a kind of convulsive submission to jouissance; an attempt to fill a void marked by castration, a drive toward disappearance.

As an androgynous kid, people constantly pushed me into a feminine category, while at the same time reprimanding me for wanting to play with “girls’ toys” like dolls. I was excluded from the boys’ group and redirected toward the girls, which, in retrospect, shaped my sense of gender more than anything else. Those experiences—along with the violence that often accompanied them, from harassment to being assigned responsibilities far beyond my age—made me feel deeply disconnected from boyhood (and childhood) as it was socially defined. That sense of displacement eventually informed my gender transition, but it also became central to my artistic language. Now I work deliberately with imagery coded as “girly”: teddy bears, unicorns, pastel fantasies. I’m interested in how these symbols can hold both vulnerability and subversion, and how something seemingly sweet can carry the weight of a much more complicated history.


I also gained a very clinical, almost forensic, impression with the splayed bodies of the dolls in “The Holy Brat” and “Autopsia” which became more explicit in the “Monster Hospital” installation. I am curious to learn more about this medical investigation

My interest in medicine and the corpse emerges from interconnected sources. On one level, my theoretical engagement with the abject situates me within a field deeply invested in wounds, trauma, and the dead body. This framework also shapes how I read the “apocalyptic” signs of late capitalism and how I think about my own language in relation to biopolitics.

My personal experiences with mourning, the repressed violence attached to trans-misogyny, and encounters with psychiatric violence or self-destructive behaviours draw me toward questions of sickness and vulnerability. Alongside these experiences is a long-standing fascination with horror. Julia Kristeva—feminist theorist, philosopher, critic, and psychoanalyst—describes horror as a sublime arena generated through marginal forms of subjectivity. In her account, horror gives form to an apocalypse that resides where identities exist along fragile or liminal borders, producing an almost religious fiction of the imagination. Its imagery is one of decay and death. 

In this context, Damien Hirst’s work offers a revealing counterpoint, performing the cold, medicalized gaze of late capitalism and exposing another kind of horror: the bureaucratic, sanitized violence of biopolitics itself. Hirst transforms death into an aesthetic of containment; a polished, institutionalized spectacle of the body. The tension between the unstable, abject body and the regulated, medicalized one is central to how I understand my own practice: a negotiation between the intimate body marked by trauma and the public body disciplined by medicine, psychiatry, and neoliberal rationality.


I am also fascinated by the thread of Christian iconography in your work, from religious symbols to titles like “The Holy Brat”, and would love to hear more about this relationship to Christianity and how it is expressed in your work.

There is a powerful Evangelical Parliamentary Front shaping contemporary politics in Brazil. This bloc—deeply tied to electoral campaigns and public funding—pushes conservative “family values” agendas around abortion, gender, and sexuality, and advances regressive social policies that restrict the rights of women, LGBTQ+ people, and other marginalized communities. Much of the violence people like me face is entangled with this political force, which is why I often feel compelled to profane it, as many of the artists who influence me have done. Márcia X fused Christian iconography with sex toys and phallic imagery; Nelson Leirner staged saints alongside toys in satirical political tableaux; Andres Serrano immersed a crucifix in urine; León Ferrari crucified a plastic Jesus onto a toy U.S. fighter jet; Chris Burden enacted his own crucifixion on a Volkswagen; and Robert Gober cast a concrete Virgin Mary violently pierced by a culvert pipe. These gestures interrupt the supposed sanctity of institutional power and that lineage is important to me.





I am struck by how your paintings hold a deeply sculptural quality - from the collage of found materials to the heavily textured treatment of paint, but also with the edges of your canvases often incorporated as focal elements to the work, as seen with the figurine balancing at the top of the canvas whilst a wheel is hanging off the bottom in “Armed Conflict”. Is this extension of the frame and blurring of boundaries between painting and sculpture a key interest for you?

People usually credit Rauschenberg with developing the “combine,” right? That hybrid form where painting and sculpture merge—traditional surfaces colliding with everyday materials and found objects. What interests me is how combines extend a central project of modernism itself: the rupture between art and life. From the avant-gardes onward, modernism sought to collapse that supposed boundary, disrupting distinctions between high and low culture and allowing the refuse of the world to enter art without hierarchy. I’m drawn to that impulse. I like my paintings to spill outward, to push into a more physical space…



What project you are currently working on - does it build upon or diverge from your recent work? How do you see your work evolving in the future?

I am still figuring that out. The last couple of years after graduating were spent working nonstop, leaving me almost no time to make art or even think about it—ironically, in art galleries. In the market, art becomes a code, and I was the one translating artworks into numbers for clients. It honestly made me sick. Now I’m broke, unemployed, and trying to understand how to build a life where I can actually live off my work.

Right now I’m drawn to zines, cartoons, and drawing; forms that don’t demand a big budget and give me space to express myself more freely, even poetically. I’m letting myself stay open. We’ll see what comes next.