Rosana Paulino – The Artist Who Stitches Black Memory in Brazil
- Paulo Pereira de Araujo
- 7 de dez.
- 3 min de leitura
Art, Memory, and Resistance in the 21st Century
Rosana Paulino is not someone you “discover” she is someone who slaps you awake. A necessary slap, the kind that makes you more than strong coffee ever could. She is an artist whose work, memory, body, Black womanhood, structural racism, the African diaspora, does not seek to please; it seeks truth. And, like every stubborn old man, I have deep respect for those who do not ask permission to exist.
Born in São Paulo in 1967, Rosana could have taken gentler paths, but instead she chose to push the needle right into the places Brazil pretends do not hurt. She graduated and earned her doctorate at ECA–USP (University of São Paulo), trained in London, and understood early on that contemporary art is not living-room decoration; it is a scalpel.
Her work crosses photography, drawing, video, installation, and above all stitching, something that always moves me. Needle as pen, thread as scar. I always think of Parede da Memória (Memory Wall), that 1994 installation. Paulino takes family photographs, Black faces this country tried to erase, and stitches them together as someone piecing back a torn history.
That was when I first realized that stitching can be more violent than cutting. Each stitch reveals a previous rupture. In Assentamento (Settlement), the gesture returns, now as intimate archaeology, fragments of Black lives held by a fragile yet stubborn thread. In Atlântico Vermelho (Red Atlantic), she confronts the ocean that does not divide continents but binds tragic history.
Stitching as Politics: The Artist’s Singular Method
Rosana Paulino does not work to build idols. She dismantles, gathers, rearranges. She is an artist acutely aware that Brazil loves historical filters: hides slavery in shadows, buries Black genocide under statistics, and turns suffering into exoticism. Paulino brings these violences back to the light, not to torture, but to decolonize the gaze, that word modern critics adore but that, in her hands, gains real weight.
Her presence in national and international institutions such as Pinacoteca de São Paulo, MASP (São Paulo Museum of Art), MAM São Paulo (Museum of Modern Art), Museu AfroBrasil (Afro-Brazilian Museum) in São Paulo, Brooklyn Museum in New York, is not a prize; it is a consequence. In 2018, she became the first Black Brazilian woman to have a solo exhibition at the Pinacoteca. A late milestone that says less about her and more about a country that took far too long to acknowledge her.
Listening to Paulino on the Descriarte podcast, I found her discussion of the series Búfala, Senhora das Plantas (Lady of the Plants), and As Jatobás (The Jatobá trees) beautiful. Those works are not just denunciations; they hold spirituality, a dialogue with ancestral forces that even my old skepticism tries to resist but ends up respecting.
She speaks of the psychology of Black women, the one official history conveniently ignored. And in a moment that drew a smile from me, she said she is the daughter of Ogum and Iansã. Two warrior deities. Ah, that explains everything: it takes a great deal of Ogum to face this country, and plenty of Iansã to breathe life into what others tried to smother.
Rosana is often placed within the so-called “Generation of the 1990s,” the group that kicked Brazilian artistic stagnation and brought urgency to the center of the room. But the truth is she belongs to no generation. She is a chapter of her own. Her work weaves memory, African heritage, gendered violence, the Black body, identity, archive, symbolic reparation, and even if she doubts the very idea of reparation, there is in her work some form of reconstruction, however provisional.
I often say that some artists paint the world while others unstitch it. Rosana Paulino does both. She tears what must be torn and mends what deserves care. She does not seek comfort; she seeks consciousness. Perhaps that is why her work is so essential in a country that still prefers myths over reality, selfies over history, and covering its eyes instead of facing the mirror.
If you want to understand Brazil — the real Brazil, not the folkloric postcard version — start with Rosana Paulino. She does not promise comfort; she promises clarity. And at this age, when I’ve lost all taste for illusions, nothing seems more beautiful than that.
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