booklets and publications
Temporal
After a trip with friends to Petar, one of those trips we think will never happen, Temporal emerges from a spell: the echoes whispered by the caves continued to reverberate for months until they took shape as a book. It was born from four hands, where we find ourselves among poetic, informative, and visual narratives, sometimes in the form of words, sometimes in the form of drawings, to explore the context of a cave from the perspective of time—and, well, a few other things that it ends up evoking.
The project was welcomed by the publisher Livros da Matriz, a beautiful and sensitive house, which fills us with joy to be a part of. The text is by Dani Gutfreund: "'How much can fit in emptiness?” With this question, Luísa Capalbo and Bruna Martins provoke readers — who need to be attentive observers of the landscape they draw in a sharp combination of words and extremely poetic images.
Temporal is a picture book about time and caves, about voids and how they are filled. The landscape takes center stage at a time when it is becoming increasingly urgent to look at it and the environment as a whole. A hybrid, part fiction, part informative, whose first part, a delicate poem illustrated by scenes of cave formation and soil sedimentation, is followed by a glossary of speleology and an inventory of Brazilian caves.
The poetic text narrates, through visual and verbal metaphors, the action of time, layer by layer, on nature. Presenting the formation of caves and their particularities, the authors make us think that the landscape is born from an instant, from the winding paths that water traces when discovering gaps, inviting us, drop by drop, to look at what is not yet until it becomes. It is with this premise that we unravel the paths of time, which, although organized in a straight line, is perceived in curves and swirls.
Temporal's illustrations reveal layers and help us feel the passage of time in close collaboration with the turning of the pages. Made with collage, watercolor, and oil pastels, with a predominance of earthy tones, they seem to shed light on other colors when they appear. Through literature, we can discover other ways to relate to the environment and everything that lives around us. And illustrated literature allows us to enter these wonderful worlds in other ways, beyond words, without discarding them."'
collaboration: revision by Daniel Menin and launch mediation by Ana Paula Campos
São Paulo, Brasil, 2023 - 2025
Rediscovering Spaces: play
and learning at school and in the city
As my final undergraduate work (FAUUSP, 2021), under the guidance of Marta Bogéa, I entered spheres of interest that had been with me for some time: play and learning. Thinking about the everyday spaces a child frequents and looking around, I tried to understand a little more about these atmospheres in a territorial way, looking at the school and the city.
Rediscovering spaces: play and learning at school and in the city was also a discovery of my own living spaces since it was carried out during the Covid 19 pandemic. So, in addition to formal research, focused on bibliographies on the subject, in which Paulo Freire, Mayumi Watanabe and Francesco Tonucci were of great inspiration, I felt the desire to be in contact, to weave links, to build collaborative bridges.
So, in addition to theoretical exploration, I combined my appreciation of books and literature dedicated to childhood with the creation, through many pairs of hands, of two illustrated booklets, Backyards of the City: an invitation to play and The Courtyard and the Square: an invitation to play. The construction of the books is shown in the monograph's notebook, a process in which I was able to count on some children, in which we communicated through letters and phone calls, their respective families and some other professionals who taught me how to make an illustrated book.
The work traveled a bit and arrived in France, where it was presented at the symposium “Megalopolises, metropolises, cities in the countryside, cities in decline: what imaginations for the city of tomorrow?” at the National School of Architecture in Saint-Etienne, 2021.
Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2021
Invitations to Play
As mentioned previously, the books City Backyards: an invitation to play, illustrated by Guilherme Lira, and The Courtyard and the Square: an invitation to play, illustrated by Bruna Martins, were conceived as final graduation work.
Through an exploratory narrative, the books' purpose was to provide, through activities, a new perspective on these everyday spaces that children already inhabit, but which may or may not be appropriated. The proposals, therefore, aim for a place of (re)cognition, of identification, of "feeling at home" in the other environments that surround them. The narratives and activities, which also gave us a taste for going out into the streets, brought critical reflection also addressed in the theoretical exposition of the work as a whole: considering that, once they feel part of their surroundings, children would walk through the sensations of autonomy, of protagonism and of appropriation of their subjectivities when they reflected on what it is like to live in society and in the ways that are imposed on us - and that still take them little into account.
Thus, the attempt was to enable a new perspective, another presence of body, sensation, understanding, of children in their respective schools and neighborhoods, seeking to demonstrate that a healthy environment for a child, and healthy being seen from different aspects, would also be a more comfortable place for everyone, regardless of age.
The booklets were designed as exploration notebooks, with one side containing the narrative, activities and letter intended for the mediators, and the other, an open and wide space for recording.
Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2021
Weaving the Morning,
by João Cabral de Melo Neto
Under the guidance of Clice Mazzilli, the accordion book, a format already designated, was conceived with the question of how it would be possible to visually illustrate the effects of a narrative in movement, whose progression, repetition and fluidity were considered premises. In addition to the format, another issue that was in line with the materiality of the book was the choice of the type of illustration: rubber and wood stamps were made so that some of the intended effects could be affirmed.
As well as being curious about the potential of stamps, the poem Tecendo a Manhã (Weaving the Morning), by the Pernambuco poet João Cabral de Melo Neto, was chosen because of a personal fondness for years, but also considering that, through figures of speech, the imagery it permeates and the nuances it touches on, the poem weaves a morning, originating from the crowing of many roosters, and could also be a representation of what the visual resources sought to articulate.
Sao Paulo, Brazil, 2015
