In the photo-performance Consagrada, I present myself with my chest ripped open by a scarification, symbolizing the painful path to acceptance in the Brazilian art market. This work marked my debut at the Luisa Strina gallery and critically explores the way in which the market chooses its characters and the difficult paths to achieving legitimacy.

The practice of scarification, which I began to explore after a visit to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 2016, has become a tool in my artistic research. On that occasion, contact with the work of Catherine Opie, one of my main references, was the trigger for using this technique to think about forms of transgression and resistance.

Scarification, historically linked to rituals of belonging and identity, is recontextualized in Consagrada as a fierce critique of the validation process in the artistic system. In a field where approval can become a painful rite, the act of tearing one's skin becomes a physical metaphor for what it means to be shaped by expectations and standards. Thus, the work moves between the new and the ancestral, questioning the boundaries between tradition and contemporaneity, and at what cost “consecration” takes place.