decifra-me ou devoro-te
Decifra-me ou devoro-te grows out of the making of Meu Tempo é Quando, carried out in 2012. To write the sentence, steel chains were broken and then welded into the shapes of letters. Once matter of bond and imprisonment, the chain is converted into language: it must be broken for it to write.
- medium
- photography, UV printing on steel sheet and selective laser engraving
- dimensions
- variable
- year
- 2012 — 2026
- venue
- —
The photographs do not record only the chains or the letters already formed. They turn to what the process left on the stone used as a soldering base. The fire that joins also burns, darkens, melts and alters the surface. Halos of heat remain, soot, residue, cracks and deformations — an involuntary writing produced by the very gesture of transformation.
The chain writes.
The fire inscribes.
Taken up again in 2026, these images are transferred onto steel sheets by UV printing and selective engraving. In certain areas the metal surface itself remains visible; in others the image is physically marked. The photograph thus stops merely representing a scar and comes itself to carry an inscription.
The work displaces rupture from the idea of an instantaneous event. It is not enough to leave. It is not enough to break. Between what breaks and what is recomposed there is a process — and every process modifies matter.
The stone becomes support, witness and archive. What remains is not only the chain transformed into word, but the scar of the gesture that transformed it.
- medium
- photography, UV printing on steel sheet and selective laser engraving
- dimensions
- variable
Every rupture has a process.
Every process leaves a scar.
Every scar is a form of permanence.