arquivo mangue (2018) is a duo of expanded visual arts formed by Camila Mota and Cafira Zoé. Nominated for the Prêmio Pipa 2024, their work engages with living archives, multispecies cartographies, cosmopolitical imagination, speculative f(r)iction, oavnis – unidentified audiovisual objects, makumbas graphykas, objetos de viração [transformation objects], sculpture-beings, precarious supports, and ruins. Their research explores practices of counter-coloniality, ritual theatricalities, and human and non-human choral movements from a non-binary perspective, focusing on urban biomes, territories of re-existence, and gender and sexuality dissidences. They take the crossroads as a method, working with time and its enchanted materialities. They also investigate the sinister correspondences between the predatory practices of mining and urban real estate speculation. Site-specificity, experimentation, and the connective work between beings, peoples, cosmologies, ideas, and circuits are key traits of their creative process. For nearly a decade, they have been engaged in a public and collective struggle for the reopening and regeneration of the Bixiga River and the creation of a green area around the Teat(r)o Oficina in São Paulo.

In imaginação que estrutura (2025), the support tells a story. It is living matter, moving archive, structure, starting point, call, arrival, and also a fabulative fiction. The work refers to the moment when Lina Bo Bardi was called to work on Ladeira da Misericórdia, in Salvador, and encountered structural challenges that considered the weight and dimensions of machinery, the impact on residents’ lives, and the characteristics of the streets. In her search for a solution, Lina discovered a palmeira grass leaf and envisioned through it the direction that would shape the concrete leaves that forged Coaty with both lightness and strength. She sent architect Lelé, in Salvador, a shoebox containing the leaf and a simple instruction, “Let’s do it like this.”

The wood that supports the woodcut of the palmeira grass leaf was found by arquivo mangue in the historic center of Salvador, abandoned among debris. It is defined as a “perhaps sculpture” and as an “object of viração, a listening to elements and materials, a spell-making gesture that projects rites of regeneration and invention onto the body of things and our own “(…) a marker of the passage of time and of imagination.” The woodcut returns to the wood; layers of time spiral; stories intersect; and imagination expands.