"The trip I took in February of 2011 through a region called the pampas was my incentive for creating the Treaty of Limits Project (Projeto Tratado de Limites). It was after Aracy Amaral, guest curator for the 8th Mercosul Biennial, had proposed traveling through parts of southern Brazil that I decided on the Pampa region as my focus for this investigation. The trip encompassed the southern part of the state of Rio Grande do Sul and northern Uruguay.

Traveling throughout this region made me reflect on geographical and political limits between states and countries. The pampas region creates its own geographical boundaries that determine its specific biome, making other means for defining its borders seem senseless. The spatial continuity of the pampas’ fields and landscape evokes the perception of diluted borders, reminding one that borders are not always perceptible, nor pertinent, and that this region’s own characteristics had once been enough to identity it, without the necessity of politically drawn borderlines. In addition to the experience of traveling through the pampas, ‘cartography’ and geographical ‘displacements’ are also elements present in my work. Trips, voyages and direct contact with different places have been and are determinant in my visual research. I am interested in how the representations of things in the world are conceived and visually presented in ways that displace their original meaning: such as in maps, photographs, videos, drawings or other media.

Characterizing many of my works is the specific perception that emerges from issues relating to the places where I’ve traveled. Two texts, “Tratado de Limites entre o Brazil e a República Oriental do Uruguay” (Treaty of Limits between Brazil and the Oriental Republic of Uruguay) and “Extremo Sul do Brasil (Limites do RS)” (Extreme South of Brazil (Limits of RS), inspired this project’s name. These treaties give an account of the boundary delimitation process as defined by political and geographic limits in southern Brazil and Uruguay.

What constantly impressed me was the fact that a border really represents a passage between one place and another that I could actually see - not only as a political division between two territories, but also as one intrinsic to the place’s geography. Borders are delimited by bodies of water, such as the Uruguay River that separates Brazil from Uruguay. This same river in Argentina, as well as in the border city Jaguarão, delimits borders in the extreme south of Brazil

(One of this works is a map (see image) made of ice showing the cold southern region of the Mercosul (South America’s Common Southern Market) whose delimiting borders are formed by oceans, lakes or rivers. As the ice melts, these boundaries are lost)."