Jardins is an ongoing painting and book project structured as alternating botanical encyclopedia entries and personal memories — aunts, a grandmother, a Northeastern Brazilian childhood, and emigration through Florida, Switzerland, and Lisbon. The project examines what plant knowledge carries when the official archive does not reach.
The project begins with a formal contradiction: the botanical encyclopedia is a document of precision. It names, classifies, dates, and locates. It produces certainty about organisms. Jardins uses this structure as a site of failure to expose a certain category of knowledge it cannot hold.
Alternating with each entry are personal memory texts about people who have already died and whose direct or indirect relationship to plants was a form of intelligence transmitted body-to-body, never institutionally recorded. Private names for plants (seu-cu for alamanda; regional designations that existed only inside one family) represent a system of knowledge that the encyclopedia has no entry for. When those people die, those names disappear. The organisms survive, renamed, classified, officially correct — and something irreplaceable is gone with the wrong documentation.
The project traces a geographic arc: a Northeastern Brazilian childhood in Aracaju, Sergipe, followed by the current displacement to Lisbon. At each location, the practice of tending plants — growing them from seed, transplanting them, maintaining them against the odds of climate and soil — functions as a continuation of a lineage rather than its memorial. The garden is a space where the dead remain methodologically present.
Formally, the book performs the argument it makes. The scientific register — clean, authoritative, structured — repeatedly collapses into something it was not designed to hold: grief, private cosmology, the specificity of a house, the body memory of a child watching an aunt work soil. The illegibility produced at those junctures is the moment where official language admits its own limit.
Jardins is an investigation into the documentary form itself — into what a record can and cannot produce, and into what gets erased when precision becomes the only legitimate mode of knowledge. The garden is where that erasure becomes survivable.
