Carmo Menezes

she/her

Portuguese, 2002

Thesis: Earthborn wind. Bodies in motion, memories in matter 

In the creation of this work I was guided by the question: How can migration be understood beyond geography, as a sensory and material experience?

 

For decades, thousands of people have crossed borders under extreme conditions, exposed to life-threatening conditions and vulnerability. Upon arrival, bound to languages they did not speak and to systems that devalued them, they learnt to inhabit the space anew. 

 

At the core of this work is the migrant body and its experience of being read as a body of lack: a lack of place, a lack of fixed roots. 

 

As an artist and having experienced migration myself, I refuse this image. In this work, I propose to view migration not as a rupture, but a certain ecology: a traversed body that learns how to inhabit its own fragmentation: the memories, habits, relationships, sounds, colours, textures, sensations…

 

Portugal is a fragment of me, Amsterdam is another. Each place, each encounter, each fleeting sensation is part of a network of fragments. The physicality of a place is inseparable from what is held in memory and perception.

 

The work informs a sculptural language based on directional forms: arrows, axes and leaning structures, that suggest movement without fixing it, and a direction without determining it. This is where the wind is born. Like an arrow released from a bow, unable to command but dependent on it, it remains open to invisible currents and subtle shifts. In this way it can be  understood as a condition that moves through bodies, memory, and matter: invisible, mobile, and transformative.

 

Each fragment of the installation operates autonomously while remaining part of a larger shifting system, reflecting how identity and place are continuously recomposed. 

Through stability, migration can be understood beyond geography from an ecophysical perspective, where movement is not limited to the crossing of borders but experienced as a bodily and material condition shaped by visible and invisible forces.