Ana Lucia Mariz, from the series Herbário Baldio (Barren Herbarium), 2019
Ana Lucia Mariz, from the series Herbário Baldio (Barren Herbarium), 2019
How does a city move? How is nature converted into geography? A city, after all, results in the sum of layers, channels, landscapes, mindsets, passions, and pains.
This Herbário Baldio (Barren Herbarium) lies between the desire for eternity and the awareness of the transitory. By collecting leaves, seeds, flowers, and stems of plants remaining in land-lots undergoing demolition in São Paulo, Ana Lucia Mariz preserves the marginalized and hidden elements of the history of the city’s transformation. Small branches and structures of botanical species, buried under cement and iron, gain a new cycle of life when they materialize in the form of images. The vulnerable bodies of these vegetal species emerge on paper as Mariz presses them against the surface and, with a piece of sandpaper, carefully traces and copies them. Inverting the photographic process, in which traditionally light is added to transform the photosensitive surface, Mariz creates a process of subtraction, as if excavating what was on the threshold of disappearance.
(Based on the text Herbário Baldio.
Act of revealing insurgent images
by Eder Chiodetto and Fabiana Bruno)
Ana Lucia Mariz was born in São Paulo in 1965. She holds a degree in Social Communications and has worked as a photographer and printer for the past thirty years. She’s a founder of Giclê Fine Art Print, a studio of gliclée printing, based in Sāo Paulo. Her research includes photography, video, embroidery, drawing, and their intersections. Interested in the relationship between the fluid and the permanent, Mariz explores the subjects of nature, the history of photography, and her family, often transitioning between them.
Mariz’s work has been exhibited in museums in Brazil and abroad, including the Pinacoteca do Estado de São Paulo, Instituto Tomie Ohtake, and the Centro León (Dominican Republic). She was a finalist of the Brazilian awards Salão de Arte Contemporânea Luiz Sacilotto and Salão da Bahia in MAM. She participated in the 16th edition of the Pirelli MASP Photo Collection and the Bienal de Cerveira, Portugal.
Mariz’s publications include Secret Soul, a documentary project depicting ruins in Brazil and Herbário Baldio (Barren Herbarium), a self-published book inspired by the cyanotypes of Anna Atkins, uniting images of plants that Mariz collected from construction sites in São Paulo.