Juliana dos Santos, Experiência Azul, Blue Experience (detail), 2022, Clitoria ternatea flower petal on cotton paper, 30 x 56 cm, detail view
2025. Juliana dos Santos
Not All Travellers Walk Roads: Of Humanity as Practice
Essay published in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo catalog about the artist’s practice
WEB
Essay published in the 36th Bienal de São Paulo catalog about the artist’s practice
WEB
Juliana dos Santos’s research is driven by her curiosity about the intertwining of the blue color of the Clitoria ternatea flower and the Black and Afro-diasporic experience in Brazil. Her work is driven by a desire to challenge the limiting Eurocentric traditions of perception and representation by exploring sensory expansions. Blue came to the artist during a meditation in a Buddhist temple, an event in which she saw the ajñachakra, known as the “third eye.” This vision, however, was not retinal, but synesthetic, emphasizing the possibility of visualizing something not through the eyes, but through a sensory experience.
Blue, usually associated with states of elevation, beauty, and intangibility in certain cultural contexts, is present in the artist’s work through complex stages of processing the Clitoria ternatea flower, cultivated by a family from São Félix, in the Recôncavo Baiano, with whom she has collaborated for years: Nilton Cesar dos Santos and Edilene Costa de Jesus dos Santos. These processes are analogous to the traditions of indigo dyeing and textile dyeing on the African continent, or even to the history of the blues, the musical manifestation of the Black experience in the United States. Just as immateriality and impermanence are fundamental to Dos Santos, the blue note is central to the blues: a dissonant note, considered out of tune because it defies the rigidity of the pentatonic scale, it is purposely used to amplify the music's emotion and expressiveness.
Dos Santos experiments with the manifestation of aqueous language by blowing granules of roasted and ground flowers onto a moist plane (paper or canvas), which absorbs them. Although they retain the artist's gesture, this blue topography is also shaped by the agency of the pulverized flowers themselves and the winds that distribute them across the canvas, adding multiple actions to the artistic result. In this way, the flower not only plays a colorful role in the service of the artist’s plastic desires but also has a pictorial autonomy. Dos Santos doesn’t extract a pigment from the flower, but rather processes the entire flower into a powder, making the work more of a botanical impression that questions categorical definitions than a painting.
For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, complex planes in a shade of blue surround the viewer, creating an enveloping atmosphere. This experience resembles the artist's synesthetic vision of blue during meditation. In this work, the artist collaborates with her mother, Eliana de Oliveira, who has for years developed complex patchwork designs for textile patterns. The union of different fabrics follows her mother’s interest in applied mathematics, guiding rhythms and compositions close to Euclidean logics that contrast with the botanical geometries proposed by Dos Santos. This dialogue emphasizes flows of knowledge transmission, hierarchical revisions, and transdisciplinary practices.
Text originally published in Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Ed.). 36a. Bienal de São Paulo: Nem todo viandante anda estradas: Da humanidade como prática. São Paulo: Bienal de São Paulo, 2025
Blue, usually associated with states of elevation, beauty, and intangibility in certain cultural contexts, is present in the artist’s work through complex stages of processing the Clitoria ternatea flower, cultivated by a family from São Félix, in the Recôncavo Baiano, with whom she has collaborated for years: Nilton Cesar dos Santos and Edilene Costa de Jesus dos Santos. These processes are analogous to the traditions of indigo dyeing and textile dyeing on the African continent, or even to the history of the blues, the musical manifestation of the Black experience in the United States. Just as immateriality and impermanence are fundamental to Dos Santos, the blue note is central to the blues: a dissonant note, considered out of tune because it defies the rigidity of the pentatonic scale, it is purposely used to amplify the music's emotion and expressiveness.
Dos Santos experiments with the manifestation of aqueous language by blowing granules of roasted and ground flowers onto a moist plane (paper or canvas), which absorbs them. Although they retain the artist's gesture, this blue topography is also shaped by the agency of the pulverized flowers themselves and the winds that distribute them across the canvas, adding multiple actions to the artistic result. In this way, the flower not only plays a colorful role in the service of the artist’s plastic desires but also has a pictorial autonomy. Dos Santos doesn’t extract a pigment from the flower, but rather processes the entire flower into a powder, making the work more of a botanical impression that questions categorical definitions than a painting.
For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, complex planes in a shade of blue surround the viewer, creating an enveloping atmosphere. This experience resembles the artist's synesthetic vision of blue during meditation. In this work, the artist collaborates with her mother, Eliana de Oliveira, who has for years developed complex patchwork designs for textile patterns. The union of different fabrics follows her mother’s interest in applied mathematics, guiding rhythms and compositions close to Euclidean logics that contrast with the botanical geometries proposed by Dos Santos. This dialogue emphasizes flows of knowledge transmission, hierarchical revisions, and transdisciplinary practices.
Text originally published in Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung (Ed.). 36a. Bienal de São Paulo: Nem todo viandante anda estradas: Da humanidade como prática. São Paulo: Bienal de São Paulo, 2025
Juliana dos Santos, Experiência Azul, Blue Experience (detail), 2022, Clitoria ternatea flower petal on cotton paper, 30 x 56 cm
Juliana dos Santos, Como terminar uma tese: o tempo da cor, How to End a Thesis: The Time of Color, 2024, Clitoria ternatea flower petals on cotton canvas, 500 × 400 × 300 cm
Juliana dos Santos, Sopro/aragem/viração, 2025, 36th Bienal de São Paulo, São Paulo, installation views