Teia de Palma

This is where I face my roots, to strengthen myself through the intimate connection with this nourishment.

Being displaced from family and society for reasons of recognition of cultural (ancestral), gender and ethnic identity, respectively, I come face to face with the understanding that the unique exhaustion that I’ve been going through happens in parallel with the exhaustion of the seed from which palm oil is extracted, increasingly difficult to find in its natural state in the markets of the countries in which its use is intimately connected to its practices and cultural traditions. Since palm oil is a food with great ancestral weight in African culture, I explore its use as a way to nourish the memory of my origins.

I go through the sap of these seeds with the extensions of my being, bringing to multiple plans of consciousness the basis of care with the matrices fed by this internal organism, intrinsically connected to the Earth’s flows. Through bodies that intersect with mine, I interact intuitively with the visible and invisible world, establishing new bonds which may serve as guides for protection and strengthening in the end of this time(s).

— An internal root-network that I cultivated to sustain myself when all personal connections were close to break. The search for parallel paths to these connections, whose outcomes multiply themselves in all directions from the untangling of ourselves, relieving the weight of relationships that keep us continuously at risk of an imminent fall.

— A prayer I designed so that when I cross the fault, I can be made mesh, beyond the times that were ending. I fall into the consciousness which takes me to the encounter of lines that form overlapped planes, to the certainty of a foreseen route of erosion. Tchon is where the siti seeds are born. I go through this ancestral blood in the whitest compulsion of death, in repetitive paths, with faith and without counting on luck. I bathe in the flows of the world which sustains me from the root, when there’s no land, ground or home where, carefully, I can stand.