For curators · 2026 — ongoing
THE INSEPARABLES
Two birds, one memory. One belongs to a child. The other belongs to everyone.
Two birds, one memory. One belongs to a child. The other belongs to everyone.
Melinda was eight. She named them Fofinho and Rosinha.
Nothing in the work replaces these two paintings; everything is grown from them. The braided strokes became feathers, the swirls became a body, the colours are hers and no one else's.
Not how a real bird looks — how these two would look if they could exist.
One memory, brought to life twice, down to the last detail. From that moment it is no longer one memory: each bird lives its own life.
The dark one is Melinda's. She answers it from time to time — no schedule, no rule, the way a child remembers to. The pink one belongs to everyone who comes to it. What becomes of a memory when other people begin to take part in it?
Life, not chance, is what separates them.
Here there is no doubt. On one side there is a child: Melinda's memory, arriving now and then. On the other there is you, if you choose to come close. No one else is speaking.
The birds do not invent feelings. They hold what was given to them and give it back — in an eye that widens, in feathers that rise, in a head that turns toward you, or away.
It does not feel. It answers.
You can simply watch. If you come closer, they look back — curious, wary, sometimes not at all.
Touch the pink bird and a card opens: a few questions, nothing to type, nothing that asks who you are. Once a day. What you leave stays in the bird. Not with us.
The work takes nothing from you — not your name, not your attention.
Behind them, figures in pencil come and go — drawn by the same hand. They are what the birds remember. They have moods of their own. A child made the birds, the birds carry a memory, the memory returns as figures, and the figures begin to live on their own. You arrive at the end of that chain.
Melinda's answers are written into the work itself, and every version is fingerprinted and time-stamped. A visitor's answers stay in that visitor's pink bird, on their own device, and nowhere else. Shown today and shown in ten years, it is the same work — only older.