Among the lively gestures of a vibrant artist such as zarro, there is a gesture of care. Her works take care of the images that persist, the fragments that survive, the past that has not passed peacefully.

In her first solo exhibition, she presents a body of work developed over the past year, partly during her residency at the Remanso – Instituto Cultural’s Studio Grant Program, and subsequently continued in the spaces of APPH – the Association for Research and Practice in the Humanities. Recently awarded the Acquisition Prize at the 24th Salon of Visual Arts of the Porto Alegre City Council, zarro has cultivated her poetics through the articulation of different languages – painting, collage, and collecting – proposing ways of perceiving and reworking historical memories, political traumas, and practices of coexistence.

In Topography of Encounters, the works elaborate compositions of the common. The exhibition is organized into three nuclei, each touching upon that which, though seemingly distant, still pulsates: images that return, spaces that open, bodies that reappear.

The first nucleus stems from archival research. There are press photographs from the Brazilian dictatorial period, but also the unexpected archive of traces found by the artist on the shores of Guaíba Lake in Porto Alegre, documenting the remnants of old riverside dwellings, whether on one bank of the river or the other. zarro re-presents these images as someone who wants to learn to see them anew, through cutting and montage, destabilizing official narratives and revealing what remained outside the frame, thereby giving body to what the original framing sought to erase.

Entering the second nucleus, we encounter canvases from the series Ebó de bar (Bar Offering), where the artist recreates a democratic space of collective elaboration. Taking the bar as a place of popular reunion, where pain and joy are shared, zarro offers us scenes that carry their own soundtrack and are populated with promises: chairs and potential layers of people in vibrant color fields, waiting for someone or something – a body, a conversation, a gesture of healing. The bar, here, is ritual and shelter. It is daily offering and a possible site of reparation.

In the third and final nucleus, the series Multitudes presents the artist’s most recent works, where nearly abstract images give body to groups of people gathered in scenes of parties, celebrations, and demonstrations. To paint the multitude is an affirmation of the power of being together: the vibration of bodies and the strength of the collective. The works capture not only the form but the energy of the warmth of encounters – that which escapes the image and yet remains within it.

Through reappropriations, rituals, and communions, the exhibition builds a path that is also a return – not to the past in search of nostalgia, but to it as living matter that can, through art, be potentiated and thus take on other forms, other names, other futures.