Embroidering Memory, but Leaving a Loose Thread

Rosana Paulino and the Spiraling Presence of the Past

Abstract

This article examines the work of Rosana Paulino in light of contemporary debates on memory and ecology. Drawing on the catalog A costura da memória (2018), particularly the pieces involving fiber and thread practices, it argues that the artist undertakes a critical reassembly of colonial debris, stitching – both literally and metaphorically – historical wounds that remain open. Her artistic practice exposes the persistence of racial violence in the present by articulating images, procedures, and archival materials that lay bare silencing, erasure, and forms of resistance. The text engages the works of Malcom Ferdinand, Édouard Glissant, Saidiya Hartman, and Leda Maria Martins to reflect on, respectively, the colonial-ecological fracture, the poetics of relation, the Atlantic journey of enslavement and spiral time. By returning to the Atlantic as both wound and flow, Paulino reconstructs a regime of memory that does not seek to settle the past but rather to reinscribe it in the body and in the present, leaving a loose thread that calls for reflection, responsibility, and the reconstruction of shared worlds.