Livro-cicatriz: processo, memória e a poética do esforço

Abstract

This descriptive memorial, entitled "Scar Book: Process, Memory, and the Poetics of Effort", investigates the transformation of an academic and personal trajectory marked by traumas, ruptures, and feelings of inadequacy into essential raw material for creation in visual arts. Driven by the metaphor of the "ninja way"—the valorization of effort and continuous hard work over an alleged innate gift—the work is methodologically structured through the lens of Autobiographical Research in Art (Manoela Rodrigues). The text presents a narrative built upon a tensional and complementary dialogue between the sensitive, confessional voice of the artist and the rigorous foundation of the academic voice. The research stems from the author's experience of exclusion, understood as a "foreign body" within the university environment due to class markers and neurodivergence, in order to resignify failure and school trauma as a fertile archive of memories. Supported by the concepts of Genetic Criticism and the Unfinished Gesture by Cecilia Salles, the study analyzes a collection of twenty compulsive sketchbooks not as preparatory drafts, but as "process documents" and the very physical materialization of a body-work focused on repetition. The journey culminates in the poetic analysis of the exhibition "Trilogy of Memory"—composed of an installation, a video performance, and the rebinding of the "Scar Book"—mobilizing authors such as Paulo Silveira to discuss the aesthetics of injury, the violated page, and the artist's book. It concludes that the scar and the erasure do not represent the overcoming of failure, but its definitive incorporation as an aesthetic and methodological potency, validating vulnerability as a decolonial and legitimate tool for the production of poetic knowledge.