Habitar o entre: processos de criação artística sobre migração, território e pertencimento

Abstract

This research investigates the construction of a symbolic space of belonging through artistic production based on the migratory experience of a Northeastern Brazilian artist from a riverside community in the semi-arid region of Bahia. Developed within the field of Visual Arts research, the study adopts autoethnography as its methodological approach to understand how displacement, memory, territory, ancestry, and identity shape the creative process. Throughout the research, autoethnographic writing (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011) is articulated with the concept of Ethnography at Home, proposed by João Rivelino Rezende (Barreto, 2025), bringing the investigation closer to relationships of community, kinship, orality, and knowledge produced within the artist’s own territory. Alongside the written investigation, artistic production constitutes an autonomous process of inquiry, developed through material experimentation and the relationship between image and support, understood in this research as autoethnopoetics. The research resulted in the artistic series CASA, Entre, Feitos de Rio, Mororó, Apanhadores de Sol, and Fragmentos de Passagem, in which materials such as bricks, mororó leaves, fabric, stones, and prints are employed as constitutive elements of the poetic language. The results demonstrate artistic production as a means of elaborating the migratory experience and constructing belonging, while also contributing to the expansion of self-referential Northeastern and riverside narratives in contemporary art and to the understanding of artistic practice as a mode of knowledge production.