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Monster, drink to me, 2023

Burnt sugar, wallpaper

60 x 40 x 20 cm

Pivô arte e pesquisa, Sao Paulo 

Monster, Drink to Me is a project that recreates the winged lions housed at the Secretaria da Educação in Praça da República, São Paulo, using burnt sugar. It explores the figure of the monster as a colonial archetype—a projection of fear and desire that labeled the unfamiliar as grotesque, macabre, and threatening. These figures, colonial constructs designed to exoticize and control, transformed otherness into ornament and domination into fantasy, materializing both the desire and the fear of the colonizer into spectacle. Linking this iconography to the violent transformation of Brazil into the world’s largest sugar-producing colony in the 16th century, the work connects the brutality of sugar monoculture to architecture, colonial history, and eating rituals as dramatizations of power. Here, licking the monster becomes a strategy for deforming, sabotaging, and ultimately digesting the aesthetics of domination.