Interiors, exteriors, private, public, personal, political—these are the spaces created by the geometries of Paula Parisot. Intimate and social memories are activated within her poetics, in the search for ways of creating that affirm autonomy. Paula recalls that, in the mythological imagination, “the woman who claims autonomy is accused […]. Antigone, Cassandra, Helen, Lilith, Eve […], all are punished.” “The geometry of memory,” the artist adds, “is to understand this within my own history.”
In this movement, her encounter with feminisms strengthened and reshaped her trajectory as a writer and visual artist. In Geometry of Memory, presented by the Museu de Arte Brasileira (MAB), Paula brings together both earlier and previously unseen works, venturing across a range of media and languages. The exhibition goes beyond the museum walls and reaches the city streets through a partnership with Coletivo Transverso.
Care, a question long considered and reconsidered by feminists, emerges, for the artist, as inseparable from memory: “when we take care of personal memory, we do not fall into collective amnesia.” The remembrance of women’s struggles, pains, violences, and achievements acts as a driving force for the creation and re-signification of Paula Parisot’s work. It is a search for self-affirmation, escaping the traps of identity shaped by patriarchal frameworks, constructing a geometry of the self with gender awareness.
