At times, life forces us to retrace our own steps in order to understand who we are. For Paula Parisot, that return will be both literal and symbolic. In 2026, the visual artist and writer will present Geometría de la Memoria at two key institutions in her native Brazil: the Museum of Art of Brasília (MAB) and the Hélio Oiticica Municipal Art Center, in Rio de Janeiro. This work, deeply intimate, engages in dialogue with her body and with a decade marked by fear, harassment, and survival.
Memory as a Battlefield
From her studio in Palermo, Buenos Aires, Parisot explores memory not as a static archive, but as a living and unstable field. For years, the artist — a disciple of the great Rubem Fonseca — took refuge in fiction, keeping her personal diaries as forbidden territory. However, darkness prevailed after the death of her ex-husband, Richard Haber, in 2016.
What followed was an ordeal: the denial of her children’s inheritance rights by her ex-husband’s family and escalating legal harassment. In 2020, the introspection of pandemic confinement led her to write again. “I understood that no one changes through theory. True learning happens in the body. Creating became resistance. Working was the way to avoid disappearing,” Paula confessed.
Break the pact of silence
Geometry emerges in her work as an attempt to bring order to chaos. Lines and structures seek to contain memories and obsessions, yet they also unravel to reveal human fragilities. This artistic process sustained her when she decided not to sign an agreement with her children’s paternal family that demanded her silence. “This silence compromised my integrity as a woman and as an artist. Accepting it would have meant disappearing,” she stated categorically.
Faced with the harassment that began to affect her children, Parisot turned to the Argentine judicial system. The case is currently in the hands of the Prosecutor’s Office for Combating Gender Violence, which issued a restraining order against Eduardo Haber, her former brother-in-law: “For the first time, I felt that my story was being heard within the appropriate structure. It was, quite literally, a life-changing experience. A little peace.”
The personal is political
Curated by Gabriela Laurentiis, a specialist in feminist practices, Parisot situates her work within a genealogy of women who have transformed lived experience into visual thought. A resident of Buenos Aires for ten years, she now actively leads the local chapter of the organization Mulheres do Brasil, convinced that support networks are essential.
For Paula, this return to Brazil with her work is not a professional consecration, but a vital necessity. “Creating did not save my life. Creating allowed me to live it,” she concluded. In every line of her geometry, one certainty remains: telling one’s own story is the ultimate act of freedom.
