The work in progress proposes a reflection on the multifaceted meaning of ancestry, understood by the artist as a concept that expresses the layers of our existence in close connection with traditions, territories and identities. From this perspective, the artist creates portraits of her father and mother, composing a series of photographs that seek to visually translate the complex interrelationships that constitute ancestral heritage.
Photographs of her ancestors are digitally manipulated in Photoshop and combined with images selected from the public domain collection of the National Archives of Brazil. The result is a collage that integrates family portraits with photographs of other historical subjects. This symbolic juxtaposition represents the multiplicity of ancestries that shape our cultural heritage, thus offering a portrait of the ancestral diversity of Brazil.

The artist creates a photographic print on stone, reinterpreting the historical image of Maria Quitéria from a contemporary perspective. The work reclaims the symbolic power of Quitéria — the first woman to join the Brazilian Army, in 1822 —, highlighting how her acts of bravery continue to resonate in today's feminist struggles.
This visual reinterpretation proposes a reflection on the archetype of combative militancy, as a living memory that inspires and strengthens, both poetically and ideologically, the various contemporary feminisms. The work aligns with a vision of intersectional feminism, by considering not only the struggle of women, but also the intersections between gender, race, class and sexuality — recognizing the importance of LGBTQIA+ and anti-racist issues in the construction of a plural and inclusive militancy.

In the action recorded in photographs, Anna Menezes places her own body in friction with the world — not as a support, but as living matter that thinks and feels. Carrying stones, here, is more than a gesture: it is confronting the symbolic weight of history, of the earth, of the structures that shape and wound. In the friction between skin and rock, a deep crossing is revealed, where the body not only touches, but is touched by the density of the surroundings.
The artist strains the limits of the sensitive and the rational, destabilizing deep-rooted binarisms: materiality and spirituality, sensitivity and consciousness, feeling and thinking, nature and culture, body and spirit. Her body poetics dismantles the logic of separation to propose a hybrid field, where the boundaries between the human and the non-human become porous, fluid, indistinct. In this journey, body and stone become a single organism. Distinct, but interconnected by that which pulses as a common essence: life itself — raw, dense, vibrant.

The work Sedimentary Bodies presents, through fragmented photographs printed on rocks, different types of bodies that break with dichotomous views between materiality and spirituality, sensitivity and consciousness, feeling and thinking, nature and culture, body and spirit. Each body is understood not only as a form, but as a symbolic territory — a repository of identities, historical and emotional relationships, in constant dialogue with itself, with others and with the world.
In this work, the body is taken as a social symbol loaded with historical layers. When recognized by itself and its relatives, it also becomes an ancestral symbol — a living presence of a heritage that pulsates in the present.
The title Sedimentary Bodies makes direct reference to the geological process of formation of sedimentary rocks: elements that are transformed by the action of time, friction, accumulation of debris, pressure and wear. The same is true of bodies — shaped by experiences, encounters, ruptures and resistance. The experiences that pass through the bodies are like sediments that, when accumulated, form new layers of existence.
In the work, the spaces of the rock merge with the features of the human body, establishing a visual and symbolic dialogue between both materials. Body and rock become one — distinct in texture, but intertwined by the same vital line. They are presences that carry, in their constitution, the testimony of life and time.

Videoinstalação Veredas is a video installation that is inscribed on the wall as a scar and a landscape. Fragments of rock fixed high above evoke the solidity of geological time, while below, the luminous projection of a tree cut by a crack invites the gaze to travel through a Cerrado in a state of suspension — a biome that, at the same time, resists and ruptures.

A work that seeks to illuminate the power of recognizing our pluralities as Brazilian people and our singularities as subjects of this Nation-State.
Photographic print on Portuguese stone.