Back then I wanted to be anywhere but the farm where I grew up, and the example of one uncle gave me an idea of how to see the world. These days I go back as often as I can to spend time with family and work on an artist residency project called FARM/SCHOOL.

What I learned from freeDimensional was carried over to Lanchonete(.)org and then Luv ‘til it Hurts. I survey past works and those of other artists each time I make something new. freeDimensional used artist residency as a tool to achieve a desired end-result of artists hosted and nurtured during personal danger around the world. I guessed that ten years would be enough to refine this practice. Since that project, timing has been a part of my work, as is hospitality and hosting. In both Lanchonete(.)org and Luv ‘til it Hurts, the topic of stigma was evoked implicitly and/or explicitly.

I visited São Paulo several times over the course of freeDimensional, and began sitting at lunchcounters, formulating the concept for a five-year project interpreting the rather vague ‘right to the city’ in these semi-public spaces. With time the project acquired a lanchonete in a modernist compound infamous due to its history as a drug ‘boca’. Northeasterners new to the city were conscripted into the local gang as vendors. The gang had a base in one of the three buildings until about 2006 or 2008. At the same time as Rua Paim began to gentrify, drug sales were shifting to online platforms rather than dark ‘bocas’ like the one this ‘road without exit’ had become. However the stigma of Treme Treme had affixed itself to Conjunto Santos Dumont, a residence for upwards of 4000 people, majority Northeastern. The small bar came with its 35-year bartender, Tarcísio. He is one of the best partners I’ve ever had, and over time became the owner of his bar.

There are things that Lanchonete(.)org borrowed from freeDimensional even though it was to be site-specific. These ranged from general residency format to collective organizing insights when making a platform that others could modify with ideas and content. Both Lanchonete(.)org and freeDimensional required the creation of nonprofit organizations to hold their work, for example. With Lanchonete(.)org I also surveyed recent writing on social sculpture, relational aesthetics, social practice, site-specificity, public art, food practice and (an)architecture as we produced cultural events and interventions at the bar spilling onto the internal roadway of the compound.

I contracted HIV while living in São Paulo. Just like Lanchonete(.)org to freeDimensional, Luv ‘til it Hurts–a two-year project on HIV+ stigma–clung to Lanchonete(.)org for as long as possible before exerting itself as a work. I was only then coming out as poz in public settings. At the same time I knew that this new situation would be processed through a methodological chapter (in a series of chapters) leading to something. LUV threw out a set of building blocks for encounters. Polish artist Jakub Szczęsny developed an intimate series of vitrines for artist works and Egyptian artist, Adham Bakry the LUV game , an interactive device for having a large conversation on HIV+ stigma. These two elements together comprise Exquisite Corpse a show that can be invited to community centers, galleries, museums, health clinics and public spaces. There is an open curatorial text with an example of how to modify it offered by Cabaré Cazuza , an intervention during AIDS 2026 (Rio).

I not only knew these chapters to be artworks in a series, but that I should keep track of their lessons for an evolving methodology (or low-theory) with which I would make something else. FARM/SCHOOL is an artist residency on the mountainside farm where I grew up. I am making it with my family, other artists and friends. And it is a curious look at homecoming /-going.