Over the summer of 2026, in an exchange over email, we seized the opportunity to ask Rosana Paulino broad questions about her practice, each drawing another link to ¿História Natural?, the project for which she receives the 2025—2027 Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice. What emerges most clearly in her generous responses is a belief in the power and necessity of images. Images that prevail in political strife that no other expression can match. And images that are so complex they can surpass their own historical context. In the text below, Paulino refers to homeopathy and a completely new culture that can emerge from such images.  

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Carin Kuoni and Eriola Pira: Ten years after its creation, we return to ¿História Natural? What does it mean to revisit the project under the auspices of the Jane Lombard Prize for Art and Social Justice from your current perspective, and to do so within the context of social justice and the VLC’s Matter of Intelligence framework? 

Rosana Paulino: It is difficult, and troubling, to acknowledge that ten years later we are witnessing a renewed growth of ideas connected to pseudoscientific thinking, which was one of the central concerns of ¿História Natural?. Today, these ideas seem to have expanded across contemporary society, ranging from racist ideologies to absurd false beliefs in the field of health. In this sense, ¿História Natural? feels more relevant than ever.

At the same time, to think of art as a tool for social justice, and to take part in the Vera List Center’s Matter of Intelligence framework, is a great privilege. It allows me to be in dialogue with people from different countries, communities, and ways of thinking. This expands the meaning of the work for me, helping me understand intelligence and technology beyond Western notions of progress and knowledge, while incorporating other perspectives on nature.

As artists, we often do not fully understand the work we make. We can see part of it, but never the whole, because something always remains hidden from the person who produces it, situated in deeper layers of the psyche. This exhibition and the conversations around it will help me perceive things I have not yet seen, whether in relation to the book itself or to my broader way of working.

Carin and Eriola: To us, repetition, mirroring, and doubling of images, forms, and gestures from page to page are striking features of ¿História Natural?. A sense of recurrence also resonates throughout your broader artistic practice, and while working on this exhibition, it has been wonderful to see certain motifs, figures, and elements surface and resurface across different bodies of work. How do you think about this process of appearance and reappearance in your practice? 

Rosana: I am very interested in thinking about how much an image can “withstand”: how many times it can be used, how it changes according to the technique employed, and, at the same time, what remains inherent and deeply embedded in it, continuing to draw my attention. When I use the same image across different techniques, I am not only thinking about the meaning of that image, but also about how it can be stretched, displaced, and taken to its fullest potential. 

Alongside this technical question, there is also a motivation for using the same effigy at different moments: to reinforce what is being discussed and to consider, in the case of Brazil, how certain situations repeat themselves continuously. It is striking to realize that even today, we are witnessing cases of religious persecution against Afro-Brazilian religions that could have taken place in the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Using the same images, returning to them, and allowing them to reappear in different contexts reinforces the extent to which the country remains trapped in structures established during the period of slavery, and how difficult it is for us to free ourselves from this way of thinking.

Carin and Eriola: Before training as an artist, you were interested in biology. How did your interest in the sciences, or rather pseudoscientific theories of race in support of colonialism and slavery, shape the ways you approach art-making? How does your work engage with, complicate, or challenge the assumptions embedded in Eurocentric scientific frameworks and systems of knowledge? In bringing these images and forms of scientific representation into an artistic context, how do you navigate the potential risks of reproducing the very structures or visual languages you are critically examining? 

Rosana: Since childhood, I have been interested in the sciences, in observing the world through eyes that wanted to test, observe, and learn about life. This was strongly shaped by the fact that I grew up very close to nature, observing insects, making collections, and interacting with plants and some animals. It was only after entering art school, and beginning to study the question of racism in Brazil, that I came to understand how the sciences—or rather, pseudosciences—had been used to justify slavery in the country, and that, in order to understand the situation of the Black population in Brazil, it would be essential to immerse myself in this history.

Throughout this process, it became increasingly clear to me how European science was, and continues to be, used to subjugate other peoples; how the idea of the “universal” was imposed upon other populations; and how the damage caused by this way of thinking continues to be felt today.

When bringing these images into my work, there is always a concern not to fall into the trap of reproducing precisely what I want to destroy. For this reason, I embrace image-based strategies for emphasis. Curiously, I start from homeopathy—something that, for some, exists between science and pseudoscience—as a strategy. This choice already carries its own irony. Working with the homeopathic idea that “similar cures similar,” I reclaim images created to dehumanize Black people, revealing instead the power of the diverse African groups who arrived in Brazil.

An image made as evidence of supposed inferiority begins to show resilience, strength, and creativity instead. Images once used to oppress can become liberating and healing for the descendants of those portrayed. Reversing the image’s intended purpose prevents it from reinforcing the prejudice I confront and reject.

Carin and Eriola: Study and research are central to your practice—not only as methods of inquiry, but as creative and relational processes. How do you approach the act of studying, whether through materials, histories, ecosystems, or communities? In what ways do you understand your art as a form of study, particularly of the ethnological and botanical archives of European researchers, as a way of understanding the legacies of racialization and dehumanization of Black and Indigenous people and present-day Brazilian society?

Rosana: I do not believe it is possible to make meaningful art without study. Studying allows me to deepen my knowledge of what I intend to discuss, but also to make the work possible in the world, so that it can stand.

At the same time, the work itself is also a form of knowledge about my environment, whether physical or social. In this sense, I understand my work as a form of study carried out through the field in which I am called to operate: the visual arts. Of course, as an artist, I allow myself certain freedoms that a historian might not, such as bringing together, in the same work, images from different times or different places. This is one of the freedoms that art makes possible, along with the use of symbolic language.

Ethnological and botanical archives interest me because they reveal how bodies, territories, plants, animals, and forms of knowledge were classified through the same colonial logic, transforming them into objects of study, possession, and exploitation. For example, using images from botanical archives allows me to think about how an extractivist society, in which people, fauna, and flora were placed on the same level as things to be exploited, still functions in basically the same way today.

Marginalized groups continue to be exploited and to have their rights “cut down,” just like trees. I am speaking here, above all, about Black and Indigenous people, who were racialized, classified, and imagined as available for exploitation, suffering a fate similar to that of Brazilian nature. These archives help me discuss a particular worldview, based on the idea of hierarchy between peoples and forms of knowledge, which was foundational to and remains present in Brazilian society today.

Carin and Eriola: Brazil and the United States are home to the largest Black populations outside Africa, yet Black histories and contributions remain marginalized in dominant national narratives. How do your images of rootedness, transformation, and regeneration speak to the shared legacies of the Middle Passage across the African diaspora?

Rosana: I am always struck by the resilience and strength of African groups in the Americas. Despite all the horrors of the crossing, these people settled, built countries and cultures, and continue to transform these places day by day.

In this sense, although Brazil and the United States have distinct histories, both share the profound mark of the African diaspora, of forced crossing, displacement, and the reconstruction of forms of life in territories violently shaped by slavery.

Showing that Brazil is a country whose roots are Black and Indigenous is fundamental for understanding ourselves as a nation. For the most part, the country is content to be a very poorly made copy of the West, which, fortunately, does not even consider Brazil to be one of its own.

The capacity for transformation and the constant emergence of cultural elements in the most diverse forms is remarkable. I often joke that, culturally, Brazil is a country where 1 + 1 equals 3. This is because the encounter of different cultures and their settlement on Brazilian soil is not only an adaptation; it represents the birth of a completely new culture, one that carries the memory of the crossing from Africa but points toward other possibilities, other worldviews. It is not just a transplantation, but the creation, despite immense resistance, of another cultural identity.

Recognizing this strength is important not only for Brazil, home to the world’s largest Black population outside of Africa, but for Afro-diasporic communities across the Americas, including the United States.

Carin and Eriola: With our focus on Matter of Intelligence, we want to counter narrow, Western definitions of qualifications and social, intellectual, and political hierarchies. Considering the ways your work frames intelligence as dynamic, relational, and liberatory, how do collaboration and relations with human and non-human materials and histories generate other ways of knowing? How might they help us reimagine intelligence as plural, embodied, and interconnected?

Rosana: I usually think of intelligence as the different ways of placing oneself in the world. The way the West has, with some exceptions, understood intelligence as something that can be measured, ranked, and hierarchized, with a particular focus on the exact and biological sciences, has brought the world to the edge of the abyss in which we now find ourselves, since this also structures the social and economic systems that organize societies.

It seems much more sensible to think that we live in an interconnected world, where other non-human species have their own different intelligences and communicate with others—including with us, although we are the ones who do not listen—and have their own strategies for survival. This makes much more sense to me. There is not only interconnection, but also interdependence among the different forms of life that cohabit the planet.

In this sense, collaboration means recognizing different forms, systems, intelligences, and technologies for seeing and dealing with the world. It also means recognizing that every work is made through relations: with materials, histories, ancestors, communities, territories, and other biological forms of life with whom we share the same ground.

Thinking from this expanded focus, forms of knowledge considered minor, such as those produced by women, quilombola communities, Indigenous peoples, and Black communities of African origin, which were seen as primitive, childish, and often ridiculed, may perhaps hold the solution, if that is still possible, to get us out of the trap into which the Western, exploitative, hierarchical, and disrespectful way of thinking has placed us.

To consider respect among different species is fundamental. I was taught to ask permission before taking a leaf from a tree. This is not superstition; it is respect. Unfortunately, it is being lost. The result of looking at a tree only in terms of its commercial value is that we are now suffering intense heat in the middle of the Brazilian winter.

The Western way of thinking about knowledge is self-destructive and urgently needs to be questioned, or we will have no tomorrow. 

Carin and Eriola: Your recent work centers the figure of the Brazilian tree-woman and other metamorphic figures—seeds, pods, and cocoons—that position Black women as the roots and sustaining force of Brazilian society. Alongside their mythological, spiritual, and cosmological dimensions, how does this work recover and reimagine Black women’s legacies of knowledge, labor, memory, and creativity across generations? And how do these figures help imagine more just futures that resonate beyond Brazil, across the Black diaspora and here in the United States?

Rosana: Black women in Brazil, in economic and social terms, occupy the base of the social pyramid. And yet, in a certain sense, they are the ones who sustain the country. If the resilience of the Black population in general is very great, theirs is even greater. Black women have been priestesses, vendors, and providers of various services, despite historic obstacles. Even within a context of abandonment and lack of recognition, we can find their traces in the way Brazil speaks, in the distinctions of the Portuguese language spoken in Brazil, in religiosity, in cuisine, and in forms of engagement more broadly. In other words, in what shapes the country affectively and psychically.

At this moment, we are witnessing in Brazil the emergence of Afro-Brazilian culture, a fundamental shift in the way the country is seen, and Black women have played a central role in this. It is a process of self-analysis coming from a part of the population that was not considered a producer of knowledge, an exercise that the country has not yet undertaken and that is fundamental for thinking of itself as a nation. Thinkers such as philosophers Sueli Carneiro or Lélia Gonzalez, and writers such as Conceição Evaristo and Ana Maria Gonçalves, have played a central role in this movement. They are, as you put it in your question, the seeds and roots of the country. And this must be recognized.