alecrim dourado, 468–867
2026 · archival pigment print on cotton paper · 84 × 55.6 cm
A dwarf coconut palm, seen from my son's window in Paracuru, Ceará, appears four ways — as a tile plan, a failed 3D scan, a relief on the wall and a row of tiles on the floor — across a grid of 400 cells. Each cell is one day of my son's life, numbered in red and weighted by the ground beneath it: a topography generated from the places where the scan lost the tree.
The work is bracketed by Alecrim Dourado, the cantiga infantil I sing to my son each night, about a golden rosemary plant “born without being sown”, and by a record of how this cultivated palm arrived in Brazil. Between the two is something I've come to understand as a father: that what grows is rarely unsown. It is tended, counted, returned to every day. The palm was sown for its harvest; my son is tended for nothing but himself.
Each print in the series ends on the day it is printed, so no two hold the same days.