Brazilian women upon arriving in Portugal are promptly labelled with the word Brasileira. This noun is more than a name for a nationality but an adjective for microaggressions. Your name is erased from then onwards and you are now remembered as a faceless stereotype. I interviewed 8 women to showcase their stories in a celebratory positive light, which are collected within a book.
My Godmother is one of the most important Brasileiras near me, long before I was one. While I was interviewing her, she told me right away, 'it was as if she fell without a parachute, straight into unknown terrain, alone.' This metaphorical parachute of 8 women connected to each other but still individual, is the noise and stories that save each other from the fall. The parachute is the object that complements the book of stories, that brings forth the public and declares: Look at them!
The togetherness of the parachute is something that saves your life when you're falling, hard ground incoming. You're going to arrive, you have no one and you have nothing, you are going to hit the floor. These women will be there to bring you down gently, you will still hit the floor hard, but you will survive. They will help you out, because they've been through it, they had their own parachutes. When my mom arrived, my Godmother was her parachute, when my aunt arrived, my mother was hers.
The amplified parachute sections their stories as a caricature of themselves. The overexaggerated images of these individuals' personalities as the image of the Brasileira, complements the absurdity. The noise between sections clashes aesthetically only to match the embroidery quotes from their interviews: ensuring that one can find each women's section when reading the stories.
