459 dias à deriva - " 459 days drifting"
“459 dias à deriva” is an installation composed of 459 paper boats, handcrafted from envelopes of old letters.
Each boat represents one day — between departures and returns — during which I lived a long-distance relationship, far from my partner.
Marked by the uncertainty of a definitive migration, those days embody the duration of distance, the negotiation between destinations, and the invisible shoreline that both separated and brought us closer together.
The envelopes that once carried letters from senders to recipients now come to represent, for me, the uncertainty of arrival. Like boats sailing without knowing whether they are heading north or south, they trace an invisible map of back-and-forth movements. They are fragile vessels, symbols of all the journeys — real and imagined — that I had to undertake to keep a bond alive. Built from the doubt that accumulated over those 459 days, the work also speaks about the persistence of traveling in a vehicle of uncertainty. “Love is an obstinate adventure. The adventurous side is necessary, but so is obstinacy” (Badiou, 2009).
By grouping the boats together, I create a non-geographical map in which time and affection draw a cartography based on day-units. The borders, for me, were the intervals between a plane landing and another taking off, between a message read and a reply sent across, between the here and the there of two people insisting on meeting.
“459 dias à deriva” thus becomes a personal exercise in mapping what is usually left uncharted: the duration of distance and the in-between state of destinations. Between thin paper, always on the verge of tearing, and the persistent image of travel, I ask what a border ultimately is: a line of blockage or a place of passage.