ZANZADO EM TRAMA É ARMAÇÃO DE ARAPUCA
Installation composed from the fragments of 65 disassembled traps
Variable dimensions  
2021 - 2022



The trap has always been present in my daily life because my father, Jorge da Costa, is a trapmaker. I grew up watching him create objects and movements of capture. When I think about a family’s passage through time, I see there is always an incomplete choreography passed from one to another, teaching us only part of the gestures needed to cross.

It is as if, to cross the street, we were told beforehand to look both ways, but then we must learn the step and the path on our own. I call ancestry this part of the gestures we perform, those that guide our survival in the world, the fragment of choreography that keeps us standing or teaches us how to rise. I believe every dance inhabiting space is forged between memory and the body’s own way of walking through the world. We inherit an incomplete choreography so that we may multiply the paths.

From the moment I began to understand my body as a trap, I also understood that weaving is the multiplication of the lines of the path, and that to be a good trap it is inevitably necessary to be many, just as my father is, and as everyone I know who makes traps is. Zanzado em trama é armação de arapuca is the sum of several crossroads: the unfolding of a step, a turn around the central axis among possible directions, a search for an expanded way of being a trap. It is the shaping of muscle, of pause, of the order that disorients. A movement that both announces and renounces.

I multiplied the strategies of my presence by blending with 65 traps woven between Minas Gerais and Bahia, which captured fish, birds, moray eels, armadillos, crabs, rats, and octopuses. I studied how each one negotiated with space to be at once immanent and invisible. I understand Zanzado em trama é armação de arapuca as a study in motion - a work that will happen again but never repeat itself, because it is a form yet to come, and when it arrives, it must be remade for its next appearance.

To be a trap is to bring the enemy inside oneself and not every enemy can be brought inside. While dismantling the 60 traps, I removed from many of them their ability to capture. In my neighborhood, Jardim Laguna, I learned that if you know how to threaten, you are protected. That is why Laguna is a prayer I carry at the crown of my skull. The eloquence of threat is a trap disguised as armor, a game, a defense that declares itself with relaxed musculature.

Violence naturally continues to operate, and defense remains necessary — just as it is also necessary, at times, not to defend oneself. Play, however, is an ancient lesson in protection, an evasion that keeps the body from illness. Being a trap is indeed a possibility for both defense and attack, but today I understand being a trap mainly as a stance, an attitude, a way of existing in the world.


This gives me a body of warning, one that weaves silent threads of threat, like sowing fear to reap a moment of pause before the other’s attack. Pause and watchfulness become the measures for the calm of the zanzado. Every muscle that only contracts grows ill; what never contracts also grows ill. To lessen the enemy’s calls to war is to create more time to wander freely.