Agrade Camíz

Agrade Camíz

Mapa Mundi, 2025

Acrylic and oil stick on canvas

130.4 x 90.5 cm

TBA21 Thyssen-Bornemisza Art Contemporary Collection

In Mapa Mundi (2025), Agrade Camíz constructs a visceral cartography of the body as terrain—marked, politicized, and transformed by lived experience. Rendered in richly saturated tones of brown and deep blue, the composition evokes both flesh and sky, earth and ether. At its center is a female torso, monumental and assertive, foregrounded with two yellow circles radiating multicolored lines from the nipples—simultaneously referencing celestial diagrams and the playful energy of children’s spinning toys. The work becomes a universe unto itself, mapping not only geography but memory, trauma, and survival.

Camíz, born and raised on the margins of Rio de Janeiro’s Jacaré favela, draws deeply from her urban context and autobiographical wounds. Having begun her creative practice through writing as a form of self-knowledge, she later turned to the streets in 2010 to build visual narratives—murals that confronted silence with visibility. Her interdisciplinary approach now bridges painting, installation, and video, often incorporating visual symbols from the suburbs: iron window grids, favela architecture, and emblems of both restriction and resistance.

Grids—grades—play a crucial linguistic and conceptual role in Camíz’s visual language. In Mapa Mundi, the faint overlay of grid-like patterns on the body alludes to behavioral constraints imposed by societal expectations, particularly on marginalized female bodies. Through an evocative punning of the Portuguese word “grade” (grid), she unfolds a web of meaning: agradecer (to thank), agradar (to please), agrade (please). These overlapping resonances open up questions around conformity, limitation, and the weight of being expected to "please" in environments that restrict and surveil. But Camíz’s work refuses containment. It emerges from pain, including her own narrative of childhood sexual abuse, not to offer closure, but to trigger—a term she embraces unapologetically in her concept of "arte gatilho" (trigger art). Mapa Mundi is not decorative, nor is it neutral. It speaks in raw symbols and coded gestures that disturb comfort zones, insisting that pain, particularly when systemically erased or normalized, must be rendered visible in ways that pierce. Here, the body is not a passive surface—it is a site of resistance, a living map of histories that have been crossed out, silenced, or denied. The colorful bursts from the breasts, reminiscent of toy spinners, complicate the visual register: they suggest innocence, but also rupture. They point to a childhood interrupted, and to a body that carries within it both violence and joy, silence and voice. Through such gestures, Camíz invites the viewer not only to look, but to feel implicated—to shift, even slightly, in their relation to structures of power, beauty, and violence.