This exhibition began to be dreamed of at a time when the world was suspended. During the pandemic, amid uncertainty and isolation, the idea was born to present Panmela Castro’s work in a show that approached affection as both a gesture and a rupture. The exhibition was conceived to take place at the Jacarandá space, in Villa Aymoré, in Catete — a place that, like this proposal itself, has withstood time. What was meant to happen earlier is only now coming to fruition. And perhaps because of that, it carries the strength of those who endured postponement without losing the impulse to bloom.
Jacarandá is, in itself, an affirmation of endurance. Founded in 2014 under the leadership of Carlos Vergara, it is a collective initiative of artists and art enthusiasts, with no commercial or profit-oriented goals. Since then, it has maintained its commitment to expanding the spaces of art and thought in an independent, generous, and critical way. To host Panmela here, now, is a celebration of this shared resistance — of art that insists, of ideas that return, of affection that materializes in encounter.
Wordless Music
How can one express feeling without words?
What moves within when there is no written reference — and, therefore, no definition, no boundary?
Perhaps it is necessary to unlearn naming.
Not to place.
Let the wind in.
Wordless music is breath.
It is sound that touches without saying.
It is the interval between one note and another that sustains what we feel without the need to explain.
And who said that feeling must be explained?
Silence?
Not exactly.
Perhaps it is listening.
Perhaps it is pause.
Perhaps it is only the courage not to fill the space.
Wordless music offers us another way of understanding:
Affection exists.
It is not spoken.
But it is present.
Like a gesture that does not demand return.
Like a gaze that remains even after one turns away.
It is not about saying, but about sustaining.
It is not about defining, but about allowing to exist.
Wordless music is the language of body and time.
It is where affection breathes.
In Panmela Castro’s work, affection is not an obvious gesture. It is far from being light or automatic. For that reason, affection here becomes a field of dispute — and also of construction.
Panmela begins from a simple experience: receiving flowers. A gesture often associated with delicacy, care, or romance. But she does not stop there. She responds to this gesture with another — she paints the flowers. In this case, painting is not merely an image or a visual translation. It is an action. It is elaboration. It is the transformation of a symbol into a practice, of an offering into a choice, of emotion into aesthetic and political construction.
In this exhibition, the act of painting flowers does not represent a romantic idealization of affection, but its recoding as a possibility for healing, autonomy, and reciprocity. By painting the flowers she receives, Panmela refuses to simply express gratitude. She gives back. And in doing so, she asserts. She asserts that affection is not a luxury: it is a right. And more than that, it is a strategy.
Affection, in her work, is summoned as a force that moves structures and serves as a foundation for the construction of self-esteem. It is not merely intimate — it is public. It is collective. And it is political. It is present in the act of caring for oneself, but also in sustaining others, in looking toward those who come after, in building bridges where before there was only isolation. In this dynamic, affection aligns with the construction of health and education. It is a foundational force — a ground upon which autonomy, vision of the future, and social change can be built.
Self-esteem, here, is not vanity: it is foundation. It is the sedimentation of a knowledge that has been denied to us — the understanding that we can, indeed, act, create, lead, teach, and exist fully. Affection establishes what is possible. It establishes trust. It establishes action.
And it is in this spirit that, as curator, I reclaim the gesture of affection without the obligation of response. The flowers I send to Panmela are not requests, nor expectations. They are flowers so that she does not feel obliged to anything.
Flowers for her simply to receive, if she wishes, in her own time, with the freedom not to reciprocate. Because care is also that: offering without demanding. Creating a space where presence can bloom without debt. Where affection does not become burden, but possibility.
With her flowers and paints, Panmela reminds us that to create is also to care. And that to care, from the margins of an exclusionary society, is a revolutionary act. Her paintings are not ornaments. They are responses. They are affirmations of presence. They are seeds cast into time to bloom in other hands, other voices, other bodies that have also chosen — or are learning to choose — to live with affection as a political verb.
— Keyna Eleison (Curator)
