Augusto de Campos, Brazilian concrete and visual poet, wrote an inspiring poem called Renasce-Remorre. With its fluctuation of grammar, semantics and setting on the page inspired me to create this artwork.

Nace-Vive Muere/Nasce-Vive-Morre talks about a non definite dead, we are born and  die many times in our lives, part of us dies and later rebirths and part of us does not. 

For every time I leave a place I take in my suitcase everything that has significance in my life. Is like dying a little but coming back to life once again in a new place.

This artist book, Nace-Vive Muere/Nasce-Vive-Morre is an homage to the power of rebirth, my own rebirth. It is a book that I started in Sao Paulo, Brazil 1995 (the prints were conceived and printed there), continued in Montreal, Canada 1995-1996 (the book was conceived and planned there) and finished in Buenos Aires, Argentina 1996 (the binding and the box was designed and produced there). These are the three countries that I lived in during these last years and the book traveled with me like a suitcase were to keep my life while travelling through different countries and cultures.

The color of the pages simulates the flesh tone, relating the piece to the body, my own. Even though the images are abstract constructions one can identify the fluctuation of time passing and changing things, or oneself. Images appear and smoothly disappear or change into other images, narrating the continuous change that we all go through as life goes by.
The leather of the box and cover of the book reinforces the significance of death and rebirth. An old cow leather, with vein left marks, ruined by the time, a leather that nobody will ever use is meant to signify life and dead at the same time. The transformation of an undesirable object into an art object, a metaphor of changing dead into life.

A metaphor of my own rebirth? Who knows...?