Juliana dos Santos’s research is based on her curiosity about the intertwining of the blue color of the Clitoria ternatea flower and the Black and Afro-diasporic experience in Brazil. Her work is driven by a desire to challenge the limiting Eurocentric traditions about perception and representation through the exploration of sensory expansions. Blue came to the artist during a meditation in a Buddhist temple, an event in which she saw the ajña chakra, known as the “third eye.” This vision, however, was not retinal, but synesthetic, emphasizing the possibility of visualizing something not through the eyes, but through a sensory experience.

Blue, usually associated with states of elevation, beauty, and intangibility in certain cultural contexts, is present in the artist’s work through complex stages of processing the Clitoria ternatea flower, cultivated by a family from São Félix, in the Recôncavo Baiano, with whom she has collaborated for years: Nilton Cesar dos Santos and Edilene Costa de Jesus dos Santos. These processes are analogous to the traditions of indigo dyeing and textile dyeing on the African continent, or even the history of the blues, the musical manifestation of the Black experience in the context of the United States. Just as immateriality and impermanence are fundamental to Dos Santos, the blue note is central to the blues: it is a dissonant note, considered out of tune as it defies the rigidity of the pentatonic scale, purposely used to amplify the emotion and expressiveness of the music.

Dos Santos experiments with the manifestation of aqueous language by blowing granules of roasted and ground f lowers onto a moist plane (paper or canvas), which absorbs them. Although they retain the gesture of the artist, this blue topography is also formed by the agency of the pulverized flower itself and the winds that distribute them across the canvas, adding multiple actions to the artistic results. In this way, the flower not only plays a colorful role in the service of the artist’s plastic desires but also has a pictorial autonomy. Dos Santos doesn’t extract a pigment from the f lower, but rather processes the entire flower into a powder, making the work more of a botanical impression that questions categorical definitions than a painting.

For the 36th Bienal de São Paulo, complex planes in shades of blue surround the viewer, creating an enveloping atmosphere. This experience resembles the artist’s synesthetic vision of blue during meditation. In this work, she collaborates with her mother, Eliana de Oliveira, who for years has developed complex patchwork designs in the construction of textile patterns. The union of different fabrics follows her mother’s interest in applied mathematics, guiding rhythms and compositions close to Euclidean logics that contrast with the botanical geometries proposed by Dos Santos. This dialogue emphasizes flows of knowledge transmission, hierarchical revisions, and transdisciplinary practices.