Some of the photographs and videos that appear to capture natural landscapes are in fact registers of the chaos of Rio de Janeiro city, as seen from a nearby highway. The presence of those small and delicate creatures in the middle of the gray concrete landscape was almost imperceptible.

In Metaphormoses, I record and share my encounters with the beauty inherent in metamorphosis and its movements. The photographs, films and installations I created under this title were inspired by the poetic imagery of the dream of the Taoist philosopher, Zhuang Zhou.

I was engrossed by the mix of wisdom and humour present in the zen and philosophical stories narrated by John Cage, and particularly captivated by Cage’s account of Zhuang Zhou’s dream. The Taoist philosopher once dreamt he was a butterfly, riding the wind across an open meadow. When he awoke, there was no wind, no meadow, and he had no wings. There was only a man asleep on a hard bed. He asked himself which was the dream, and which was reality. Am I a man dreaming of being a butterfly? Or a butterfly dreaming of being a man?