One way to situate Ana Amorim’s work is through the concepts appropriated by movements such as Situationist International, active in the 1960s and remembered particularly for the texts by Guy Debord (1931-1994), the French thinker and author of the book La Société du Spectacle. In it, the writer criticizes contemporary consumerism, defining it as the product of a capitalist society that transforms culture into a commodity.

In the end, Ana Amorim, resistant to any association with private or public spaces committed to that purpose, established a contract with herself that would not allow for this commercialization of works of art.

The artist drew up her Contrato de Arte [Art Contract] in 2001, which rejected any links to institutions (museums, galleries) that receive financial support from companies whose objective is to use art to legitimize illicit practices— known as artwashing.

The Contract, which was in force from 2001 to 2016, made Ana Amorim’s activities as an artist difficult, and she was reduced to the stereotype of being “difficult.” A year after creating her “contract,” she started working on her first Psychogeographic Map (2002), adopting a Guy Debord concept in which the writer associates an individual’s social behavior with the geographic environment in which they live.

It was a daily map where the artist recorded her routine on sheets of acetate. In the end, the 52 blocks of spectral maps (one per week for a year) became the embryonic process of a series where repetition and serialization (processes related to conceptual art) predominated.

Since then, these maps of Ana Amorim’s daily life have assumed many forms: In 2005, they were closely linked to witnessed social struggles (from the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra [Landless Rural Workers’ Movement]). In 2012, Translucent Maps (pen on tracing paper) recorded personal experiences (such as, for example, a visit to a dermatologist). Finally, in 2016, when she decided to end her “Contract,” the artist started a series of embroideries (existing in her work since 2010) in which she recorded the passage of time (she even calculated the number of minutes lived since her birth). In 2018, an installation of 16 pieces of cotton embroidered on black fabric summarized the artist’s itinerary and her steps in each journey she took during that period.

There is a visible sense of freedom in the maps that came before the coronavirus pandemic. In the 2019 embroideries, Ana Amorim records flights from São Paulo to Valencia, passing through London, a city where she lived for eight years. In the same year, Ana Amorim started to include materials such as white acrylic pen on black paper in her maps, where the relationship between life and work seems even clearer, paving the way for the maps where she transcribed political street demonstrations against the possible return of the dictatorial regime.

From 2020 onwards, the situation in Brazil started taking up more and more space in Ana Amorim’s maps. Political news about the country (such as the government's campaign of disinformation about the pandemic) mixed with records of routine personal activities (a journey to a restaurant, for example) in an installation of Gulliverian dimensions (which reach three meters in width).

The starting point for Ana Amorim’s work was a historic piece of conceptual art by the North American artist Joseph Kosuth (One and Three Chairs, 1965). In this work, which associates a real chair with its photograph reproduction and textual definition, Kosuth, challenging the preeminence of the object, affirms that concept is fundamental and that a work of art should, first and foremost, provoke reflection.

An English teacher, translator, and full-time artist for almost 40 years, Ana Amorim reiterates Kosuth’s concept, presenting works in this exhibition that pay tribute to that legacy: the black maps, the yellow embroideries, the maps of her journeys around the world, and the large work Numbers of Days Lived, which calculates the over 22 thousand days of Ana Amorim’s lived experiences until 2019.