A Não Permanência do Ser (The Non-Permanence of Being) is a site-specific work that emerges from the encounter between the human body and the forest, installed in a tree at the heart of the Costa da Lagoa trail in Florianópolis — a forest reserve where the Atlantic Forest still breathes in its original potency.
The sculpture, molded from the artist's own body, consists of a head and an arm that seem to sprout from the tree trunk, as if the human being and nature had fused into a single organism. The choice of COB — an ancestral mixture of earth, water, and straw — is deeply symbolic: it is a resistant and durable material, capable of withstanding time and the elements, yet entirely natural, producing no waste and integrating into the ecosystem without harming it.
Over the time, the work underwent transformation. Moss and small plants began to grow around the sculpture, as if the forest itself was reclaiming it as part of itself. Gradually, the sculpted body began to decompose, returning to the earth from which it came — thus fulfilling the natural cycle of organic matter. What remained was the memory of a presence, the photographic record of an instant in which the human and the vegetal touched.
The title A Não Permanência do Ser reflects this ephemerality. In a society obsessed with durability, documentation, and digital immortality, the work proposes the opposite: the acceptance of transience, the recognition that everything that exists is in constant transformation, and that art, like life, can be a fleeting but deeply meaningful gesture.
The work also dialogues with the indigenous and riverside tradition of using COB as a building material — a simple, sustainable technology that respects the environment. By using this material, the artist not only pays homage to popular knowledge but also denounces the logic of the disposable and the plastic that invades nature, proposing a poetic and ethical alternative for occupying space.
The Non-Permanence of Being is, therefore, a reflection on the place of human beings in the world: not as dominators or exploiters, but as an integral part of a web of life that precedes and succeeds them. The work invites us to think about what we leave behind, the marks we imprint on the planet, and the beauty of one day disappearing without a trace — leaving only the memory that we were here.
