While Brazilian artist Virginia de Medeiros maintains a studio behind her house in São Paulo, the majority of her practice takes place elsewhere. Driven by experience rather than medium, de Medeiros shapes her art around the extended social residencies she creates out of her insatiable curiosity to understand humanity’s “micro-universes.”
“Art and everyday life go hand in hand for me. There’s no separation between them,” she says. “Each art project is a space for learning, for transformation, for inventing new forms of pleasure and interaction.” De Medeiros’ idea of the everyday is more inclusive than most. The artist has inserted herself into a diverse range of environments, from a transgender brothel in Salvador to a soup kitchen in Fortaleza. Out of these immersive episodes, de Medeiros creates equally eclectic bodies of work, from videos to books, but always with the participation and help of the people she meets along the way. “Becoming familiar, interacting, building trust, sharing life, falling in love, letting oneself go, embarking on adventures and making good friends are the pillars of my work method,” de Medeiros explains. “The philosopher Henri Bergson once said sympathy is a method that enables us to reach inside different realities, to apprehend them from within. This is the condition in which I create my work.” 
One of de Medeiros’ most recent projects, a stint as a submissive in a BDSM family, perfectly illustrates the way she translates an ephemeral experience into something more tangible. The resulting show, Jardim das Torturas, combined an installation of erotic sculptures and her first performance piece. Outfitted by her adopted family in a ball gag and a ponytailed butt plug, the artist spent two hours on her hands and knees in a hidden vitrine while visitors were invited to gaze at her through small holes. However, it was the most subtle element of the show, the transcribed diary entries by de Medeiros and her fellow submissives on sheets of copper, that offered the most intimate window into the psyche and dynamics of polyamorous, dominatrix/submissive relations. Writing occupies a central part of de Medeiros’ creative process. “Diaries are a way of organizing my emotional states and not letting feelings get to me,” she explains. “Diaries tend to follow the movements of life, but in my case the diary opens up a space for narrative. In it, ascertainments from everyday life can be elaborated on, betrayed, or even forgotten. The candor in my diary is the transparency of a desire, more so than a truth.” These days, de Medeiros is on the road embarking on several back-to-back residencies, starting in New York and then moving to Manchester, U.K., and eventually back to São Paulo. Without concrete plans for these stays, de Medeiros leaves herself purposefully open to chance encounters and the effects they will inevitably have on her life. “To enter a new day-to-day; to let myself be affected by other codes, other values, other ethics—that’s what drives my creative process,” she says. “As a Latin American artist I build myself through a mestizo of blurred boundaries and multiple transits. My constitution takes place through the notion of the unfinished, unstable, middle-of-the-road, centrifuged, mobile body. I believe the relationship we must build with ourselves is not one of identity, but one of differentiation.”Brazilian artist Virginia de Medeiros embraces the marginalized fringes by embedding herself in the micro-universes of society.
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