In espírito jardim humana, family memory and fiction are woven together into a singular imaginary shaped by Tadáskía’s cosmology. Throughout the exhibition, forms and figures reappear, unfold, and take on new configurations as they move from one work to another and across different supports. These beings inhabit the threshold between the human and the nonhuman, connecting different domains of existence through language and formal invention. Characters such as jour nuit papillon, travesti mariposa centopeia travesti moth centipede, ave preta mística mystical black bird and lua coelho negra moon black rabbit form part of this expanding imaginary.

In drawings and paintings on canvas, as well as on sculptural supports made of leather paper, wood veneer, and MDF, the artist gives form to a kind of anima—a presence of life and movement that runs through her practice. The word also evokes the cartoons of her childhood and the possibility of life circulating among beings and environments, even when these are commonly understood as inanimate or inorganic. Animals, plants, hair, shells, and other references reappear alongside branches, cattail straw, bromeliads, fruit, vegetables, and liquids. These elements rarely settle into stable identities; instead, they appear, retreat from view, and recombine across images and objects. In the “apparitions,” as Tadáskía calls her 35 mm photographs, as well as in the grooves, scratches, reliefs, shifts in line, and passages of color that traverse the works, image, matter, and form remain in constant exchange. What is merely suggested in one painting or drawing may acquire body and volume elsewhere, allowing one language to extend into another.

This logic also informs the language of Tadáskía’s titles. In espírito jardim humana, labirinto céu noturno, olhos de pedra bruta, no meio do caminho as S, espantalha, a unicórnia and língua de boi língua de vaca, words and images are drawn together through associations, displacements, and resonances that do not necessarily follow a descriptive logic. In other works, such as nascida casca born shell and casca híbrida hybrid shell, Portuguese and English appear side by side, without the relationship between the two languages being reduced to translation. The recurrence of titles made up of juxtaposed words—often without commas or other punctuation to establish a relationship between them—keeps these combinations open-ended. The titles do not necessarily explain or definitively name what we see; rather, they participate in the same movement that runs through the works. Language and matter thus converge without either fully containing the other.

In the exhibition, this dynamic also unfolds through the relationship between surface and time. Fruit, vegetables, liquids, and shells carry their own processes of transformation, renewal, and disappearance, while oil painting on canvas, leather paper, and wood introduces another dimension of duration, tied to matter’s inscription in time and history. Yet these elements do not appear as separate categories: the organic and the inorganic, the living and the inanimate, that which grows and that which changes all meet and intertwine. Across the surfaces, paint, scraped areas, grooves, reliefs, and exposed sections of the support coexist, producing different layers. Surrounding them, the sculptures bring found elements into contact with transformed objects, drawing together materials of different origins and temporalities. Graphic marks, fields of color, organic matter, and constructed forms circulate through the space, establishing relationships that extend beyond each individual work. What emerges is a hybrid universe, as palpable as a body and as invisible as a spirit, in which a form can carry the presence of something that grows, endures, or comes undone.