Pau-Campeche 
Curated by Sofia Lemos
Galeria da Boavista - Galerias Municipais de Lisboa
Lisbon, Portugal
https://galeriasmunicipais.pt/en/exposicoes/pau-campeche/​


Cotton dyed with pau-campeche (logwood tree), steel, ceramics and video installation.
Collaboration with Lejos Lejos and ArtWorks.
2025
@ Bruno Lopes




Trees are an invitation to think about time
and to travel in it the way they do,
by standing still and reaching out and down. [1]​ 

Plants do not begin at the beginning.[2] They emerge from the middle, from the thick of things, neither entirely of the earth nor wholly of the atmosphere. Rooted in soil yet reaching for the sky, they connect environments continuously through space and time. Long ago, their presence transformed Earth’s atmosphere, weaving the air we breathe, turning light into matter and possibility into form. Defined by deep interrelation, plants are not passive intermediaries but active agents of transformation, dissolving boundaries between species, forms, and modes of living. Their existence is a “transitive life,”[3] entwined with everything that is and has ever been.
The Palo-tinte tree (Haematoxylum campechianum), also known as logwood or Pau-Campeche in Portuguese, embodies this entanglement, shaping parallel histories of colonial trade and artistic expression. Native to Central America, its richly pigmented heartwood shaped both the material and symbolic landscapes of pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica. Before colonial powers turned it into a global commodity, Palo-tinte colored bodies, textiles, and rituals in deep shades of red, black, and blue. The Spanish Crown quickly recognised its value as a dye, turning its harvest into an industry woven into the fabric of colonial modernity.
In 2023, during a residency at Matadero Madrid in partnership with ArtWorks, Flávia Vieira began researching what became the script for El Otro Color (2025), a moving-image work that explores the archives of the Museo Nacional del Prado, the Museo del Traje in Madrid, and the Jardín Americano in Seville. Filming at night, she captured the tree’s branches and leaves in slow, circular movements, revealing their depths through shifting light. Their darkness gives way to the details of paintings by Spain’s masters, Diego Velázquez and Antonio Moro, among others, who depicted the Spanish Habsburgs in vivid black hues between the 1550s and the 1630s.
A woman’s voice reads fragments of Vieira’s conversation with psychologist José Luís Gomes, reflecting on alterity and ambiguity in human relationships. This dialogue led Vieira to perceive Pau-Campeche as an elusive, colonial object of desire—perpetually out of reach, yet ever- present. This notion unfolds through a letter to the tree, transforming the film into a vegetal journey: from cotton to paper, bark to ink, clothing to power, loss to archive, and from the Americas to Spain. The tree’s transitive life extends beyond the screen into a large-scale sculptural installation at Galeria da Boavista: a metal structure meanders through the gallery space from which textiles dyed with Palo-tinte in varying shades of black are suspended. In a play of opacity, the fabrics, echoing the tones of Prado’s paintings, reveal a life-sized set of metal and ceramic sculpture, evoking the tree’s fragmented presence—out of joint yet still resonant.
Vieira, an artist trained in Fine Arts in Porto based in Brazil for the past fifteen years, works across sculpture, textiles, and ceramics to explore the cultural histories of making. Her research into natural dyes informs her concept of “botanical diasporas”—the ongoing entanglement of nature, history, and culture seeds migrate and plants are uprooted and transplanted elsewhere, affecting their environments. As a symbol of desire and displacement, Pau-Campeche reminds us that vegetal lives cast long shadows, whispering unfinished histories, inviting us to listen.  


[1] Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses. London: Granta Books, 2021, p.5.
[2] The idea that in vegetal life, everything starts from the middle stems from readings and discussions with philosopher Michael Marder over the years. See Time is a Plant. Boston: Brill, 2023; Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (co-authored with Luce Irigaray). Columbia University Press, 2016; The Philosopher’s Plant: An Intellectual Herbarium. Columbia University Press, 2014; and Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. Columbia University Press, 2013.
[3] Emanuele Coccia, The Life of Plants: A Metaphysics of Mixture. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2019, p.47.


Sofia Lemos