During the Shifting Shores residency (in Ubatuba and Salvador), Licida Vidal contrasts the natural beauty with the scars of mass tourism, exposing the severe contamination of local waters by pharmaceuticals and sewage, confirmed by recent research from the USP Oceanographic Institute. In response to this urgency, the artist proposes and deploys a filtering assembly at the water’s surface. Expanding bioremediation to the intelligence of the social body, the gathering “Conversation with the Waters” brought together women, activists, and Indigenous and Quilombola leaders connected to the cause. From this encounter, an advisory council was formed, which guided the consolidation of the artwork and its installation site.

The work materializes through the dispersion of low-fired ceramic “seeds,” made porous with sawdust and designed to maintain an inward flow through the Venturi effect. Alongside studies such as Biorock technology (calcium carbonate sanctuaries) and algal phytoremediation, these ceramics, submerged and secured by cables to floating structures, act as marine shelters and traps for contaminants. While awaiting legal approval for a dedicated floating device, the sculptures were divided between a deactivated barge in a private marina and a mariculture farm, creating a mixed structure for cultivation and pollutant capture.

Titled “A spoonful of salt and a spoonful of sugar: solutions for a feverish ocean,” the work acts like a homemade rehydration solution: a gesture of affection fighting the effects of a sick system. Beyond pursuing physical and chemical efficacy in ocean cleaning, there is the symbolic efficacy of providing a space to re-elaborate care as a political gesture. This culminates in the central question: “Who, historically, cleans?” Drawing on Françoise Vergès, Licida points out that care work in Brazil has a color, a gender, and a zip code. Rejecting the idea that environmental cleaning should be an unpaid “vocation” sustained by racial capitalism, the project demands climate justice and proposes that the act of caring be remunerated, recognized, and transformed into a poetics of coexistence.

Licida Vidal is a visual artist living and working in Ubatuba, São Paulo, Brazil, graduated in Social Sciences at the University of São Paulo (USP). Through performance, photography, video, and installations, her work explores questions of gender and nature within the context of climate emergencies. Her practice weaves together subaltern knowledge, intimate experiences, and academic research in a search for strategies of habitability and the restoration of autonomy to bodies and territories.