Following her residency at Pivô Pesquisa, Caroline Ricca Lee returns to Pivô-Copan with work that cuts straight to the bone of inherited trauma. Her family history reads like a map of 20th-century displacement: fourth-generation Japanese coffee plantation workers, third-generation Chinese arrivals via Macau. Two lineages that collided in São Paulo, still carrying the psychic debris of the Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945)—a conflict whose aftershocks continue to reverberate through domestic spaces decades later. “We can move bodies from territories,” Lee observes, “but never territories from these bodies.”

Pivô’s vitrine becomes Lee’s perfect stage. This strange liminal space—part shop window, part aquarium—forces everything inside to perform. Here, Lee orchestrates a dialogue between Moon-Jen Tawei (2021) and the newly commissioned Constelação de um complexo IV (2025).

Moon-Jen Tawei presents three ceramic heads wrapped in pale fabrics, suspended like laundry or shrouds. The masks, fired at punishing temperatures, peer out from their textile cocoons with expressions caught between serenity and surveillance. “Faces of a father, a grandmother, and a grandfather,” Lee explains, though she immediately complicates this genealogy: are these actual ancestors or “facets hanging in the wardrobe named as unconscious”? The work asks an impossible question—how do we hold the weight of lives we can no longer touch?

Constelação de um complexo IV abandons such delicate ambiguities. This is Lee unleashed: calcined metal, buckwheat grain, ceramics, and fiberglass assembled into what she calls “an amalgam of chaos and dream in an inherited body.” Knives hang overhead like a suspended threat, turning rest into anxiety, safety into vigilance. The installation claims the vitrine’s space aggressively, transforming the viewing chamber into something more urgent—a place where memory refuses to stay buried.

Working between dream and documentation, Lee practices a kind of speculative archaeology, excavating the psychic sediment of diaspora. Her question—”If trauma cannot be cured, how do we rest under its imminence?”—finds no easy answers. Instead, she offers these material negotiations: works that turn nostalgia inside out, revealing it as much a weapon as a wound.