Natalia Pereira: a birth – I can’t stop

In fall 2024, the Institute of Contemporary Art Santa Fe hosted Brazilian-American artist and award-winning chef Natalia Pereira for a residency and exhibition titled a birth – I can’t stop—a project that collapsed the boundaries between exhibition and artistic practice. Over two and a half months, the gallery evolved from an empty space into a working artist studio and ultimately into a completed exhibition.

Pereira’s drawings, paintings, and sculptures—primarily created on found paper—feature silhouetted figures she describes as medicine women, teachers, and beings who hold both questions and answers. These works form part of the AD 105 Society, a reference to the year paper was first standardized, and a symbol for the body’s ability to express, record, and transform experience between birth and death. In Pereira’s work, paper becomes a living surface—delicate yet resilient—where abstracted figures emerge through frenetic, precise lines that hold both spirit and matter.

Throughout the residency, the ICA hosted a series of dinners, tea gatherings, and public programs as ways to activate the exhibition and deepen engagement with Pereira’s practice. Events included lectures and discussions on ancestral seed knowledge, acequia water stewardship, and the social and ecological politics of wild foraging in Northern New Mexico.