Crescent (2016) was a land art intervention created on the shores of Lagoa do Paraíso (Paradise Lagoon) in Brazil’s northeast, a landscape where dunes, lagoons, and winds are in constant dialogue. The work traced a twelve-meter semicircle into the sand, its two ends opening into the lagoon. As currents passed through, the crescent stirred hidden sediments—lifting layers of black sand and white clay that drifted into shifting drawings on the water’s surface. Within fifteen days, the form was carried away by the same forces it had summoned, dissolving back into the lagoon’s rhythm.

Ephemeral by design, the work resonates with the fleeting gestures of 1970s land art, yet its roots are distinctly Brazilian. In the Northeast, cycles of drought and rain have long dictated both ecology and ways of life, creating a cultural landscape deeply attuned to impermanence. The crescent form recalls symbols of the heavens present across Indigenous cosmologies and Afro-Brazilian spiritualities, while also whispering toward the sensibilities of Japanese-Brazilian traditions—where an appreciation of seasonality and impermanence (wabi-sabi) honors the beauty of things as they appear and vanish. In Crescent, these layered references converge: a temporal drawing in sand and water, as fleeting as the winds that carried it away.