Ancer brings together three moments of the work of the artist from Maranhão, Claudio Costa. Around 2000, Claudio set out in search of a deeper experience of the landscapes and hauntings of northern Maranhão. He traced routes and for over fifteen years he poetically investigated the region. He passed through places where the human landscape is as strong and impactful as the natural landscape. The immensity, the abundance of waters, the extensive, diverse and mysterious mangrove, the sand people with their knowledge, their dealings with nature, their mythologies, their vision of the world. This peculiar universe started the processes of experimentation and artistic creation, instigating, challenging, presenting themes. At the same time, an investigation of techniques and materialities that were capable of translating with propriety and force what was being captured by the artist began. Often what you find is stronger than what you were initially looking for. Arcabouços deals with the landscape, the natural context, the stage on which life unfolds. Bestiary is the result of a dive into regional mythologies, where the artist presents his reading of men who turn into animals and the reports he heard about strange and isolated beings, which represent ways of dealing with non-accepted aspects of reality, with the fears it produces . Nódoa , performed some time later, talks about the marks of an individual's trajectory. Strong or fragile marks, dramatic or soft, beautiful or heavy, like those on exposed fabrics in the form of small labyrinths, as labyrinthine and full of marks is the trajectory of each one. Dyeing is the predominant technique, a link between works performed at different times. The bark of mangrove trees, sarnambi and cashew, whose dyes are traditionally used by residents in their candles, clothes, utensils, and houses gave rise to a prolonged period of experimentation. Different processes, saturations and supports were being worked on. The artist found preserved in the terreiros the knowledge about the use of natural dyes, a wide variety of techniques and purposes, which are disappearing. For each dye, there is a use, which ranges from a remedy to the production of a waterproofing varnish used on boat sails or on the floors and walls of houses. Dyeing to smear everyday clothes in the fields and camouflage in nature, blending in with the landscape, not making noise. The dark paint of a mangrove bark staining all the clothing you have when there is a loss in the family. And the realization that, just as the dye is loosening from the fabric, fading with time, the mourning gradually leaves us. It never comes out completely, but it softens. The strong poetic charge of dyeing as a traditional practice, present in different dimensions of life, emerges in the observation of the artist's works. The processes learned in his long immersion, the stories he heard point to the richness of this landscape and its wisdom. The works tell us about the marks of life, as well as the knowledge, perceptions, fears and worldview of those who live amidst the exuberance and magnificence of the landscape. They speak of an ancestry, of a baggage that is carried. An ancestry sometimes collective, sometimes personal. Art always raises different perceptions, different reactions. What the artist brought to his work can be understood in many ways, it can only be felt without any explanation, it can only be appreciated in its beauty, its drama or its rawness.