My name is Rafaela Werdan, I'm from Rio de Janeiro, that city of unbelievable headlines and sumptuous postcards. A city founded on the pain of wanting to live up to its beauty and never achieving it. Contradiction is part of the Rio essence. The creativity of remaking oneself at all times is latent, due to the need to overcome the shadows of the first buildings built in the place of powerful fauna, flora and ancient cultures.

All the pain that Rio carries rests in the corner bars, in the carnival, in the incredible sunset of Ipanema, in the mix of bodies, colors, beliefs and smiles wherever you go. It is a city that cannot bear the idea of being the best in the world and destroys itself by denying the beauty and importance of those who build it.

I'm a native Carioca, with my family in struggle and contradiction to exist in this place.

My journey begins when I decide to study psychology at the age of 10, without knowing exactly what that meant, they said it took care of people's souls, I thought it was good.

I always grew up writing long diaries to find the essence of things, I abandoned certainties and threw away the diaries at 15, when the intensities of life came.

I have always been full of dreams in an unwelcoming reality, to preserve my soul I clung to poetry, which exists in everything, from the puddles formed after torrential summer rains reflecting the clean blue sky, to the plate of hot food placed on the table after a long journey for it to reach me. The years passed and the intensities became more latent, my body, strong through sensitivity, grew. I needed to complete the goal of becoming a psychologist and continue changing stories, sharing the discovered essences, the persistence of beauty.

The road to achieving such a feat was long, I needed funds to finance my preparation for the test, as at the time, no one supported what I wanted to do. I researched what the current job was and Google from many years ago indicated: web designer. I didn't hesitate to take a course and then I opened a website company called: Rsites. I didn't imagine it would work, it was an active company for 3 years, with more than 40 completed websites achieved after a long research to find out which Rio companies still didn't have a website and proposing one to them. It worked out! In the company there was only me and my dream. The day of the test arrives and so does the result, after 10 years of journey, the answer was: I didn't get the place I wanted. This fell on me like a “March rain ending the summer”, it shook everything I was up to that point. I had to rebuild myself, in fact, get to know myself because throughout my life I was chasing a dream created in childhood without trying to think about anything else, without knowing what I had become. Not passing this test was the best thing in my life!

A universe of possibilities opens up the moment I give up just one path to follow, art came like trees that grow on the bank of a river after a flood that destroys everything on the surface, to reveal the strong roots , full of nutrients, desperate for sun. My fruits were watercolors, photographs until I reached resin and ceramic works. In terms of writing, the diaries became short stories, poems, articles and elaborate story scripts. I would never be complete without all of this, I discovered that this is how I will take care of stories, the essence of things and beauty. There is no more complete path to this than art, it's where you don't need to be, just feel.

It is on this point, on feeling, that my existence is based, on right and wrong choices, on streets full of beauty and instability, on being remade by the soul, on listening and reproducing stories, on loving without measure.

I was lucky at the beginning of my life to have found a great love, which made me grow and grew with me, as love is expected to live: growing from within to the world. Making us grow in the world. Growing the world in us.

I tried to feel beyond all borders, using different tools for this, but the greatest of all is the one I have now: I have just become a mother and I am remaking myself, once again, to receive the new trees after this flood of life in me, with its sweet-smelling but incredibly unfamiliar fruits. Living is the art of feeling and art is feeling materialized for all eternity.