NAVEGANÇA / Navigating Time
I created the first Book of the Day in 1992, not knowing it would become a lifelong practice. As an artist who moves constantly between continents, I needed something that could travel with me. Traditional painting requires space: studios, canvases, shipping crates. An accordion-fold book fits in a suitcase.
What began as practical necessity became conceptual framework. These small accordion-folded books literally embody navegança, the Portuguese word suggesting both purposeful navigation and open-ended wandering. I fold them to travel, unfold them to work, refold them to carry again. They are made for movement.
Over thirty-two years, I have carried these books across oceans, through airports, to residencies and symposiums in a dozen countries. In 2000 the installation “The Ups and Downs of the Days, 1992 to 2000” opened at Galeriehaus Nord in Nuremberg with more than thirty-five works. In 2001 I immigrated to Canada with 100 of the 350 books I had made in Germany. Another 500 have followed across three Vancouver-area studios in Vancouver, Tsawwassen, and Burnaby.
They are documentation of my artistic practice and of my life. Many of the older pages have been painted over, layered with new marks, the past evolving into dialogue with the present.
At seventy, having worked in East Germany, West Germany, Brazil, England, Poland, France, Portugal, and Canada, and having become a Canadian citizen in October 2024, I return to São Paulo in 2026. In 1994 I showed my work outside Germany for the first time, at SESC Pompeia. In 1996 I was at FUNARTE with sculptural wire works. Now I return to FUNARTE with thirty-two Books of the Days. This is navegança: we set out thinking we know our destination, only to discover that the journey itself has been shaping us all along.
The long voyage of art. Humble, grateful, endlessly generative.
Stefani Peter, Vancouver 2025
