This sense of immersion is present in many of Paes Leme’s works and it is exactly the fact that she uses local materials, associated with immanent geographies and archaic history, that turns her work into a subversive process in which questions of home, banishment, and exile are being posed. Subversive also because when Paes Leme creates from materials native to her homeland, from the very materials homes are made of, she introduces an element in her work that uses and abuses the sense of place, and puts the melancholic mode under suspicion. She creates an unstable heterotopia, for her works destabilize the notions of longing and belonging since the materials that symbolize the sense of place act here as agents of alienation, designating something amiss. If, by employing dichotomies such as nature/culture, the interpretation of Paes Leme could acquire a tranquilizing effect – for what is more soothing than a demonstration of dichotomies living in harmony with one another, as if the museum or the installation locus were a peace conference with successful elements? – and such an interpretation would lead us to the place where the work, now in its utopic aspect, could, accompanied by our condolences, indeed rest in peace. However, once we realize that we are in the presence of a categorical collapse, that we have been maneuvered towards the recognition of such a collapse, once that is apprehended, the sense of discontent raises its perplexing head. It is here that the work leaves the anthropological Elysian Fields and enters chaos. It asks questions concerning the small place (Brazil as a physical locus) and the great place (Brazil as an idea). It relates to the concept of no-place, which is also utopic par excellence, and the discrepancies boggle the mind. This state of ambiguity produces a sense of discontent, the awareness that what is seen has a paradoxical meaning which, in its turn, is expressed through the melancholic mode that marks the works of Paes Leme. Asking, then, about the nature of the melancholic object, about its characteristics and virtues, requires a better look at the idea of home as
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