Thaís says that her background comes from cinema, both as a spectator and a maker. The audiovisual field was decisive in shaping her interests and aesthetic directions. In Fortaleza, while studying at the public audiovisual school at Vila das Artes, she became closely involved with live image manipulation and with the relationship between sound, gesture and materiality. In 2009, she created the project Nós em Fortaleza, alongside Uirá dos Reis and Frederico Benevides, working with archival images processed live and improvised soundtracks. This formative experiment already introduced central elements that would define her future trajectory: the appropriation of other people’s images, aesthetic degradation, sonic improvisation and the idea that each presentation should exist only in that specific instant. As Thaís says, “if you saw it, you saw it; if you didn’t, you missed it”. It is an ethics of presence that does not simply celebrate the ephemeral, but the very untransferability of a live action, where bodies, noise, movement and attention become unrepeatable conditions.

From audiovisual experimentation, she moved into music and improvisation. She used to play guitar at home, in an intimate way, with just a few chords, but what pushed her forward was realising that image could become sound, that projection could behave like musical editing. This encounter between domestic practices and the public stage became the backbone of her research: a stitching together of everyday gestures and improvised invention, between what one does alone at home and what one risks in front of an audience. Many of her artistic partnerships emerge in this expanded domestic space, where musicians and friends visit, test instruments, create small improvised sessions and, from a single meeting, discover a shared sonority. It was in this environment that the turning point occurred, when “I don’t know how to play anything” became “I can play anything”.

This lack of pretension works as a strategy. Thaís avoids relying on software, preferring physical instruments, improvised microphones, analogue synthesisers and found objects. She builds a home studio made of raw possibilities. In 2016, for example, she formed the band Microleão Dourado with Eduardo Carpinelli and Ivo Lopes Araújo, where collective experimentation was the foundation. The recordings were done live, embracing sounds from the city and the countryside, including footsteps, wind, movement. Environmental noise as raw material.

Her openness to the unexpected reveals a double discipline that oscillates between improvisation and structure. Improvisation takes place within concrete conditions: microphones, old machines, simple cameras, precarious objects. There is rigour in the listening. And this ethic also appears in artists who, like Thaís, work with the minimum as the spark of form. The Argentine multidisciplinary artist Cecilia Bengolea (1979–), for example, starts from the everyday body and the unrefined gesture to build performances that depend on the encounter between what she does and what the environment gives back. The Brazilian artist Berna Reale (1965–), meanwhile, uses ordinary objects and public spaces as performative agents that create tension between body, politics and instability. Their work is related through a shared principle: action emerges from the friction between body, material and circumstance.

One of the strongest aspects of Thaís’s account is her relationship with objects and her ability to extract sound from absolutely anything: “I can make a sound from an earring, or from a very silent place”. She collects everyday materials, sometimes discarded, guided by the intuition that they may produce unforeseen sounds. Plastic bags, for instance, are categorised solely by the type of noise they make when miked, crumpled or stretched. These objects cease to be metaphors and become active sources of sonic texture. On stage, they are handled, attached to structures, dragged, left to vibrate. The performance arises from this direct, physical, material contact.

This interest in objects as operational partners takes condensed form in MulherMÁquina, her current and continually evolving project. The performance proposes a state of body traversed by noises, interruptions and attempts to re-establish internal circuits. Thaís does not “imitate” the behaviour of a machine, but investigates how small mechanical patterns (repetition, failure, hesitation, loop) can reorganise her presence. The short circuit, for example, functions both as sensation and dramaturgy, defining rhythm, suspending gestures and creating micro-emotional temperatures that move the scene.

In MulherMÁquina, the domestic space is transformed as well. Cutlery, glasses, plates and kitchen objects appear as if being seen for the first time, almost foreign. The performer tries to decipher the behaviour of these objects, listening to their “tendencies”, as she puts it. They cease to be utensils and become extensions of the body. Each object offers its own sonic grammar, and the performance consists of accompanying the process of learning this grammar in real time.

The notion of “activating what already exists in objects” is recurrent in Thaís’s words. This idea of a “minimal autonomy” of materials echoes the practices of artists such as the South African Dineo Seshee Bopape (1981–), who works with objects loaded with history, dust and remnants, granting these materials a symbolic agency that structures her work. It is not a matter of attributing literal life to objects, but of recognising that they produce effects, resistances, rhythms, accidents. In MulherMÁquina, this micro-autonomy organises the scene, and the performance advances according to what the environment gives back, an unexpected crackle, an irregular loop, an unforeseen vibration.

This instability is central to the project. Thaís uses the term “bug” to refer to the small errors, freezes and interruptions that arise in the midst of the action. Here, the bug is not a technical problem, but compositional material. Instead of striving for mechanical precision, the performance embraces deviations and incorporates failures as narrative engines.

One of the strongest images from the interview is her refurbished guitar. Once just an empty shell without strings, it became a reinvented instrument: sanded, cleaned, drilled with nails, adapted with bolts, wires, improvised pieces. Thaís does not “master” this instrument; she discovers it. The cracks and rust are not obstacles but potential. The hybrid guitar connects the domestic environment with the performative act, transforming a patched-up object into a living sonic body.

When she performs, Thaís says that the audience encounters “another presence”. She mentions how projecting giant images of her own eyes, distorted and strange, provokes both laughter and discomfort in herself. She prefers to show the “strange” rather than exhibit the “beautiful images she has already made”. The performance becomes the invention of an unstable subjectivity, where vulnerability generates new ways of affecting and being affected. This commitment to instability brings her work close to the practice of Colombian artist María José Arjona (1972–), whose research in long-duration performance activates altered bodily states to investigate limits, repetition and resistance. In works such as Línea de Vida (2016) or All the Others in Me (2012-2018), Arjona sustains continuous actions that transform the perception of the body over time, pushing it into zones of exhaustion, concentration and hyper-presence. The link with Thaís lies precisely in the production of an expanded presence. Both create performative conditions in which the body ceases to be merely a support for actions and becomes a sensitive system traversed by tensions, errors, deviations and reconfigurations, generating forms of perception not accessible in everyday states.

In an exclusive recording for SONA, Thaís presented three tracks that reveal, each in their own way, distinct layers of her creative process. In “MulherMÁquina, Ato 1”, she works from her own voice, exploring a sonic materiality that arises from the body in a raw state. The layering of vocal tracks constructs an irregular landscape made of amplified breaths, distorted whispers and small frictions that accumulate like organisms. Breathing becomes rhythm, now accelerated, spaced, always open to the risk of losing control. As the track progresses, subtle effects transform this vocal mass into textures that oscillate between the biological and the machinic, as if the voice were stretching beyond speech and entering a hybrid territory where its timbre vibrates between flesh, prosthesis and noise. Each layer reacts to the previous one, creating a kind of internal sonic choreography that exists only because she allows herself to listen to her own instability.

“MulherMÁquina, Ato 2” features the refurbished guitar, the Frankenstein instrument that synthesises Thaís’s poetics. Here, we hear no chords or recognisable structures. What emerges is a tactile listening, a gesture guided by the sensation of contact. She plays the guitar as someone examining an unfamiliar body, sliding her fingers over sanded parts, lightly scraping where there is a nail, pressing surfaces that reverberate in precarious and irregular ways. Each touch is a question she asks the instrument; the answer, whether a crack, a short vibration, a muffled low tone, determines the next gesture. There is a rhythm that is not metric but muscular, transforming the performance into an intimate conversation with the object itself. The result is a sound that never fully stabilises, always on the verge of falling apart, as if the music arose from the act of holding together something that insists on dispersing.

In “MulherMÁquina, Ato 3”, the artist shifts the focus to the table of objects used in MulherMÁquina. Here, the performance is organised around the activation of small material events. The objects, domestic, found, repurposed, are used as engines that determine the direction of the piece. Thaís seeks the exact instant when each object “responds”: the point of vibration of a glass resting on its side, or the friction between two pieces of cutlery. The track invites the listener to follow this process of discovery, as if we were in the same room, watching the performer test the behaviour of each material. There is no haste; the piece is built through micro-decisions, through perceiving what each object gives back. It is in this relational, almost choreographic game that a sonic dramaturgy emerges, made of hesitations, attempts, deviations and small revelations.

These three tracks synthesise Thaís’s sonic narrative: activating minimal instances such as gestures, objects, machines, archives, and combining them to generate experiences. At heart, her work invites us to listen and see differently. To recognise that nothing is finished; that everything can be restarted, reactivated, remade. A plastic bag, a patched-up guitar, a domestic table. Anything can be a device. In this way, her poetics exemplifies that the entire world is available as material for invention. And that each performance is always a wager on what may emerge when we allow the minimum to speak.