Naveganças

THE PORTABLE PRACTICE 1992 to 2025

“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 a practice that could travel with me.

Traditional painting requires space: studios, canvases, shipping crates. But an accordion-fold book? It fits in my suitcase.

What began as practical necessity became conceptual framework. These small accordion folded books literally embody “navegança” – that 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 32 years, I have carried these books across oceans, through airports, to residencies and symposiums in a dozen countries. They are not just documentation of my artistic practice – they are documentation of my life. They are the practice that has sustained me through every transition, every airport, every arrival in a new place.

At 70, having traveled between East Germany, West Germany, Brazil, England, Poland, France, Portugal, and Canada, and having finally become a Canadian citizen in October 2024, I’m honored to share this work with Vancouver’s book arts community.”

– Stefani Peter, October 2025

Statement for the Navegança Exhibition
FUNARTE, São Paulo – April 2026

In 1992, I began what I thought would be a year-long daily practice—folding paper and making marks, creating  intimate works that would capture the rhythm of everyday existence. What emerged was something far more expansive: a body of work that has grown to encompass approximately 600 pieces over three decades, mapping not just days but an entire artistic lifetime.

“The Ups and Downs of the Days” began as a commitment to presence, to showing up each day with paper, pigment, and intention. The folded format became both constraint and liberation—a consistent vessel that could hold infinite variations of thought, feeling, and discovery. Each piece bears witness to a particular moment while participating in a larger conversation about time, repetition, and the accumulation of experience.

The title “Naveganças”—a word that suggests both navigation and wandering—speaks to how this work has functioned in my practice. These pieces have been my compass and my map, guiding me through the territory of artistic development while documenting the journey itself. They are simultaneously intimate and universal, personal diary entries that speak to the shared human experience of marking time.

Now, thirty years after their inception and nearly three decades since their first exhibition at SESC Pompeia in 1994, I return to São Paulo with these works transformed. Many pieces have been painted over, layered with new marks and meanings, bringing the past into dialogue with the present. This is not revision but evolution—the artist’s way of honoring the foundation while continuing to build.

At seventy years on this earth plane, I see this body of work as a meditation on the creative life itself. Each folded page represents a day lived consciously, a commitment to the practice of making. Together, they form an archive of attention, a testament to the belief that art emerges not from grand gestures alone but from the patient accumulation of daily acts of creation.

The circular nature of this exhibition—returning to the city where these works were first shown, revisiting and transforming pieces from my past—reflects the deeper truth that all artistic practice is a form of “navegança.” We set out thinking we know our destination, only to discover that the journey itself has been shaping us all along.

This is the long voyage of art: humble, grateful, and endlessly generative.

Stefani Peter,  Vancouver 10. August 2025