Tiago Sant’Ana is part of the exhibition Brésil Illustré: l’héritage post colonial de J.B. Debret, at Maison de l’Amérique latine in Paris. The show creates a dialogue between Jean-Baptiste Debret’s 19th-century depictions of Brazil and contemporary interpretations by Brazilian artists.

In Refino #3 and Refino #4, Tiago Sant’Ana revisits the iconography of Black labor under colonial systems, using Debret’s work as a starting point to question and intervene in Brazil’s historiographies. In these works, sugar appears both as a medium that erases the reproduction of violence and as a trace that reveals the brutality of colonial processes, highlighting its lasting impact on social stratification. Between concealment and revelation, the artist conducts an archaeology of sugar and its enduring marks in the present.