2050 Came Early — and LatimLove Was Holding the Needle

The sentence hangs like a stitched prophecy on Randolpho Lamonier’s fabric banner — a line equal parts joke, wound, and warning.

It’s typical Lamonier: tender and brutal, devotional and sarcastic. His art doesn’t announce revolutions; it drags them out of discarded fabric, household debris, and the leftover threads of survival. Born and raised in Contagem, an industrial city outside Belo Horizonte, Lamonier grew up queer in a landscape of factories, inequality, and violence. What others might call the margins, he calls home. It’s where he learned that improvisation isn’t an aesthetic — it’s a survival mechanism.

His practice stitches the personal to the political, often literally. The fabrics he uses — worn sheets, rags, factory scraps — carry traces of working-class exhaustion and domestic tenderness. Sewing, a skill passed down from his grandmother and mother, both seamstresses in the auto industry, becomes an act of reclamation: what was once mechanical labor under capitalist monotony becomes a gesture of autonomy and revolt. Each stitch is a reversal of hierarchy — turning what was exploited into what speaks.

Lamonier’s work oscillates between art and activism, craft and confrontation. His use of text — slogans, diary fragments, street idioms — insists that words still matter, even in an era where language has been hollowed out by marketing and political cynicism. His sentences bleed irony and faith in equal measure, forming banners that look like protest relics from a future that hasn’t happened yet.

That’s the power of the line “In 2050 we discover: Brazil is Latin America.” It’s not really about the future. It’s about the present denial. Brazil has long performed isolation — a continent-sized island speaking Portuguese, pretending that its colonial legacy makes it somehow exceptional. Lamonier’s prophecy points to the absurdity of that myth, but it also offers a fragile hope: that recognition, even late, might still come.

The irony? That revelation might already be arriving — not in 2050, but on a small stage in Óbidos, Portugal. On October 18th, as part of the Folio Festival — the country’s biggest literature event — three women, Bruna Castro, Rafaela Cardeal, and Jorgelina Tallei, will launch LatimLove Magazine, a publication born out of linguistic friction and cultural disobedience. Under this year’s theme, “Borders,” their launch panel will open with a simple but radical question: what are the frontiers we face when creating a magazine today?

It’s a question that echoes Lamonier’s entire body of work. Both the artist and the magazine operate at the edges — between languages, between aesthetics, between the intimate and the insurgent. LatimLove doesn’t sell identity; it dissects it. It arrives at the geography Lamonier keeps mapping — one where language, care, violence, and memory all bleed into one another.

Through his work, Lamonier reframes the act of sewing as both care and confrontation — transforming the factory line into a frontline. His materials, torn from the industrial and domestic landscapes of Brazil’s peripheries, become metaphors for resilience and fragility, a way of saying: this is what survives after the system forgets you.

So maybe the prophecy is already unraveling. Maybe 2050 came early — stitched together by artists, editors, and dreamers who refuse to wait for Brazil to recognize its own reflection. Because if Lamonier’s art tells us anything, it’s that the discovery of Latin America — like all discoveries — begins not on maps, but in the seams.