Constructing the kiln took a year. The artist built it entirely by hand. She dug the ground to the proper depth, shaped and sketched the form, and finally laid the bricks. The bricks that structure the kiln’s body come from mud formed along the edges of reservoirs after flooding. Water and earth are still united. Air fills the time of drying. Fire, later on, hardens the clay that will become structure. The construction of this technological artifact depends on a rudimentary convergence of all the natural elements. When the kiln was ready, Rafael entered it. She sat in the darkness, meditated, and asked the fire to lend her the strength of the stars. This symbolic gesture belongs to the realm of necessity. Harnessing fire requires knowledge of an ancient system – it demands passing through the material before using it. The kiln and the fire thus function as mediating devices between body, territory, and materiality. The desire to work with ceramics was not new. In 2023, at the invitation of curator Tereza de Arruda, the artist participated in the Jingdezhen International Ceramics Biennale in China, presenting pictorial works from her botijas series – paintings on ceramic vessels with pronounced textures and radiant illuminations. The visual exploration of volume in this series already foreshadowed the desire to move beyond two-dimensionality. Increasingly, the artist sought chromatic techniques that enhanced contours; building the kiln was therefore the culmination of a desire that had grown uncontrollable.