There are strange reasons and ways that take us to choose a face, mainly if it is not intended to become a mask, but rather the incorporation of a theme that is basically Eastern.

I ask myself why did I chose Lucilia Lara and not an Eastern Model. Probably I don't want to explain it in a rational way. Maybe I just want to keep the choice instinctive.
The West places Reason above Instinct. As for me, depending on situations, I tend to balance between the two. In this case I instinctively felt that the face that would appear with these garments and wrappings would have to be foreign to the cultures and memories that presided over the construction of the project. It would have to be a possibly legendary face in terms of myth and of geographical distance.

Lucilia's face, in my opinion, carries a mix between an imagined goddess and a innocent beauty, a possible face of a vestal. And, as I write this words, I am having a glimpse of the reason of instinct.

The model had to come from the opposite end of the Maritime Route so that everything could make sense. The opposites assembled into the entirety of the whole, as the aesthetical concepts of Phidias, Benvenutto Cellini, Michelangelo Buonarrotti are not alien to me.
So it was necessary that I reached for my memory of faces do find one that would correspond to a certain type of Western beauty capable of blending with the exoticism of these enveloped garments.

People can put on a mask, but I have found out the obvious. That one can always decipher when a face is a mask and either you read it the opposite way or there is something leaking that will provide the revelation of what is behind.

Having worked with Lucilia in the ephemerous fashion world, that experience made me see that she had no masks, that if she had one, it was the intriguing overlapping of her own innocent and totally vulnerable look which gave her the authenticity I wanted.

Having chosen her to fly to Macau for the album, I was not disappointed at all to have chosen this young woman, this face to become the face and body of a goddess of lost heavens made of invented and ancient Memories.

Antonio Conceição Júnior