MUD-BODY®
Created within the collective “Grupo de Performance Bora Pra Rua”, the performance is the result of a path of stage construction from Parà (north of Brazil). The body is the instrument that plays the music of “Nação Zumbi” / nassaum zumbi / in gesture-manifesto of the references of the brazilian artistic movement of the 90s, manguebeat . Covering ourselves with mud and appropriating from this element, each performer expresses, with the earth-motive, a path starting from a common amalgamated body. From creation to crucifixion, to the eternal regurgitation of Kronos, to the continuous transformations of mythology, to the collection of moments of human life in Ceres, the performance invites us, as the song, to return from chaos to the mud and to the mud again to chaos.
MY GRANDMOTHER’S BONES®
Inspired by the movements of rural migration to the cities, I take my own family as an example of many to rewrite a story that was not part of the official history. I take part of my ancient culture and do a reenactment of actions, movements and beliefs that honour memories left behind in time and space.
The procession starts outside of the exhibition space, in a cleansing rite, to end it's path around a circle of earth in which a plant was burrowed among reminiscences of past times. The rite continued during the opening, also blessing the visitors of the exhibition, to empower both people and parts of the so-called indigenous cultures every so often forgotten by discourse.
THE LOGIC OF THE ANTS®
The Logic of The Ants® is the work of an artistic research that starts from the Amerindian perspective to seek a logical-cognitive and also aesthetic change of art and the current configuration of societies. The choice of animals and other personifications as a metaphor for the life of human beings is very common within the Amerindian cosmogony and ontology.
The research is also based on precepts of western biology, in particular entomology, from where I collected the concept of eusociality, a behavior verified in many groups of animals of complex societies and considered by biologists as the highest degree of social organization of living beings. Among its characteristics, the main ones: the intergenerational nature of the nests, the cooperative care of the offspring and of the community and the division of labor.
Poetry is a way to link the factual eusociality of ants to the dystopia of the contemporary. The earth becomes the ant-mother and the inhabitants of the earth should organize their life, both individual and collective, with the aim of preserving the planet that feeds and nurtures them. The language used in the text is divided into different languages and straddles the line between orality and writing, also highlighting the importance and hierarchy of communication.
OFFER (OFERENDA)
The performance was conceived as a rite of thanksgiving and reunion of salt and fresh waters, in honor of Yemanjà, a deity of Brazilian culture also belonging to the African pantheon and to other forms of religiosity in the Americas. The work also leads to an artist's book, conceived as an honor of the syncretic roots of the peoples who associate spirituality with the cult of nature.
The re-creation of the sense of belonging by the artist abroad, recalling rituals that refer to Brazilian cultural and identity formation, are the key to understanding an utopian and symbolic space between past and present. Nature and spirituality meet with the acceptance of the colonial past of violence and slavery and redeem it with rites of personal and collective pacification in the juxtaposition of traditions and stories removed from ufficial history.
PENAS DE FE’
The performance was carried out inside the “Auto do Cìrio”, a Carnavalesque procession in a profane homage to the Holy Mistress of the city of Belém, “Nossa Senhora de Nazaré”. The purpose of the car is to bring together popular culture and theater into festivals, to religious origins, in the historic area of Belém (Pará, Brazil), in a gesture of profanation, from the point of view of Agamben. The religious syncretism of the place makes the Holy Mother the protector of all this people, made up of different ethnic groups (indigenous, African, European) and gathered in the name of faith.
RAGNAROK
The old norse mythology predicts great battles on the planet that will lead to natural disasters and the submersion of the world in water, to resurge as a new and purified place, leaving chaos behind. The performance occurred in Rio de Janeiro, on the 31st december 2015, as a pressage of continuous and damaging changes in brazilian contemporary society, full of contradictions.
CHECKMATE
The "Bora Pra Rua Performance Group" is the result of the collaboration of different artists for the creation of a scenic corpus that transmits, starting from the individuality that each brings to the group, the strength that the works of artistic assemblage take on. The phrase of the Queen of Cups 'Cut off her head!' was the initial motto for the formation of the stage body, due to the late political choices of brazilian governors.
Each artist-creator independently was inspired by a female archetype of the queen of cups: Goddess Maha-Kali, Elizabeth Bathory, The French Revolution and Dorothy Stang, all marked by emotion and blood. The name of the assembly "Checkmate”, was chosen as a metaphor for the time that the inhabitants of the earth have to find a solution for the resolution of its common problems, before it expires.
TRAMA-VIVA® or LIVING-WEFT
Through the strands that protrude from my hair, a new identity is formed in a new territory. The performance highlights the semantic, symbolic and metaphorical strength of the threads, where the hair becomes the element that is rooted in the earth in a physical, aesthetic and organic process that creates a link between oneself and the world.
Furthermore, hair is the persistence of ancestral memories of different cultures mixed in a single body; in that of the performer there is Amerindian, African and European blood, in an ambiguous fusion that reveals condensed experiences. The performer is a frame that brings together and gives continuity to these different existences and stories and creates a narrative to contribute to an imaginary that accepts and recognizes the great human mixture of which we are all made.
EXPERIMENTUM LINGUAE OR THE CHANT OF THE UNSILENCED REVOLT
The site-specific performance was conceived within the theme of the exhibition “La Strada. Where the World is created ”, at MAXXI, on the occasion of a day of performance inside the museum. The chair represents a continuation of a theatrical work that claims the unspoken words of other women, victims of violence in other parts of the world, and is worn as a symbol of power and of the capability of being able to speak freely when many are silenced, by force or absence, denouncing the persistence of a still colonial world-system. The arrival at Maxxi as the end of the procession through the streets of Rome is significant: it is the arrival of the third world to the upper echelons of representation of cultural power. Where to sit, waiting for an effective dialogue.
According to Bruce Chatwin and the australian natives’ perspective, everything is waiting to be sung - and this is how a road is created, by singing the road itself. Through the speech of Gramsci's text, Odio Gli Indifferenti, the words become a prayer. Language becomes the means, the path and the process in which oppressive structures are highlighted, inviting a contemporary reflection starting from the point of view of the colony.