The fun part of doing art is combining lots of characters.
We can be a little bit of a historicist,
of a photographer, of an anthropologist,
of a researcher, of a filmmaker, of a drawer.
I like thinking of my projects as
a combination of these personas—
Recife is part of the northeast of Brazil,
one of the first sites to be colonized by the Portuguese,
and today it’s still a very complex place,
where all the contradictions of being in Brazil,
of being in South America, can be seen.
One to One speaks about relation.
It’s the title of this large-scale installation
of clay bars that create a large drawing
of a real-scale floor plan of a social occupation
by the train rail in Recife.
The title metaphorically speaks about
the relation with the other,
and this can be seen in the other works as well.
For example, I’m presenting the installation Suar a camisa.
The shirts come from workers, real workers,
that are going to work and coming back from work.
I would negotiate with them to buy the shirts,
exchange for a new one.
The shirt would come with the scent of the sweat
And represent the presence of the body,
So it challenges how the upper-class also reads the presence
and invisiblizes the presence of the worker’s body.
Another work, Jogos dirigidos,
was shot in the small town of Várzea Queimada,
a very dry area, in the northeast of Brazil
with a community of deaf people.
They created their own sign language,
so they don’t take the official sign language.
And I proposed that we would shoot this video,
that it was something between a dynamic of games
in an open space and also exercises of speech,
of telling stories of their lives.
People always ask me the relation of
fiction and nonfiction in my work,
in this work I can see that my presence
provoked the situation of inviting people
to speak about themselves in front of a camera.
And going to the fields, creating a dynamic
—a physical dynamic—of an exercise
that, in those, I could clearly see the engagement,
their engagement as a community,
how they were engaged, how they were close,
how they were sort of a family.
The Northeast is very stigmatized by the hunger,
by the lack of opportunity, of education, and so on.
Here I am presenting the first steps
of the project Infindável Mapa da Fome,
the Endless Map of Hunger.
In this project I’m taking historical maps
to work on a series where hunger
is understood not only as a nutrition,
but hunger understood as desire.
For example, I’m presenting here The Map of Resistance.
I worked with a group of Kayapo indigenous women
who painted the maps where their territory is located.
And on the side of these paintings,
you can see all the hands that touched the maps.
The ongoing politics in Brazil, they created a deep battle
for the indigenous and for other minorities in Brazil.
And I think One to One speaks also about that,
about how we deal with the idea that
things are being decided in democracy, taken as legitimate,
but actually we don’t feel–or we disagree.
How do we relate our own responsibility with
these decisions that are being taken under our name?
