Call from Berkana at Room 117
Performance / Installation
2023
Excerpt.
Recordings happened in three iterations, from April through October. Call from Berkana consists of multiple recorded rituals that gets activated through video installations
I am a Curandeira in a line of Curandeiras in Brasil. Soon after moving to the North Hemisphere I had a rendezvous with a burned log in Mount Lemmon, Tucson. The wood came with me into my studio within the university campus, built on ancestral territories of displaced Indigenous peoples. I named the being “Berkana”, and we sat down together for three rituals of a healing circle. Through intuitive strategies, my interaction with the wood speaks to a veil of reality shattered by trauma.
First, five GoPro cameras watched our exchange, forming a pentagram around us. Simultaneously, a night vision camera filmed everything from behind me. I was naked and in my bleeding cycle. The wood’s scars are visible, both our bodies and the land beneath us were burnt by our culture’s violences. Next, on the night of my 33rd birthday, I evoked that first ritual by projecting the images on the wall behind me, as the night vision camera observed me collect the fallen charcoal into a bag. On October 31st I activated healing circles and engaged with the wood and the cameras once more, as an audience watched online and in person. The echo created by the images interacting happens in a constant flux as the videos loop together, each holding an independent duration.
Call from Berkana at room 117 uses surveillance devices as generators of a sacred sight, overthrowing their function. The camera is a tool of exploration and production of knowledge; here its use is also an encounter.
Dona Santa, my grandmother, was a healer
Installation
2023
Solo exhibition at the Center for Creative Photography in Tucson, Arizona in 2023.
How does one look for that which has been erased?
An estimated number of 305 indigenous ethnic groups resist throughout Brazil’s territory. The peoples' cultures and knowledge have been brutally erased since the arrival of the "light of civilization". Among surviving practices of healing of the indigenous people, some are performed by benzedeiras: healers who operate with herbs and prayers, in a spirituality that was syncretized with Christianity. This exhibition inherits benzimentos performed by my grandmother. Lady Saint, as named by the locals, was a benzedeira in my hometown. Alluding to the erasure manifested by colonialism, an expired analog film was used to capture a photograph of each visit I held with a person from my family. These encounters happened for seven days, until I visited my grandmother's grave. Pieces of paper holding their handwriting and audio recordings in Brazilian Portuguese are the offerings to explore a few narratives. To end each conversation I asked a question that arose from intuitively selecting a passage from the book "History of a Voyage to the Land of Brazil'', written in the XVI century by French explorer Jean de Léry. The relationships we form through care and healing with the people, objects and situations around us are our most precious resources.
After Light
Installation
2023
Installation in the Rombach Gallery at the University of Arizona, on April 2023. Composed of two single-channel videos.
On the monitor "After Light", a video made from a cyanotype fabric flying by the window. In the picture, you can catch glimpses of a man, my grandfather. The picture was taken in the late 70's in Southern Brasil, the cyanotype was made in 2022 in my backyard in Tucson, Arizona. On the projector, which faces the corner of the gallery wall, is "Cyano Glitch" a video created out of the one frame of the cyanotype, repeated through several variations of glitches and transformed through AI operations and video editing. I am narrating my thought process in each video, when played together my voice overlaps. The analog and the digital process happen in the image and are felt also in the voice, as I narrate on one video with a soft voice and, on the other my voice is sped up, sounding distorted and computerized.
Hexe Weg
Installation | Performance | Live 2021
Installation + performance + Instagram Live
Occurred on Halloween (10/31/2021), at the artist's home and artistic residency. It is a research continuity about performance for the camera and artistic process.
After 7 days of performance for the camera working on the wooden piece Wald, the installation consisted of the exhibition of the raw material, no editing - except for the cuts created by the lag of the computer - and my last three works: S, Befana and Sunya, which permeate the theme of witchcraft, performance and process. Looking at the screen during the instagram Live was a proposal of presence with the performance generated by the machine e.i.: computer, cellphone.
Coincidentia Oppositorum
Installation
2020
Audiovisual installation presented with the thesis for the Program of Post-Graduation in Cinema and Arts of the Video at UNESPAR, line II - artistic process studies in cinema and arts of the video.
Advisor: Prof. Dr. Fábio Jabur de Noronha
Bringing together the concepts of Performance, Expanded Cinema and Happening, the installation sought to produce an experience of sorcery ritual, which thought the images from a perspective of performance for the camera - a performative action that reports itself to the camera and that considers elements of montage pertinent of cinema. It occurred on October 30th and 31st 2020, in Curitiba, Brazil, at the artist's apartment.
Befana
Installation
2019
"Wooden skin, video sculpture
Wooden video, sculptor's skin."
Audiovisual installation made during the workshop Núcleo de Audiovisual Sesi/Fiep Curitiba, on the days 18th, 19th and 20th of November 2019, at the exhibition "E os corpos estão diante das telas" [And the bodies are facing the screens] with the participation of several artists and a simultaneous exhibition of 12 audiovisual works.
Installation composed of the projection of two videos created from the making of a wooden sculpture. A video documentary and a video performance.