In the pandemic context, from Lisbon, I challenged people in the Swedish town of Gnosjö, to use their own cameras (in mobile phones, ipads, drones, etc.) to send me online short video clips that could portray the so-called "Spirit of Gnosjö" (the essence of labour, industry and entrepreneurship of Gnosjö area). Then, I reframed it with footage I filmed in Amazonia with Huni Kuin Indigenous People and with what I filmed during my research time in Gnosjö (when I was there in an art residency, in 2019). This mix of images in split screen and the texts I wrote, linked utopian desires and our sick present times in a way that new meanings emerge.

Crossing a participatory process involving Gnosjö people (in loco and online), and Amerindian shamanic perspectives, I created a paradoxical dialogue between a man and a woman, a local and an immigrant, a person and a spirit.

The result is a film that reflects about how the Immaterial (through images, sounds, concepts, movements, and dreams) and the Corporeal (through human body, machines, and work) structure and are structured in cultural values and universal archetypal needs, in terms of identity and transformation.

An electric guitar soundtrack was specially created by Bruno Gonçalves to this artwork. The Huni Kuin folk songs and dances in the film were performed by Kayatibu Collective. The shamanic performance was filmed in Segredo do Artesão, a Huni Kuin village in the Brazilian state of Acre.

HUNI KUIN LABORATORY is an artistic-ethnographic project developed for my PhD research in Artistic Studies. Since 2018, I am crossing art, human sciences and philosophy to try to answer to this question: Can art be a medium of laboratorial experimentation to recognize deep true(s) about human nature (as a mirror) that can activate transformation through the ritual relationship with image and sound (as a shaman does)?

My research theme is about "Art as a Laboratory between the Mirror and the Shaman". That means, that I am researching about the potential power of art to work as an experience that can produce a kind of sensitive and metaphoric knowledge that relates identity (the metaphor of the mirror) and a capacity to transform (the metaphor of the shaman).

Both as artist and as researcher, I articulate the ritual performance of the Other (in particular, in artistic practices of the Huni Kuin Indigenous people in Amazonia, in the Brazilian state of Acre) with the ritual performance of the Self while researching the Other (I mean, as an artist researching artistic practices of Huni Kuin people). At the same time, I try to figure out what is common in both processes.

I focus on how to develop an artistic language that establishes an analogy with shamanic ritual dynamics, namely at the level of the relationship between consciousness, body, and image/sound. The artistic process becomes a ritual, and the ethnographic documentation on video becomes a meta-performance of the ritual of artistic performance and of the performance of Indigenous ritual. Performative approaches are thus simultaneously subject and method.

For this research, I am specially interested in the Amerindian ontology of "two and its multiple", according to the anthropological theories of "Amerindian Perspectivism" developed by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Tânia Lima. I am working as well with Carl Jung's psychological notions of "archetypes of the collective unconscious", "Animus and Anima", and "individuation processes".

To summarize, intersecting theory and art practice, the goal is to reflect on the relationship between the moving image and sound with the ritualized movement of the performative search of the Self and of the Other, considering aesthetics, myths, and archetypes. This happens in a field of experimentation between art as ritual and ritual as art.