Embedded Files
2020
2020
(film | HD video, split screen, 16:9, colour, sound, 40 min 30 s + video installation | HD video, 3 projections in split screen with 6 different videos, 16:9, colour, sound, in loop)
TWO is the first film of a trilogy called HUNI KUIN LABORATORY. It results from an artistic research that was possible thanks to a PhD grant from FCT (the Portuguese public Foundation for Science and Technology), and thanks to AiRS (a residency for international artists in Skövde, in Sweden, that is focused on socially engaged art).
In this artwork, a shamanic journey is presented in an oneiric succession of double images between reality and fiction. As a split screen in documental video art with multiple perspectives, TWO takes the opposite/complementary double as simultaneously subject and method. From darkness, poetic layers of meaning are evoked through different spaces, times, relations, contexts, actions, and beings. This happens in a field of experimentation between art as ritual and ritual as art: doing dumpster diving, creating enigmatic computer games, connecting with Huni Kuin aesthetics in Amazonia, dancing in a museum to resignify Amerindian mummified bodies, emptying house walls at a farewell party in Lisbon, playing with a child in Sweden, following two ex-boyfriends traveling in Italy or walking around an artist's studio.
In Brazil, I researched aesthetics and rituals of the Huni Kuin Indigenous people. In English, "Huni Kuin" means True People. I was trying to understand if art could be a medium of hidden trues and Huni Kuin people helped me to decolonize my Western concept of contemporary art. For that research I went to Amazonia and I filmed in the areas of Jordão river, Tarauacá river, and in three Indigenous villages in the state of Acre (Chico Curumim, Morada Nova, and Segredo do Artesão).
In Sweden, the art residency in Skövde allowed me to film: Jonas Liveröd's art studio and house, Maria Eriksdotter's house and areas around, Hornborgasjön, Skövde University, and areas around AiRS' house. It also allowed me to document activists that use to do dumpster diving in supermarket trash bins by ecological, economic, and political reasons. The video game excerpts are from two Skövde University student projects ("Strobophagia" and "Tanggal"). Both projects mixed video games with mythology, and are good examples of the game developing cluster that Skövde University created as an important part of its own identity.
In Portugal, the film images with friends in a house are from the farewell party I have done in 2018. That party was done one day before going to Amazonia for research. I couldn't return to that house because the landlord converted it in a rental apartment for tourists. TWO also includes images from the artivist performance done in Carmo Archaeological Museum, in Lisbon, for the project THE TIME OF THE HUACAS. This project focused on the exhibition of the mummified bodies of two Amerindians and the need to decolonize museums.
In Italy, I did a train trip in 2005, from Veneto to Sicily, living my first love and using my first video camera. For TWO, I also decided to use some of that old mini-DV video footage.
An electric guitar soundtrack was specially created by Bruno Gonçalves to this project. The Huni Kuin folk songs and dances in the film were performed by Kayatibu Collective.
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 and researching the Other in itself through autoethnography in different times and spaces). At the same time, I try to figure out what is common in both artistic/scientific/ritual 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.
Using images from the film TWO, a multi-channel video installation was created for the Skövde's Art Museum. It was presented in Gothenburg International Biennial of Contemporary Art (GIBCA Extended programme).
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