I am interested in the materiality of language and the indirect forms of communication that resist or are hindered by a metric based on the efficacy and transparency of information transmission. By indirection, I mean the manners of meaning, the rustles of translations' leftovers, the reimagined accents and timbres and the unheard mother tongues. My work is grounded on the conviction that communication holds a certain richness that demands us to bear with opacities and contradictions.
How can I hold space for encounters with what is unknown or non-legible to my constant spatial re-orientation in language, or could I rehearse listening as imaginative gestures to create conditions for liminal collisions of understandings?
Whistle whistle: resonate until tongue - A three-part installation on the negotiation between the presence and intelligibility of languages from a reflection on the Uchinaaguchi, a language from Okinawa, Japan. Through imagined cross-sections in a photograph from my family’s archive, a relation between a language and the landscape was contextualised within a diaspora from Okinawa to Brazil pre-WWI.
Whistle whistle: resonate until tongue - Each section focuses on coexistent orientations to differentiate linguistic contouring from a kind of inhabitation where particular experiences and an imaginary of languages and landscapes are held together through opacities. What kind of spaces could be imagined/walked through fragments of unspoken Uchinaaguchi? I look for resonances with whispers and other unsorted phonemes that linger in one’s ears.
Through ‘Asadoya Yunta’ - An essay regarding the presence of the original unsung lyrics of a traditional song from Okinawa (Japan) composed in Yaeyaman and translated into Japanese. The diasporic experience of cultural transmission joins the historical context of Japan’s imperialism and assimilatory politics. The project was about the imaginary of this song, even if unsung, in relation to the long-lasting protests against the construction of a USA military base in Okinawa.
Through ‘Asadoya Yunta’ - The reflection comes from the apparent disparate imaginaries of the protest and the song within the diasporic community I was part of in Brazil. 'Translation', in this case, carries forceful political assimilation which softened the noncompliant lyrics into a romantic story. "It can be fruitful to discern to which Okinawa we are being welcomed, which is portrayed as beautiful every season. At the same time, the enactment and resignification of this song in familiar contexts add to it certain longings from afar passed through generations in ever -changing cultural environments."
Murmurs heard from an Indigo bush - An experiment with the mechanical performativity of automatons together with the performativity of images within a poem. These images, sustained as a possibility through the work of language, were put to function as suggestive mechanisms of objects. The poem is about the desire to plant a murmur left on the bench by a man. The hope of the poem was that the man would recognize the murmur in the color produced by the plant. It regards the specific ways the Indigo is made, in which the crushing of leaves and the contact with oxygen is paralleled with the resounding utterance of that man's murmurs.
Murmurs heard from an Indigo bush - Murmurs heard from an Indigo bush - “Something small,/ in between a gravel and a murmur/ from the man who was sitting/ by the river shore that afternoon./ small, the rock was left there/ the murmur, however, communed with me./ I wanted to plant the murmur/ as a belated dialogue with the man/ when ground to step on opens itself in windows./ The exchange of whispers/ between the sky and the ground/ made monument of that afternoon/ conversations opened by worm tunnels/ carried photosynthetic longings./ Would the man recognize its leaves and dialogues?/ (if he passed by again)/ maybe not in their verdant appearance/ a gravel has inclinations towards the ground/ so the fallen leaves had a monument trait/ each broken leaf imprinted blue,/ opening itself into the sky/ (maybe there he would remember)”
Hesitant connotations - A publication with a few short storytellings from the daily experiences of people who do not speak the same language but communicate. It is an invitation to read a music score, partially signalled but partially sheltered in
brief intervals of silence.
The sonic space of a ‘pause’ carries dislocations and encounters through an apparent ‘lack of communication’. I wanted to draw the dislocations, insisting on the rendering visible of these instants in which language extrapolates parities of lexicons and forms.
Hesitant connotations - "Shifu and Álvaro work together in the kitchen. Shifu, like the rest of the kitchen employees, is Chinese. After Covid-19, the restaurant could not hire people from China; since then, there have been Spanish colleagues. Kitchen instructions and recipes were adapted with handwritten English translations.
Their gestures must be synchronic: ‘snell (fast, in Dutch)!’ sets the pace (half confidently spoken, half confidently enacted). The smooth equivalence of languages, like the instruction’s translation of IKEA manuals, typify conditions gestured through the language most comfortably understood. The synchronicity of the kitchen’s half-confidence is
in pace with all the other abrupt encounters not included in manuals."
Polvo de Rocío en Una Parra
Polvo de Rocío en Una Parra
