Video mp4, 6’42”
2023
Sound-track*:
Cantiga do Caicó (public domein)
Composition: Heitor Villa-Lobos
Voice: Isis Penido
Cello: Anna Stronski
Camera: René Van Lier
Performance, editing and direction: Neyde Lantyer
Year: 2023
*My sincere gratitude to Isis Penido for granting me permission to utilize her and Anna Stronksi's versions of Cantiga do Caicó.
Oh mana...! [Descaminhos]
The video unfolds as a performative trace in the landscape. A poem released into the wind. The land is not scenery but matter, time, resistance. A red body crosses it—appearing as a stain, a wound, a signal—cutting through stone, fossil, bone. Aridity. Cracks. Paths that do not lead forward but inward. The backlands persist, even after departure. They enter the body. They remain.
What is fossilized is not inert. Stone remembers. Bone carries language. The landscape opens gaps where memory leaks. The feminine emerges not as figure, but as condition: exposed, cyclical, unstable. Nostalgia is not return, but friction. Geography becomes affect. Impermanence marks every step.
The backlands operate as a symbolic field—dense, contradictory, unfinished. A place where absence speaks, where what was left behind continues to insist. Words falter. Meaning fractures. Language is assembled from dust, gesture, heat.
Within this social terrain—layered, precarious, unresolved—a narrative threatens to form. Not linear. Not complete. A utopian impulse, fragile and necessary. A political-poetic construction that does not seek to restore history, but to unsettle it, to reopen its wounds, to imagine otherwise.
Original text in Portuguese at Bienal do Sertão:
Vídeo-performance centrada na paisagem, atravessada por um corpo que a invade e a ativa. Como um poema lançado ao vento, um corpo vermelho inscreve-se no território como mancha de cetim, em um deslocamento que busca ressignificar o fóssil, a pedra e o osso, a aridez, as fendas e as veredas por meio das quais o sertão continua a nos atravessar, mesmo após a partida. A obra articula geografia, feminino, nostalgia e impermanência, explorando as múltiplas camadas simbólicas do sertão enquanto campo de memória e linguagem. Nesse entrelaçamento, esboça-se uma narrativa em potência, situada na complexa paisagem social contemporânea do sertão, orientada por um desejo de utopia — uma construção político-poética que tensiona o passado e reinscreve a história.
The video unfolds as a performative trace in the landscape. A poem released into the wind. The land is not scenery but matter, time, resistance. A red body crosses it—appearing as a stain, a wound, a signal—cutting through stone, fossil, bone. Aridity. Cracks. Paths that do not lead forward but inward. The backlands persist, even after departure. They enter the body. They remain.
What is fossilized is not inert. Stone remembers. Bone carries language. The landscape opens gaps where memory leaks. The feminine emerges not as figure, but as condition: exposed, cyclical, unstable. Nostalgia is not return, but friction. Geography becomes affect. Impermanence marks every step.
The backlands operate as a symbolic field—dense, contradictory, unfinished. A place where absence speaks, where what was left behind continues to insist. Words falter. Meaning fractures. Language is assembled from dust, gesture, heat.
Within this social terrain—layered, precarious, unresolved—a narrative threatens to form. Not linear. Not complete. A utopian impulse, fragile and necessary. A political-poetic construction that does not seek to restore history, but to unsettle it, to reopen its wounds, to imagine otherwise.
***
Original text in Portuguese at Bienal do Sertão:
Vídeo-performance centrada na paisagem, atravessada por um corpo que a invade e a ativa. Como um poema lançado ao vento, um corpo vermelho inscreve-se no território como mancha de cetim, em um deslocamento que busca ressignificar o fóssil, a pedra e o osso, a aridez, as fendas e as veredas por meio das quais o sertão continua a nos atravessar, mesmo após a partida. A obra articula geografia, feminino, nostalgia e impermanência, explorando as múltiplas camadas simbólicas do sertão enquanto campo de memória e linguagem. Nesse entrelaçamento, esboça-se uma narrativa em potência, situada na complexa paisagem social contemporânea do sertão, orientada por um desejo de utopia — uma construção político-poética que tensiona o passado e reinscreve a história.