In collaboration with Jason Schuler and Magali Wilensky this performance event was created with the objective of exploring ways for audiences to awaken inner resources through a series of participatory activities that share elements common to altered states of consciousness. We resesached how one can provide new perspective on their lives through these kinds of experiences. The piece is a kind of Exploratorium that combines a central, meditative performance around which are a number of one-on-one, interactive stations. Each station helps to shift participants’ perceptions of themselves, space-time, and reality.
The goal of the event was to engineer an altered state of consciousness in participants that mirrors a kind of postmodern vision quest (inspired by rites of passage and initiation, as well as hypnosis, meditation, sensory deprivation, and hallucinatory experiences.We were interested in creating an experience that might encourage an enlightening experience without the use and/or side effects of hallucinogenic drugs.
we intend to promote a sense of self-awareness and agency that will reflect positively onto participants’ daily lives.
The world is so much stranger and more wonderful than anything we could share in performance. Hopefully along the way, providing a sense of interconnectedness that we all may take with us back to our daily lives.
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Photos by Livia Sá and Aline Veter
Metaverses
Metaverses, is an augmented reality tour of selected pieces from the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s collections.
Created by emerging artists Justine Williams, Jason Schuler, Vanessa Gilbert and Patricia Faolli in conversation and collaboration with artists (ages 60+) who live and work at the Westbeth Home to the Arts in New York City - Paul Binnerts, Nancy Gabor, Stephen Hall, Penny Jones and Christina Maile. A metaverse is a collective, shared, virtual space.
The intergenerational collaboration between the artists has resulted in the creation of original material to augment museum visitors’ experience of the Met’s collections with elements of time-based, visual and sound art, and digital media.
Augmented-Reality (AR) technology acts as a mediator of sensory input, altering an observer’s physical environment and enhancing their perception of reality. Technology also functions as the artists’ central collaborative tool, enhancing the exchange within the group as they create work in response to selected pieces in the Met’s galleries.
This self guided tour is ideally shared by intergenerational pairs, but you may enjoy it with someone your own age, or by yourself.
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Bursting Concrete
Created and performed in collaboration with Dora Edjárn, this project explores the borders between public space and private landscape.
The chosen material to represent our consciousness is bubble wrap – material used for protection of fragile objects – our fears and insecurities are represented by the colorful pattern only waiting to be busted out.
This urban intervention discusses the encounter and confrontation from individuals when the public invades their private space. When a public space can trigger your deepest fears and no matter how hard you try the "secrets within bubbles" will rupture - exposing, changing, and coloring everything, inside and out.
2014 Brooklyn Open Studios - Photos by Isadora Frost
Transparências
The main goal of this performance is to discuss human qualities, how people can be oppressive and welcoming, and the variables separating these two extremes. Is living a necessity of relationships? The work discusses trying to find satisfaction with each other, choosing to leave our own world to share a world with another. It utilizes plastic material, which helps to build the images, creating an “Umwelt” (environment) that through transparency allows us to see what is happening inside, but at the same time shows us diffuse images while it creates an indistinct whole.
Created in collaboration with Fernanda Machado, Isadora Frost, Gisele Nallini, Natalya Clua and Isabel Soares the goal of this performance is to raise questions regarding the tension between the individual and the collective. It is this tension that places us before the act of suffocating, with no possibility to breath and move, the interdependency, the resistance, the change, and the inevitable world interference given to the individuals of contemporary society. The proposal of Transparencies is to drive the audience to recognize the dynamics in their personal experiences and to allow reflection of the surrounding universe.
Photos by Natalya Clua and Wagner Teixeira Antunes
Urban Camping Project
The Urban Camping Project is a gathering of experiments to investigate and create new cartographies of cities. Created in collaboration with Raquel Mavecq, this project proposes an active state of exploration parallel to the functional state of the city. To be aware of the city’s dynamic as a multi-layered structure. An anatomical study of the city’s body.
The urban camping project is a challenge to the millions of living gears of a metropolis. This project is a two (or more) way crossing, an exchange between explorers and the city. To understand the city as a space of shared intimacy. To explore and leave traces of the experience itself. To allow a non-everyday state of investigation and immersion into the urban space.
The main idea of this project is to create a list of procedures with different rules and structures, inviting other bodies to create their own. Always consodering body of the city, the body and the city, the city as a body.
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"We ask permission
To the rats, cockroaches and pigeons.
To the scums and bums.
To the stoops.
To the sewerage that carries your filth.
To the underground tunnels
To the concrete."
Performance Photos by João Batista Corrêa
Plague
Based on Antonin Artaud’s work The Theater and the Plague, this performance discusses human reaction during times of social chaos. How does the individual deal with such public calamity as disease epidemic? Which values remain and which are forgotten? Part of the BaraFonda Project from Compania São Jorge de Variedade, this performance examines the fear and despair surrounding the unknown and, at the same time, the seduction of chaos. It also examines the political view of art as a way to express the individual’s fear and cruelty when faced with collective events. It takes images that are dormant and extends them into extreme gestures.
“The plague seems to manifest its presence in and have a preference for the very organs of the body, the particular physical sites, where human will, consciousness, and thought are imminent and apt to occur. A social disaster so far-reaching, an organic disorder so mysterious--this overflow of vices, this total exorcism which presses and impels the soul to its utmost--all indicate the presence of a state which is nevertheless characterized by extreme strength and in which all the powers of nature are freshly discovered at the moment when something essential is going to be accomplished. The plague takes images that are dormant, a latent disorder, and suddenly extends them into the most extreme gestures…”
Antonin Artaud, The Theater and the Plague
Post It
Urban Intervention took place in São Paulo (2008) and New York (2010). The project has the objective of calling the attention of people walking on the streets via little messages placed around the city. Notes like the ones we leave to ourselves in the private space of our houses and offices, but left in our public space.
A note from one stranger to another - to all the curious people who stop for only one minute of their frenetic schedules to read a small post-it in the middle of a grey landscape.
2008 – Intervention in Sao Paulo, Brazil. 200 post-its spread out on a section of the city during a six hour walk. Message: “Have you looked at the sky today?” The principal objective of this intervention was to raise awareness of the landscape that surrounds us all, to the beautiful spring sky – in streets and corners where no one really stops to observe.
2010 – Intervention in New York, USA. 900 post-its in 9 different languages and only one message: “I love you”. The main objective of this second intervention was to share love, affection coming from a stranger, coming from the city. Such a strong and intimate sentence to the city and everyone in it. Directed mainly to the ones that have English as their second language – immigrants - or just people who feel oppressed and lonely in the grayness of the metropolis.
Videos by: Bruna Lessa e Cacá Bernardes
Photos by Nathan Lundie-Maynard and Patrícia Faolli
Artérias
This performance discusses the relationship between the human being and its body - the desire to let one’s body turn itself inside out and to understand mortality. It reflects a silent cry of discovery, a desire to turn one’s body outward. It is a persona that exposes its life path through its blood, flesh, and addictions.
The nude artist brings a dinner tray to the area and slowly maps out her body through her spilled blood and invites the audience to bleed her. She finds herself stuck and wrapped in her muscle fibers. She injects black material through her outer layers and tries to remove the dirt from her body.
She turns her body inside out and, as she tries to understand the attraction of her own flesh, she pumps her history into her arteries and veins. With red paint that is stroked over her white skin, she covers up the real violence that its established and proposed to the audience in this feast of herself.
Photos by Natalya Clua