Flavia Pinheiro, Choreographer and Researcher, Brazil and Amsterdam
7 Abiku solos for 11 bacteria falling through is a research project centered on the unique cosmology of the macrobiotic world that foregrounds interspecies entanglements: ghosts, birds, bacteria migrating… It mingles a personal story: forgotten and erased memories with a sensation craved in the guts. In this speculative fabulation, the past is not located behind us; in this sense, we can create and change the narratives that have been taught to us. As if it was possible to make an ontological shift, “mirando atrás y adelante podemos caminar en el presente futuro”? (Rivera Cusicanqui 2010). It means that the past is ahead of us, you can acknowledge it, but the future, however, is not new because it is behind, in the back. The understanding is that time is not linear and that history is not factual. How to bring to the foreground the complexity of the ongoing process of colonial modernity by dismantling hegemonic systems of knowledge? How do we challenge language and its legitimation through the use of pseudoscientific and technological discourse that contributes to the obliteration of cosmologies and worlds? In this way, the research proposes the transversality of languages and disciplines intersecting a scientific vocabulary with images and allegories to dismantle/shake the fixed structures of power and unveil invisible and neglected ones. This intersectionality happens through the contamination of proposals in non-linear hybrid formats, an open and exponential system that enables mediation between a more diverse public concerning backgrounds, heritages, ages, race, and gender; integration of different capacities, and communication skills. Expanding meanings: saying names in many languages, evoking counter-narratives, casting spells, retelling stories, crossing media, and using technologies to open translation procedures.
Contamination might be the main key of this essay as a radical alternative to the sanitisation and hygienic conditions demanded in the current times. In the research, I describe myself as bacteria – because I come from a highly contagious environment, far from the aseptic conditions that are expected of a solo artist bound to a studio. As bacteria, I find it very easy to mutate and coexist: I adapt to an insalubrious environment without difficulty, in an ongoing attempt to create breathing and vital conditions. All throughout my body of work, I highlight the difference between the in vivo and the in vitro, happening outside the body in artificial conditions often in test tubes, used in scientific discourse in the entanglement of different technologies, to imagine choreographic devices in collaboration. By consistently balancing the artificial ("in vitro") environment of a studio with engagements in public spaces ("in vivo") I am attempting to create a diverse set of artistic works that reverberate in cross-contamination procedures, expanding audience and artistic disciplines. Interspecies collaborations are of absolute importance for survival. For Anna Tsing (2015), collaboration forms a thread that intertwines with the rejection of progress to produce latent commons. Collaboration is indeterminate; it involves contamination that changes the parties involved in unforeseeable ways. Nonetheless, Tsing argues that in order to survive we need the help of others. We must engage in collaboration, both within and across species, subjecting ourselves to inevitable contamination. Through collaboration and ensuing contaminated diversity, new historically contingent, relationally determined possibilities emerge.
After being outdoors in a long, embodied learning experience of becoming bacteria, the artistic proposal now deals with the captive condition of the studio; indoors. What remains is the superpower of reproduction of the bacteria, the transmutating reproducibility, always becoming others, never alone, always in collaboration. The multiplicity allows that one becomes more in a blink of an eye; a condition of not belonging to the body or not being one. The bacteria do not exist alone; they are transindividual by definition.
[…] transindividuality happens in the situation in which the individual suspends the function of its (interindividual) relations to the others, or, in other words, dis individualize itself by putting itself into question, by forcing itself to become aware of what in itself is more-than-individual. (Cvejić 2016, 6)
The sound composition and spatialisation in the piece make it possible to navigate through all the different technologies. It serves as a key to open up portals. The sound mediates the speculative fabulation, it bridges the audience and non-humans; bacteria, ghosts, and birds. The voicing out loud aims to make a highly accessible open system with many entrances. The language includes lower tones and high pitches. Those variations stress fixed spaces of knowledge and regimes of visibility, cracking their hierarchies. The characteristics of the digitalisation of space shape our ways of working, thinking, and being. The language here bridges us back to an embodiment experience, it highlights the apnea as an analogical way of sharing the invisible, it forecasts spells that are not intelligible, and it addresses that translation is always a loss.
The piece 7 Abiku solos for 11 bacteria falling through is the result of the Master's in Choreography at DAS Graduate School. I am assuming that sound is used to “glue” the pieces together and create the atmosphere. Contamination is the methodology for a collective creation process; an interspecies ecology between Flavia Pinheiro, Leandro Olivan, Tom Oliver, Kris Macdonald, Misha Douglas, Chakirou (Baba Ketu), Mario Lopes, Rodrigo Batista, Ana Lira, Willem, Eric Lint, Jakob Povel, Emanuel Nijkerk, and others, more than humans and invisible voices.
The collective was made in an assemblage with the virtual presence of Jakob, with the previous experience together with Chakirou; intertwining places, cosmologies, languages, and technologies. “Collaboration is working across differences, yet this is not the innocent diversity of self-contained evolutionary tracks. The evolution of our 'selves’ is already polluted by histories of encounters; we are mixed up with others before we even begin any new collaboration. The diversity that allows us to enter collaborations emerges from histories of extermination, imperialism, and all the rest. Contaminations make Diversity” (Tsing 2017, 29).
An immaterial knowledge has been built; enchantments and spells gathered through body practices, conversations, reading, listening, being, and eating together, surrounded by the invisible and in a wake of the past as an absent presence. A secret hidden in between the words and their translations, a code that cannot be deciphered. An important part of the work was materialised in sound, sometimes harmonic, sometimes textual, sometimes rhythmic, sometimes digital, sometimes written, sometimes dissonant and chaotic: whistles, voices, screaming, murmurs, apneas, whispers, in a format of a podcast, an installation and a music composition for a live performance.
I am not going to focus on the technical aspects, but in the crossing between them, half of the crew was there to make this happen. Nevertheless, tools become obsolete, while new ones are perpetually born, but the elements of the performance can’t remain the same. Although I believe it is interesting to say that the database of the images at the beginning of the process was a very complicated and extended decision-making process. Some of us were standing for the importance of having “real scientific images of bacteria” to be used, others believed that the images would be just a representation of scientific allegory to dismantle perception and humanity.
Empirical sciences often pride themselves on being devoid of a subject while they are in fact highly fictional, narrative-based research fields. From the vantage point of an artist, the evolutionary story can be considered a fable (Scott 2017), and the whole field of empirical science a violent fabrication in which (as history shows) some lives are inherently devalued. In the realm of this particular fable, the in vitro condition reverberates across all domains of scientific discourses and practices: characters such as Petri dishes, microscopes, magnifying glasses, compasses, greenhouses, and zoos fill the stage – in an ongoing attempt to capture and catalogue non-human subjects. The attempt is to highlight the violent effects of this fable: What is true in a microcosmic, micropolitical way is also true in a macropolitical way. Bacteria, for example, are able to change their surroundings and transform their environment into a living, breathing, vital life. However, when they are captured, this is no longer the case. An in vitro condition, in other words, is a slow death for all life forms. The aim of the project was to tell the story not through the lens of a subject whose existence had been captured but from the opposite vantage point: That of a vibrant, dancing bacteria who refuses the conditions of captivity, that insists on staying alive through a choreography of contamination. It is searching for the re-enchantment of the world through entanglement with microorganisms, to dismantle the evolutionary tale of humanity and recast it toward decolonizing nature. To resist colonizing systems of knowledge and the regimes of invisibility, the micro-politics of bacteria are a metaphor for the grammar of exclusion in the patriarchal, colonialist, capitalist macrosystem. This microscopic study investigates the ever-changing dialogue between a bacterial body as material and bone and flesh and imagination as invisible, intangible, immaterial. The sound was a creation of a specific ecosystem of practices, which aims to learn from bacteria to accelerate the metabolism, activate the immunological system, transform our visions, contaminate each other and create a dissonant community of cells that, unbalanced, moves together without a purpose, exploring the thin line between bacterial growth and inactivation, focusing on some emerging bacterial survival strategies, both from an individual cell and from a population perspective.
The fable unveils the mechanism of living in a state of being kidnapped from Life with all its colonial(ist), anti-biotic, anti-zootic impulses and implications. To create a dance with a broader engagement is, nevertheless, moving at the edge of an impossibility. The radical turn of this process is to continue to develop the research on the fine line between representation and the anti-colonial(ist) imperative, to detonate with the very logic that makes it possible even to conceive that such entrapment could ever make any sense at all. How to get totally rid of any “genre of the human” that posits captivity, hollowed-out life, anti-biotic being, living in vitro, as the only mode of understanding the living?
It is quite easy to draw a connection between these experiments and the fascination that people have with the audiovisual experience, when connecting to narrative storytelling, through the fabulation; scattered connections can be made also by the audience.
I will share the written text, the audio file, and the score of this fable, the performative installation named “7 Abiku solos for 11 bacteria falling through”; an in vitro experiment, that merges sound, texts, images, and movement in an attempt to engage the audience in imagination of the unborn. The language and translations used in “7 Abiku solos for 11 bacteria falling through" address urgent issues of macro political structures, emphasizing the importance of taking action towards a political shift.
This is why we stay with poetry. And despite our consenting to all the indisputable technologies; despite seeing the political leap that must be managed, the horror of hunger and ignorance, torture and massacre to be conquered, the full load of knowledge to be tamed, the weight of every piece of machinery that we shall finally control, and the exhausting flashes as we pass from one era to another—from forest to city, from story to computer—at the bow there is still something we now share: this murmur, cloud or rain or peaceful smoke. We know ourselves as part and as a crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone. (Glissant 1997, 35)
The trans-disciplinary approach relates to the search: how multiple voices can be heard differently through time? The choice to dive into multiple media was to hack the system of perception with analogical and digital devices in transduction procedures to complexify the meaning and the affective relations with the audience to address the invisible. For the philosopher Simondon (2017), transduction refers to a dynamic operation by which energy is actualized, moving from one state to the next, in a process that individuates new materialities.
Shifting the materiality of the experience into a plurality of voices, languages, and devices to aim at the questions: How to communicate with ghosts? How do we materialize the sensations and memories embodied in our guts, remembered by bacteria and tissues throughout generations? How can different technologies expand the experience and allow our imagination to form complex associations? How can a critical speculative fabulation address the embodiment of the unborn towards contamination procedures that could be fracture and dismantle sovereignty within neoliberalism, fostering the emergence of super-bacteria?
I will tell you a story.
It seems that the new scientific research results show that individuals with an imbalance in bacteria, with a ratio favoring harmful to healthy bacteria, were more likely to have the Alzheimer's signature. I wish I could tell you my dream, but I must tell you a story about a forced choreographic displacement. About memories stolen by colonialism that caused forgetfulness and loss in the transatlantic endless journey of no return. It is about imagining the past based on partial traces and opaque connections between an oral tradition, the presence of the Males at the port region in Recife, where my mother spent her life, and the magic realm of the Abikus in Ouidah. The legend tells that a pregnant woman was wandering around the baobab tree in an enchanted realm. Due to her sorrow and pain, her soul sunk into tears and sadness allowed the spirits inside her unborn child. A life of persistent effects of oppression, even after the oppressive system has been removed, in which silence, and annihilation takes place. Nothing has been left. She forgot everything. She cannot draw a clock due to an impairment of the frontal cerebral lobe; time has vanished away. Anatomic disrupting attention in the cerebral network. Thus, the present mingles disconnected events from the past with the future. After all, to whom does time belong? The research was an attempt to find refuge in this stolen life.
In the first room, this story was materialized through a transduction procedure using sound, spoken words, and written texts. 700 black feathers and 3 fans. An attempt to protect memory, a hidden secret, a spell uncodified, an immaterial story of the Abiku and field research in Benin. The installation with 12 LCD screens was programmed by Leandro Olivan and the sound/text composition plays with the overlapping of translations. The use of repetition, empty spaces on the screens, different font sizes, and a delay between what we see and hear were some materials used to foster this experience; a complex machine of perceptions where we fool the spectators' linear reading comprehension. On the screens, you have words, sentences, letters, graphics, and sometimes only a glitch that overlaps the multiple layers of sounds and noise emerging from the speakers.
7 Abiku solos with 11 bacteria falling through
Such a long night in the forest
Such a long night away from the forest
____
« Être un ABIKU n’est pas une fatalité. La fatalité est de croire qu’être un Abiku en est une. C’est là, la grande Ignorance »
____
I want to tell you a story about my past/future
Need
trauma
Wish I
could
life/death
Must
mother
Will
Companion spirit
Never
Curse
____________________
Being an ABIKU is not a fatality.
Reality
Between frustration and celebration
Remembrance and forgetfulness.
I belong to the disembodied entities,
spirits who live in a parallel world.
My mother lay down under the Baobab
to take refuge
Days of pain follow one another
"baobab", the sacred tree,
the nest of all spirits,
She uttered angry expressions
She uttered words of pain that gradually made her energy dirty
So angry; she didn't realize that she was surrounded by beings
of magic
In the spirit world
some feed on the tears of our tears
others on the tears of our joys,
others on our negative or positive thoughts
____________
Je ne suis jamais seule car les miens sont toujours avec moi
et me suivent partout
_____
the atmosphere of the forest settles in with the calls of
birds and animals of several species.
___________
You belong to the disembodied entities, spirits who live in a
parallel world.
a child who is born with the intention of not lasting.
____
Emi " Bànjókò " Stay (sit) by my side
Emi " Yemiitan " Stop deceiving me
Emi " Kòkúmó̩ " This one will not die
Emi " Dúrojaiyé " Stay and enjoy life
_________
powerful spirits
Encantados
Forgive me for my silence
nightly adventures in the forest
Like my shadow, I sense you
_______________
Comme si mon âme chante ibéré, Imon ; Iwa ;
Between irokos, baobas
Entre mundos que não podem desaparecer
they incarnate into a child
Who came to this world
Into the mother's womb.
Coming back again and again
“born-dead”
asphyxiated,
stillborn
Breathless
An attempt to survive in apnea
An absent presence
______
The ones who have not been born yet.
Who Will never be born
Who Will die right after birth
Many of us/ them with no right to live
Mon adrénaline monte :
colère, tristesse, anxiété, arrogance sont au rendez-vous !
my system is always corrupted
(Disease- Epidemic- Inaction Bacteria, virus malaria,
tetanus, salmonella )
I received then a very violent blow, mine are always of good
mood,
It was necessary to appease them,
chained them and fed them
so that they stop being a handicapped with my return and my
success.
The captive-born bird
The angry bird who can not fly
FIGHT - FIGHT -FIGHT - FIGHT- FIGHT
V- I -O-L-E-N- C-E
Violence
Rage rage rage rage rage
Vomitando depois de nausea, cólera e dor
To stop this cycle of births and deaths, your parents will have to perform certain rites to make the spirit forget its world of origin and to keep death away,
The first spirit that comes to me in my trance was a beautiful soul
A- Disguised and wearing a costume and a mask on which is written the letter "A" Akôkôkù (the first dead)
B- The second one with the same costume on which is written in bold the letter "B" Banjoko (sits with me)
I- The third belongs to the rank of spirits "I" inscribed on his back Ikukôhê (death has refused you)
K- The fourth has the letter "K" Kokumo (Do not die any more) on his back
U- The fifth has the letter "U" on his back, without a name or definition, he walked with his head
The five spirits brought together finally gave my identity.
Still in my trance,
I could not hold back from shouting loudly
A-BI-KU,
which had such an echo that the earth, the heavens and all
that constitutes them relayed my voice and that of babalawo,
which coincided exactly with mine; so I came back to myself for
a few seconds and then ......
The second room entails an immersive performative score with touch design programming to visualize bacteria through generative art and three live performers embodying bacterial behaviors. You have troublemakers, errors, defaults, disobedience, and restless insistence in the body. It is about an inversion acknowledging that human bodies are colonized by bacteria and microorganisms. When the body fabulates a non-human to become a gendered technology mingled with non-hierarchical relation of the tissues to evoke the invisible that has not yet been born throughout devices that shift spatial notions, the inner/outside perception, the verticality, the bottom up, the anus instead of the head, a tentacular creature, a monster in a crossroad with species, in apnea. There is no air. The ontogenetic interfaces of the parasympathetic control allow the unknown to take place, the unborn to become. There is also a disruptive bird. The drive is to materialize and give shape to nonhegemonic voices, to imagine cosmological futurities that bring ways to collaborate for a radical aesthetic approach theoretically and poetically grounded in anti-racism, anti-colonial, anti-patriarchalist to rethink the archives, the undocumented, the original narratives towards repatriation, reparation, and restitution. Abiku was meant to build a public machine to acknowledge non-humans as an art of living in disruption, the art of surviving in the other way round of the art of living. We worked in a across academy in IDLab, with a light designer, sound designers, programmers, and performers. These complex constellations were a decision to expand collaborations and interdisciplinarity to reach diverse audiences, a performative engagement to open up different points of access through a diverse encounter.
To understand a strong opposition between the world of the living and the world of death in the western cosmology to which I belong, to mingle with and migrate to impossible choreographs of humans and non-humans in states of survival. I focused on technologies of forgetting and remembering to speculate about an ontological radical turn between bacteria, birds, and spirits.
Édouard Glissant, in his Poetics of Relation (1990), reminds us that "difference itself can still contrive to reduce things to the Transparent” (189).
The proposal is to work as an ensemble where thinking promotes a shared unknowability that breaks through the dialectical limits of opacity and transparency.
The research was an attempt to fabulate my mother’s past history, grief, and forgetting. I went to Benin in West Africa for field research trying to track back if it was possible to understand the meaning of abiku, and spiritual journey to face the ghosts of my heritage and the unnamed and undocumented past of my mother.
It is the “new mission of being the theory/practice of the
permanent decolonization of thought” (Viveiros de Castro 17). It
might be a complex network of interspecies relationships and
ghostly string figures combining methods of doing, telling
stories, thinking thoughts, making dances, creating images,
decolonizing gestures, unlearning references, training to die, and
forging ( in ) discipline.
With Abiku we would like to share the potential of fabulating
narratives, a pathway of self- discovery and reconstruction that
allows openness to communicate to the unborn, to more than humans
in a listening procedure. This process converges into a deep
reflection of the ongoing colonization technologies and all the
neoliberal power dynamics when it presents a gap, a portal to the
world of those who have not yet been born. As a breath of hope, I
present us with a world to come.
The unborn fabulates into micro cosmologies and micro-politics documentation speculation, a solo score with resistance, celebration, repetition, shapeshifting, rage, anger, air, the ocean, a crossroads: bacteria and ghosts.
comment
this creepy soothing voice welcomes people to kill themselves (towards the middle) “the intestinal tract… diversity…. take your finger up and insert it inside the person next to you.”
Welcome to the dark world of invisible microorganisms. To make science instead of art
A simple life of a single cell.
Transmitting to humans and non-humans and all those almost alive. It concerns the spectral presence of ghosta, the actual war but the borders that stands between the captive and their freedom, they can never be successfully crossed. For those who do not exist yet, those who were not born, and all imaginary, imagined beings, including those who have disappeared.
For all who have had their existence captured by the world of data digitalization and to remember that movement never stops.
Stop Stop Stop.
Close your eyes. Imagine an existence without a core, a breath without air, a world of adaptive possibilities of survival, permeability, super-fast reproduction power, transmutation, and membrane resilience. Good luck!
…
In vitro is Latin (the Golden language of Science) for “within the glass.” When something is performed in vitro, it happens outside of a living organism.
You have just entered this bacterial experiment where proportions, scales, and constellations matter for everything we can perceive, imagine and realize,
This is an in vivo experiment. An ongoing, hopeless fight against the antibiotic forces that surround us from all sides.
Bacteria are able to change their surroundings and transform their environment into a living, breathing, vital life. However, when they are captured, this is no longer the case. An “in vitro” condition is a slow death for all life to be and to come.
The cecum is a pouch within the peritoneum that is considered to be the beginning of the large intestine. It is typically located on the right side of the body (the same side of the body as the appendix, to which it is joined). The word cecum is Latin for blind.
The oldest life on the planet that speaks to you is more than 3.5 billion years old!
Humans did not know of our existence until 1674 ...even though the human body is made up of 10 times more bacteria than human cells!
Since the time of the bacterial discovery, we have been plundered and looted, displaced in Petri dishes across the globe, ambient bodies in isolation in an ongoing spectacle. This stage show is available 24/7. Unable to sleep, we remain in a continuous and perpetual motion.
If we organized ourselves into a protest lined up membrane to
membrane, end to end, we’d span about 10 billion light-years.
That's the distance from here to the edge of the universe.
No wonder we are exhausted, yet you never hear us complain. And
yet we never stop
(But not all of us have been discovered yet)
Become superbug! The possible alternative in the fight against antibiotics.
Be a superbug!
Be a queerbacteria, nanobacteria divabacteria, transbacteria, necrobacteria, cyberbacteria, pornobacteria,
Make your own bacteria, Do It Yourself. Stick together:
Bacteria manifest as a new microscopic, unhealthy way of life. If now we are three, there will soon be three million of us. And when the good bugs go bad you better run for your life.
We bacteria have developed a great resilience to antibiotics ( like u )and
if there is a future ... we'll be there.
To over come the tradition of silence
is a contra attack movement
A choreography of insistence, resilience, repetition, and
accumulation. IN VITRO
Captive drawing fugitivities
emphasizing multi-species
Entanglements
Bacteria mingled with a bird in cholera.
Petri dishes, microscopes, magnifying glasses, compasses A complex
microbial choreography
In which the (non) humans are a tiny part A state
of Refusal
to make the revolution irresistible
In an absent presence
When the storm glitches with slippery memories. In
between Forgetfulness and Remembrance
In the spirit world,
some feed on the tears of our tears;
drawing their pain in the air
A vortex an uncontrolled acceleration The (non) Future of Art Research intertwined with profiles, zoo catalogs, green houses, apes, and birds A spiral of interspecies interdependence. assemblages fractals noninfectious inflammatory contamination of a harmful bacteria Not belonging to your own body Fighting against pathogenic intruders parrots, Quakers, parakeets, and macaws. Crossing the borders flying With a broken wing and withered feathers In a Violent disruption Throughout dominant immunological hygiene whiteness Bleach The illness of all times
CONTAMINATION NOW
the composition of the gut microbiota Memories for forgetfulness.
AFFECTS the insulin resistance
Antibiotics
The recruitment for microcolony formation Swimming in the
Hippocampus
Diving in the cerebral cortex
A Microbial shift
Into the cerebrospinal fluid
That tears up the tissue
An alveolar bone loss memory
outer membrane
IN VITRO
Mediates invasion and colonization of host cells
IN VIVO
The gut and the brain are deeply interconnected autonomic
pathways,
modulating permeability,
Traumas (dis)located in
The gastrointestinal tract
Attempts to survive in apnea
Glimpsed of puking
(de) formations pedagogies transmission cross-seeding
The unstoppable troubling spirits
Somersaults levitates , turn their heads, tear their limbs apart
Shattering the edges
A restless soul Unsettled
Scattered desires
walking between
Irokos, baobabs, and other big trees of the forest, by magic a wind carries me I belong to the disembodied entities,
the countdown began,
fractures of the deconstructed, erased, disrupted, and denied
memories. The endless no return.
I am ABIKU
The wondering soul
Dance to not die
The unborn
The unstoppable troubling spirits
I am ABIKU, The unborn
A crossroads
Of despair and celebration
Becoming a flock of birds
The endless path of no return.
1. Audience in – everything dark, performers whistling insistently with back and forth movement that stretches time, evoking the invisible and opening the space through the silenced voices of spirits
2. Moving around a petri dish, 7 circles crossing movement ontogenetic patterns: crawling,
3. Fast and short movements of bacteria (Live performers) -the spleen produces antibodies for a counter-attack, purple color, fighting back the invasion Transformation and Transport- let go the air ( in front of the screen 2 bacteria - behind another angry one)
4. The “characters” individual bacteria appear on the screen (they are more soft- light- transparent than the violent ones that we saw live, they shift, and float)
5. Migration movements- very fast head movements like birds- switch gazes between objects, perceive depth, and switch between lateral and frontal viewing, with minimal eye movement they have while observing their surroundings. Attentive state of the live bacteria.
6. The bacteria on the screen also start moving fluently touching each other
7. Flock of birds- contamination bacteria procedures, reproduction on the screen and live. The music is building up and the bacteria transmuted.
8. Freefall- falling under the sole influence of gravity building up something that will be destroyed - score for the performers
9. Constrictions in apnea that develops an inversion, a radical shift, bottom up- “music someone”. (Front space full of smoke and dry ice - only one performer)
10. Volcanic explosion - the destruction of brain cells CAOS
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Glissant, Édouard. 1997. Poetics of Relation. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. https://doi.org/10.3998/mpub.10257
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Scott, James C. 2017. Against the grain. A deep history of earliest states. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1bvnfk9
Simondon, Gilbert. 2017. On the mode of existence of technical objects. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Tsing, Anna Lowenhaupt. 2017. The Mushroom at the End of the World. On the Possibility of Life in Capitalism Ruins. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Viveiros de Castro, Eduardo, and Peter Skafish. 2013. “Cannibal metaphysics: Amerindian perspectivism: With an introduction by Peter Skafish.” Radical Philosophy 182 (Nov/Dec): 15–28.
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/article/cannibal-metaphysics-amerindian-perspectivism
Flavia Pinheiro is a choreographer and researcher from Brazil currently based in Amsterdam. She graduated from DAS Choreography Master program (AHK) in 2022. Her master’s research was carried out in Benin with fellowship assistance from AHK Internationalization Fund and the Talent Grant/AHK. She is currently part of the DAS Third research program developing M.I.M.O.S.A that intends to dismantle hegemonies of thought and species through an expanded choreographic and somatic approach. Her research foregrounds networks of resilience and resistance to systems of knowledge through fabulative speculations around Science and Technologies. Her artistic practice is an ongoing attempt to create breathing and vital conditions; in an unstoppable dance, she creates improbable exchanges with nonhumans such as bacteria, plants, birds, antelopes and ghosts. She focuses on states of survival and refusal of captivity by proposing a radical ontological turn.
In 2021 she received The Fonds Podiumkunsten/Performing Arts Fund /NL grant. Her graduation piece “7 Abiku Solos for 11 bacteria falling through” was supported by Aart Janszen Fund and ID Lab and it was awarded the Andre Veltkamp Beurs Grant.
In 2022 Flavia was awarded the 3Package Deal fund for International Talents by AFK for the “Engaged Art” coalition.
© 2023 Flavia Pinheiro
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.