Letter Report
Hi all this is a report that the musician that worked with me producing and thinking the music of my last completed worked named “Fantasia casi soneto después de una lectura de dan(c)e” sent me after going to ArteBA Focus (version of the big art fair in Buenos Aires done by the same people):
Hi, Dudu, how’s it going?
I was on ArteBA Focus for a while, all right. I give you a brief report: The work was in a plasma TV of acceptable size, but had no headphones, and the environment was too noisy to be heard well with the speakers of the device. Also, when I went, the video had a jump, a line of slight horizontal digital noise, which appeared cyclically and affected everything, video and audio. Still, it could be said that, given the context, the work was “intelligible”, and in fact, I saw several people stop to look at it for a while. Very good photos of you too, I liked them.
The sample, in general ok, although nothing dazzled me: – [
After reading this email this morning I felt like taking this as a chance to say more and to send it to you, curators and people working and deciding about art nowadays.
I am now living in Frankfurt and these pasts days had been the first depressive days I had here.
After being yelled while transporting myself through the city twice, Friday around 8AM and Saturday around 00AM, I decided to create a new sound work called “I love you Frankfurt”, that actually I had this idea way before but now it´s urgent for me to do it. Will be done soon hopefully.
As I am far from my Umbanda Terreiro in São Paulo, I have to appeal to some improvised healing like having a haircut today as I always do when feeling down. Today my haircut was only to leave the knife I have tattooed in my head visible to others. Now I feel cold in my head.
Great haircut to go to my Ausländerbehörde Frankfurt (Foreigners Department) meeting in 20 days! To try to get my visa, not having reached the money I need or either a sponsor who could sign a letter. Yet.
I never forget listening to Cuauhtémoc Medina talking about the meaning of Curatore.: those who used to take care…of money (back then).
But I sold two photos in the art fair! From which I have to discount half from both for the galley (fair) and production of everything (fair). I need now to think how to do to make the money travel from Buenos Aires to Frankfurt. Hopefully a friend will carry the papers for me.
Thinking about this art fair experience I do need to think of doing an exhibition soon, and I do have works ongoing:
I’m waiting for a dramaturge called Carol to come back to Guissen (next to Frankfurt) from Japan (she was at Kyoto experiment) to start a new project I already started here: performative film about a choir that sings problems in German. Their problems doesn´t seem the same as mine problems. I have a lot of ideas already for this, it´s exciting.
And I also decided to continue my blind project video with only sound, with the two amazing persons Luiz Carlos and Paula who are in São Paulo. Something good will come out from this as long as I can still be here to use the studio sound at school!
I also delivered a project here to see if I can get money for it, it´s called Incapazes. In a way it´s about art and care. A tiny for of this film was part of Jessica Gogan´s video about art and care where the curator Ricardo Resende that helped me in the beggining with this project as curator of Museu Bispo do Rosario (the museum that actually helped to get into the hospital as a pacient) I sent already this project for an open call in São Paulo, they didn´t choose it.
I started “Incapazes” last December in a psychiatric hospital in Rio de Janeiro. The material is waiting in my external hard drive and few notebooks, handwritten diaries, and now the project has another layer: doing a field research about art and madness and care here in Frankfurt starting with Heinrich Hoffman and the Sammlung Prinzhorn collection. Finger crossed.
I cried twice this weekend and talked with my lover who is now going back also from Japan to Salvador da Bahia. We talked about HIV and care and love…
And this email is mainly because I´ve been thinking about CARE.
What am I doing?
Today I thought a lot about what Willem de Rooij said in our first class meeting, in a way is like a ritual for him to send a photo of Nancy Reagan with the slogan Just Say No.
We all need to think a little more about care, and this should be translated to what we do. I felt really surprised reading that the city where I studied and grew up and decided to be an artist is or was at list for a couple days “An Art Basel City”. What does this means? I don´t get it. Are they buying the city or renting it? How are they helping there or what is their real interest? I´m curious (not that much reall). But one thing takes me to the other and seeing all those # and my work involved did affected me while thinking about CARE.
And finally: I wanted to deliver “Fantasia casi soneto después de una lectura de dan(c)e” with English subtitles for all of you but seems that I can´t download the program I´m used to use for this kind of work. So I will have to wait for this. Any way, the Spanish version of a work done during 7 months in what seems to be now an Art Basel City, the lovely but weird Buenos Aires FUCK MACRI, LOL:
