Given that the idea of freedom is used to valorize the unregulated movement of capital, with deadly consequences for bodies human and non-human alike, it may have lost its longstanding position as liberatory ideal. Following the Brazilian intellectual tradition of cultural anthropophagy , which theorizes a relationship between post-colonial cultural production and the act of consuming the other, artistic director Marc Streit organized the festival as a conversation between South America and Europe on questions of appropriation and exchange.
The program included performances, talks, and a research laboratory of eight European and Brazilian artists, organized in collaboration with Felipe Ribeiro of the Atos de Fala festival in Rio de Janeiro.
They further suggested that digestion, rather than being an extraction of value, might instead be imagined as a process of mutual encounter and entanglementβa process that could in fact lead to freedom. Five performers, clustered tightly together, begin a unified, repetitious in-out motion that maintains and mutates as they traverse an expanse of 1, wooden planks over the course of an hour.
Their upper bodies extend and contract in rhythm; their legs bounce, stomp, and seek out footing on the unstable ground cover. By the time they reach the far side of the pile, vocalizations now resounding through the space, their exhausting journey takes on an almost triumphal quality.
The performers are inside a relentless, punishing structure, but they persist in moving forwardβand always as a group, their bodies finding and returning to one another even when the ceaseless rhythm makes this difficult.
