We Are Alive [2012]

The venue: Catumbi cemetery wall. On one side, the silence, the lifeless, the memory of lives that have passed. On the other side, the “life out there”, the lives that pass by and also dance, celebrate, play, drink, eat barbecue, and project videos at an unusual moment, since this space is often seen as “dead”, “abandoned”…

In “We Are Alive”, the video does not culminate in previously edited memories; it only expresses the flows of this fortuitous “now”, but still capable of producing new memories. Not the realistic mirror of bodies outlined by ambient light and in good digital resolution, but the “ghostly” bodies, live and alive, of the few passers-by. Standing out from the everyday silence, they now catch the eye in vibrant colors, multiplied as pure light and blurs on the concrete of the cemetery wall, invoking the memory of the bodies that were once part of the human flow that suddenly became “invisible” when the neighborhood became a “byway,” stripped of its original identity, through the macro-political logic of urban administration.

What does revitalization mean, then, if life seems to matter less than the market to those who plan our cities? What is the difference between revitalization and the activation of “living spaces” according to the real desire of the communities of city dwellers? Over time, the characters, centers, peripheries, pains and joys of the city are also transformed. And life always urges beyond architecture, beyond image and representation.

Exhibition

Eu amo Catumbi (I love Catumbi) + Imagina Rio + Plataforma Vide Urbe
Catumbi Cemetery, Rio de Janeiro
June 2nd, 2012