18 Sep AnaVitória premieres 2 works between Brazil and Portugal.
“Encruzilhada” premieres in Lisbon at the Mercês Cultural Space
Since 2015 on the airlift between Brazil and Portugal, the choreographer, performer, Post-Doctor in Arts from the University of Lisbon and visual artist AnaVitória, has been developing projects based on the Poetics of the Body and the affective power of the contemporary subject.
The installation Ritual “Encruzilhada”, by the Portuguese-Brazilian artist AnaVitória, will premiere on September 23 at the Galeria de Arte – Espaço Cultural Mercês, in Lisbon, and will remain on the agenda until the 30th of the same month.
“Encruzilhada” is the result of artistic residencies carried out by the choreographer from north to south of Portugal in villages, towns and communities, with women who live on the fringes of the cultural life of their cities, often in a complete state of invisibility and social silencing and that for this project generously and courageously shared their memories and stories about their matrilineal legacies and inheritances.
The project addresses the issue of gender behavior in imposed cultures, in the ways in which societies determine the conduct of life and their social segregation.
The exhibition space includes sculptural pieces built by the artist, anonymous photographs of missing women, surgical objects used in gynecological interventions and many others for female domestic use. The environment created aims to bring the viewer’s gaze back to this powerful and singular universe.
AnaVitória places itself at this center and at this crossroads to give body, voice and presence to the memory of these women. The idea of embodyment (incarnation) takes center stage in this arena, where the past and the present come together in a performative ritual based on the energies of female archetypes, myths and rites. Given its anthropological nature, the “Encruzilhada” project is inclusive, diverse and multicultural and assumes its hybridity by adding various artistic languages.

AnaVitória has been building a long experience around themes that involve the female universe, its taboos, rites of passage and silencing. In 2012, her Performative Installation Ferida Sábia, created from her research on menstruation as a taboo topic still in our contemporary society, traveled all over Brazil performing more than 80 performances at the invitation of Cultural, Educational and Artistic Institutions, recognizing the relevance and urgency in confronting the contemporary subject with a theme that should no longer be a reason for women’s irrecoverable prejudice and misconceptions (see the artist’s website www.anavitoria.com.br).
AnaVitória’s commitment to her artistic and pedagogical world is above all ethical when she puts her own body at the service of the discourse of art as a trigger for human existence. Encruzilhada firstly proposes three layers of perceptions: that of its visuality through the sculptural objects on display, that of the presence of the artist’s body performing other female bodies and voices and invoking or incorporating their stories that are so singular and at the same time collective, and that of the affective approach. which will be given at the will of the visitors, as they leave the names of their matrilineal ancestors written on a piece of gas so that they can be later evoked during the performance. Thus, in line with the objectives listed above, this project considers artistic making as a necessary condition for social participation and construction of thinking and learning by social subjects who are aware of their legacies and sensitive to their histories.

Crossroads – Establishment 2022 – Photo – Bruno Veiga
If art has the privilege of waking up the body from its dormancy resulting from the imposed codification processes and making new fields of thinkability emerge, the research around the already codified or already semioticized thought, such as that of women, their practices and contributions underground, seems to us the ideal arena for the debate and sensitization of the fragmented contemporary subject.
This project is placed precisely at this crossroads where ancestral and contemporary practices and knowledge meet, debate and look at each other, not only on the social plane and its rawness but also in the field of affectability that art can create. By highlighting such a unique theme that concerns all of us, contemporary subjects, when we are invited to look at the stories inherited from our ancestors in their inexhaustible matrilineal chain and its deviations, pains and disaffections, we propose that instead of preconception, we can make use of plans of consistency so that new captures of forces are carried out through poetic forms. Other planes of consistencies that would be ways of approaching what summons us from our sensitive body in contact with the artistic experience. Possible openings, touches and sensory looks at the difference that is the female condition in the world.
“DSÍ-embodyment” at the 2022 Mercosul Biennial in Brazil
DSÍ_embodyment his Video-Installation participates in the 13th Bienal do Mercosul, and is on display at MARGS – Museu de Artes do Rio Grande do Sul, from September 15 to November 20.
A visual unfolding of her 2016 Performative Installation DSÍ with dancer-actress Carolyna Aguiar, asks one of the most important questions for the choreographer, “what marks were left on the body and how were they organized over time?”
As a starting point for this artistic investigation, memory, the repertoires of an existence and its archival modes are activated in order to recover the affections of a singular body. A body-memory in its temporal transversalities, its modes, behaviors and practices of the lived as dreamed.
The autobiographical investigation in DSÍ-embodyment, the story of a life, her dreams, her unconscious-that other scene-in which one also lives, is the material for her poetic creation. Autobiography as a poetic-performative device is also the subject of the recent book published by AnaVitória by Editora 7Letras in Rio de Janeiro entitled Dança- Autobiographical Creation and Memory (2022).

Video Scene DsÍ-embodyment – 2021
A video installation by AnaVitória
Directed by AnaVitória and Leticia Monte
Performer Carolyna Aguiar
Spiral Production
Achievement 8 Times
Free admission, Tuesday to Sunday, from 10 am to 7 pm