Meus Caros Amigos – part III

2021

5 cassette tapes, 5 cassette players, 5 envelopes, 5 gelatine silver prints (6x9cm each), 1 cassette recorder, durational performance throughout 5 days (15 min each day)

Analogue photos: Sofie Hviid Vinther
Documentation photos: Tatiana Lozano and Nayara Leite

For the third part of Meus Caros Amigos, presented in August 2021 at Palmera, Bergen, I wrote new letters to 5 of the friends with whom I’ve been in correspondence since 2019. In the letters, I asked for an update on Jair Bolsonaro’s destructive and chaotic term, and how the initial fear of having a homophobic president became the fear of having a genocidal one.

During the 5 days of the exhibition, I made a live recording of me reading each letter, one per day. On side B of each cassette tape, I recorded an instrumental version of the song Meu Caro Amigo, made exclusively for this project by Brazilian musician Gabriel Maron. By using a cassette recorder for this work, I made an allusion to the way Chico Buarque sent news from Brazil to his friend Augusto Boal, who was living in exile in Portugal in the 1970s when the country was under a dictatorial regime [for more information on this reference, please see Meus Caros Amigos – part I].

At the end of each recording, the tapes were placed by their respective envelopes, along with a cassette player and a hand printed b&w photograph of my wedding – the best thing that happened to me in the 2020 pandemic. All the wedding photographs were taken by my friend and fellow artist Sofie Hviid Vinther. Since the letters were written in Portuguese, I distributed their translations inside a small sealed envelope to the audience, who could decide whether to read them immeddiately or save them for later.

When all the letters were recorded and the exhibition was taken down, I collected all the material and sent it to Brazil.

This project was supported by Kulturrådet, Billedkunstnernes Vederlagsfond and Bergen Kommune.