Blue - Blue / Albastru / Azul / Neelam
Video Performance, 16:07 min.
The Blue project was born during the “Words work” workshop at the Mother Tongue Festival in February of 2023. The aim of the project was to create a collaboration where we bring our diverse ideas, languages, and identities together to understand how gestures create a sense of belonging towards oneself, and towards one another. Therefore, I join to the visual artist, Leia Mocan and the performer, Subhashini Goda, to work on the commonalities of gestures and on how colours were linked to emotions, regardless of one’s national, ethnic, or racial identity. The one colour that we commonly pointed out for its multiple interpretations was the colour blue, ranging from significations of royalty, vastness and divinity to mundane and dislike.
Juxtaposition of communication. What I say and what I really feel.
Saudade or the feeling of longing, can be described as an act of love and memory.
However, for those who set out on the road to distant lands and find this companion, they feel the weight of its call and often find themselves unable to describe what they lack. The prison is internal and the body feels wounded. Language frees, but needs to be recited and understood. Finding new loves, retracing the path and living with the past is a challenge that every immigrant faces. Being able to express yourself is freeing yourself from the ties that isolate you from belonging to the present.
Misstatements
Video Performance 5:01
Saudade - Poem
Video Performance. Poem 3:00 min
Saudade is a Portuguese and Galician word for a feeling of longing for something that can be time, place, person(s), a feeling, a moment, objects, a situation, an idea, a state of mind or a relationship phase etc. . Doesn’t translate well in English, despite being a sentiment well known to all of us.
Saudade is also related to happiness, when memories and nostalgic moments are brought into the present. Or in imagining things that might happen in the future if the present were changed. Longing is something we carry with us. We don’t want to miss it because it’s related to memory. Therefore, it becomes part of our identity.
As our society becomes more complex and more diverse, belonging is no more a privilege but a need. Multicultural societies have an increasing and inevitable challenge to be adequate for those who come and leave with the whole cultural baggage they bring. In this work, I explore barriers and obstacles that distance us from our origins, but lead us to the construction of a new being integrated into our present and based on our cultural identity. Places, objects, sensations, memories, stories, people and components that we leave on the way or find and take with us make up the scenario of each phase of the change process. The ocean is a fundamental element to represent one of these barriers, as it represents throughout history and geology a medium that unites our lands and our past and yet has been the bearer of so many tears of those who leave and those who remain. The sand is fragments of rough terrain and stories.
Steer Fragment, 2023- Video fragment of experimental reflexive movie on multiculturalism, migration, identity and belonging
Video Performance and Sand stop motion animation 4:00 min
Invisible Woman, 2022
Stop motion video animation in Rubber charcoal drawings - 3:15 min
Short story based on the struggles of the marginalised Black Women and the interconnected pathways that need to be crossed so their voice could be heard beyond the realm of reality and time. Can all of us be ourselves, independent of our current social, culture and economic situation? How do we pray for the wonders of feminism to someone who survives under overlayers of disadvantages and discrimination?