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Frames from videoperformance, 2014. 15:00 minutes.

Having the mausoleum of an abandoned cemetery in the city of Belém as the setting, the camera follows along the thorough cleaning process of a local urn. The artist – dressed in white and resembling a nurse – works the water-filled urn from the abandoned and full of seepage mausoleum. In a rite that displaces the usual place of death and making natural the interaction with the deceased’s remain, the artists takes the bones out of the urn (without gloves) and, after cleaning it, puts them back in the same place. A symbolic exchange is established in the process: the resting place will become pristine clean whereas the artist’s clothing, previously white, will become impregnated with slime, murk, signs of death. Art is treated as something that permeates our concrete existence just as much as death as another dimension of life.

Read text Clarissa Diniz >