Geografia do amor: a construção de um atlas erótico

Abstract

This project explores the heritage of Ricardo Wagner Braga, my uncle - who was chasing me around the house, dressed as a witch - as a possibility of creating an updated, festive and erotic cartography of the world. The inheritance is a box with personal archives collected in the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s. The geographical collection includes seventeen Brazilian states (Amazonas, Pará, Pernambuco, Sergipe, Paraiba, Ceará, Bahia, Mato Grosso, Federal District, Goiás, Espírito Santo, Rio de Janeiro, Sao Paulo, Minas Gerais, Santa Catarina, Paraná, and Rio Grande do Sul); and fourteen countries (Angola, Chile, United States of America, Peru, Panama, Portugal, Canada, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, England, Israel, Iraq and Switzerland). This collection, among the objects, contains: two hundred and fifty-four city postcards, written and stamped, exchanged with about one hundred and sixty women and men (80% men, 90% Brazilians); two hundred and fifty postcards from cities with no stamp and signature; identity documents; love letters; longing letters; personal photographs; photographs of ‘male mermaids’; diary sheets; a drawing of "Miss Universe"; postcards sent by me; Christmas' cards; ‘saints of death’; among others. This project - based on concepts by Clarice Lispector, Giorgio Agamben, Georges Bataille and Mikhail Bakhtin - proposes to be a utopian gesture to update Ricardo's archives and heritage, deceased as a result of AIDS, in the year two thousand and eleven. This gesture was made with Love and eight movements: four videos, three performances and the writing itself. These movements cover thirty-three percent of all inheritance and contain multiple possibilities: material; immaterials; aesthetic; iconographic; mythological; poetic; spiritual; magical and intuitive. I called this gesture "Geography of Love." An atlas - cathartic, liberating and magical, like the fairy tales - that celebrates our dead and ancestors.