Cartas que dançam ao Sul (Letters dancing towards the South) is a transdisciplinary project that combines dance, cinema and literature. Choreographic particles coming from epistolary speculations then transformed into essay films. These letters are addressed to the globalized fiction identified as the Global South.
The cartographic and geopolitical fiction based in North-South dichotomy is a result of the colonialist modernity’s ethnocentrism, built at the expense of encroachment and exploitation of territories like Abya Yala. These secular invasions left as its trace the genocide of millions of humans and as its heritage the phallogocentrism maintained by the colonialist patriarchy. For centuries, the European whiteness has been drawing maps in which the invaded populations are placed underneath them. It’s an attempt to represent the idea of the South as iconographic submission. This same political project was updated by eugenic theses that were a geopolitical reference for Mao’s Three Worlds Theory.
The colonizers’ cartographic and political heritage created the fiction of a Global North as a white male supremacy’s narcissistic pact, resulting in a unilateral and hegemonic globalization. Be that as it may, their accumulation of privileges as a consequence of the planet's destruction has done the exact opposite. Nowadays, the capitolecene redraws the colonizer’s map, announcing not only their responsibilities but also the decadence that comes from succumbing to greed.
It is through this anti-colonialist perspective that Cartas que dançam ao Sul redraws maps and choreographic processes within territories indoctrinated by wealth accumulation and alienation. That’s why these denouncements are addressed as letters to the Global South. It is a way of searching for not only other interlocutors but also different starting points. By writing and dancing to those who still suffer from the devastation of their territories and cultures, I follow the critical genealogy of an anti-colonial knowledge that resisted centuries of invasions and exploitation. Knowledge which remains in the memory of its survivors. These letters have been written and danced as a trace coming from names as Tibira, Zumbi dos Palmares, Anastácia, Antônio Conselheiro, but also Ailton Krenak, Grada Kilomba, Djamila Ribeiro, Jota Mombaça, Hija de Perra, and other activists, artists or researchers.
As a collection of testimonies this project dances the dissidence of an undisciplined body living in Lisbon and, therefore, in the Global North fiction. I send these dancing letters to the country in which I was born and raised as a way to create political denunciation and poetic abstraction. The texts investigate ethical, political and iconographic absences still present in the Portuguese public sphere, its logics of epistemic reproduction in Europe and, as consequence, the maintenance of the Global South fiction’s exploitation and invisibility.
These letters are not addressed solely to Brazil. They imply a Caribbean and Latin-American bond, a coexistence amongst populations affected by exploitation during centuries and people still facing a forced diaspora all over the world. They also consider a dialogue with allies who joined the anticolonial movement. At last, how is it possible to describe the lack of meaning our bodies have to endure while the ills of colonialism and ecological destruction are still present in the incessant advance of financial and industrial capitalism? If these violences are reproduced against bodies that won't submit to colonial modernity, it is because it questions accumulation and consumption as the only form of production of subjectivities in the metropolis.
Therefore, Cartas que Dançam ao Sul emerges as a practice-based research that aims to rethink the representational logic imposed on the dancing body. Considering the colonialist patriarchy as one of the pillars of our current western techno-scientific regime, responsible for producing limits to humanity (who is human, who is not?) — limits which are imposed by the borders of secular institutions, amongst them the idea of a nation state, this project elects the perspective of a dancing body and their thoughts to create dissident script and iconographies.
The cartographic and geopolitical fiction based in North-South dichotomy is a result of the colonialist modernity’s ethnocentrism, built at the expense of encroachment and exploitation of territories like Abya Yala. These secular invasions left as its trace the genocide of millions of humans and as its heritage the phallogocentrism maintained by the colonialist patriarchy. For centuries, the European whiteness has been drawing maps in which the invaded populations are placed underneath them. It’s an attempt to represent the idea of the South as iconographic submission. This same political project was updated by eugenic theses that were a geopolitical reference for Mao’s Three Worlds Theory.
The colonizers’ cartographic and political heritage created the fiction of a Global North as a white male supremacy’s narcissistic pact, resulting in a unilateral and hegemonic globalization. Be that as it may, their accumulation of privileges as a consequence of the planet's destruction has done the exact opposite. Nowadays, the capitolecene redraws the colonizer’s map, announcing not only their responsibilities but also the decadence that comes from succumbing to greed.
It is through this anti-colonialist perspective that Cartas que dançam ao Sul redraws maps and choreographic processes within territories indoctrinated by wealth accumulation and alienation. That’s why these denouncements are addressed as letters to the Global South. It is a way of searching for not only other interlocutors but also different starting points. By writing and dancing to those who still suffer from the devastation of their territories and cultures, I follow the critical genealogy of an anti-colonial knowledge that resisted centuries of invasions and exploitation. Knowledge which remains in the memory of its survivors. These letters have been written and danced as a trace coming from names as Tibira, Zumbi dos Palmares, Anastácia, Antônio Conselheiro, but also Ailton Krenak, Grada Kilomba, Djamila Ribeiro, Jota Mombaça, Hija de Perra, and other activists, artists or researchers.
As a collection of testimonies this project dances the dissidence of an undisciplined body living in Lisbon and, therefore, in the Global North fiction. I send these dancing letters to the country in which I was born and raised as a way to create political denunciation and poetic abstraction. The texts investigate ethical, political and iconographic absences still present in the Portuguese public sphere, its logics of epistemic reproduction in Europe and, as consequence, the maintenance of the Global South fiction’s exploitation and invisibility.
These letters are not addressed solely to Brazil. They imply a Caribbean and Latin-American bond, a coexistence amongst populations affected by exploitation during centuries and people still facing a forced diaspora all over the world. They also consider a dialogue with allies who joined the anticolonial movement. At last, how is it possible to describe the lack of meaning our bodies have to endure while the ills of colonialism and ecological destruction are still present in the incessant advance of financial and industrial capitalism? If these violences are reproduced against bodies that won't submit to colonial modernity, it is because it questions accumulation and consumption as the only form of production of subjectivities in the metropolis.
Therefore, Cartas que Dançam ao Sul emerges as a practice-based research that aims to rethink the representational logic imposed on the dancing body. Considering the colonialist patriarchy as one of the pillars of our current western techno-scientific regime, responsible for producing limits to humanity (who is human, who is not?) — limits which are imposed by the borders of secular institutions, amongst them the idea of a nation state, this project elects the perspective of a dancing body and their thoughts to create dissident script and iconographies.