Descida às águas (Descent to the Waters) comes from a collaboration with Collin Kluchman and it consists in a performance that investigates, presence, cyclicality, and regeneration through the building of fictions and rumors.
It is from the appearance and presence of a covered figure in a secluded and natural landscape that the action takes place. The work explores the potential that the performative work can establish with its video documentation, presenting the vestiges and glimpes of the performative action through it. A cloaked figure struggles upstream clutching an object engraved with arcane instructions. As the apparently linear journey progresses the video footage transitions between different generations of re-photography. This iteration creates a temporal disjuction, and when the figure deposits the object into the water at the video’s climax, the symbolic act evokes a regeneration ritual, implying that the cycles of regeneration correspond directly with the generations of footage quality. This mixture of simulacrum and temporal tensions questions the limits of presence evoking a suspended space of embodiment