recife/s, (8 min), 2008
Please watch it on HD.
A collaboration with poet Terri Witek
HIM:
In 1969 the U.S. poet Terri Witek spent one year in Recife, Brazil. 40 years later I want to imagine then, there and her (myself a transplanted person: a Brazilian in the U.S. since 1999). I use her sentences/memories as directions on how to see DeLand, FL as a possible Recife (I, who have never been there). I photograph and videotape the US as travestied Brazil. We are symbiotic flaneurs on the unconscious streets of an infinite, unstable city. Astronauts of our own invented moon.
HER: It is 1969, the year of Apollo 11. Although I am from the US, I am out walking in Recife, Brazil, where I will live for one year (I am just beginning to know the words for "street," "city," "live.) Someone is following me or just ahead--will we meet? I keep walking as far as 2009 and a small city in Florida, where I take pictures to see if I can see what he is seeing. When I do this the girl I was speaks over the great reef of time. In the breaking of her words over memory's sharpness, DeLand speaks through Recife, where Cyriaco is out walking.
recifes was part of the exhibition Contemporary Flanery: Reconfiguring Cities, curated by Vagner Whitehead at Oakland University Art Gallery. Rochester, MI: March 7 - April 12, 2009 (samples of the catalogue below)
