Reactivate the living, cross the forest

Abstract

From various poetic expressions – photographic, cinematographic, pictorial and literary – I propose to circumvent the idea of living. My photographic series Água viva depicts a girl approaching the flowing waters of the waterfall. The child encounters the matter of the world and the invisible of nature, with no margins to distinguish them. Naomi Kawase, in her film The Mourning Forest, shows us that crossing the forest is, necessarily, being crossed by it. The artist Wilma Martins pictorially constructs outbursts of the forest in the home setting and, thus, shapes the link between the real and the imaginary; between the wild and the domesticated. The character G.H., by Clarice Lispector, lives an epiphany after the encounter with a cockroach – an archaic, remote, immemorial being, an intimate and subjective crossing that makes the most primitive of herself emerge. Between the world we look at and the one we see, the visible and the invisible, matter and spirit, human and non-human, we are crossed by the energy of the living. Reactivate, a key-word in the vocabulary of the Belgian philosopher Isabelle Stengers, takes us back towards the bond with the gods, the spirits, the earth and, with these alliances, reactivate the living is composed.