Geographical Fiction

Geographical Fiction

 

In this performance, I walk through a steel line connected to a metal structure, forming the same sentence. My body weight sustains the structure fixed on the ceiling. As I step out, the sentence collapses on the floor like an explosion.

 

Euclides da Cunha, one of the central figures in Brazilian literature, describes in his book “Os Sertões” the popular rebellion that occurred in Canudos, a region in the northeast of the country deeply marked by misery and drought. Given the historic governmental neglect, its inhabitants proclaimed the area as an independent state, an action violently repressed.

 

It happened in the late nineteenth century in the confines of Latin America, and repeats in different forms and contexts in the contemporary world. The political machine’s inequality and violence seem timeless and transnational, creating borders, boundaries, and inconceivable limits. 

 

The writer, shocked by the misery and despair he sees, affirms: “This is a geographical fiction”.

 

 

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