Which work of art made you become an artist yourself?

There are two works that I encountered in the beginning of my career and that shaped everything I did afterwards.  Home of the Brave, a concert film by Laurie Anderson (1986) and the book If on a winter’s night a traveller by Italo Calvino (1979).

Where and when did you first see the artwork?

I watched  Home of the Brave when I was a student of performing arts in the university of São Paulo and I read If on a winter’s night a traveller’ ten years later during my postgraduate research in a.pass, Brussels.

“These works have inspired all my pieces in many different ways, mainly in their methodological and structural approach.”

What exactly does the work do to you? 

Laurie Anderson’s way of telling stories fascinates me, the control in the build up of a narrative, the interplay with music, voice effects and technology, the control of her intonation, the freedom of her body movement, and most importantly how she takes the role of the narrator with ambiguity, empathy, trusting the audience’s capacity of reading through contradictions and unfinished fragments of story. In Home of the Brave she manages to combine deeply relevant political commentary and philosophical thought with poetry, affect, humour.

Much like her, Calvino is a master storyteller. The novel If on a winter’s night a traveller is the result of a careful exercise in composition, combining strict mathematical constraints with an ironic commentary on literature, language, translation, and the processes of reading and writing, besides being one bold chain of ten stories that end on cliffhangers. We, readers, ‘hang’ on a sentiment, a moment, a piece of story (and of history) and by ‘hanging’ we learn we don’t always need the ‘mainframe’ to be happy.

Did the work ever inspire a specific performance?

These works have inspired all my pieces in many different ways, mainly in their methodological and structural approach; in the way I deal with strict rules in terms of ‘format’, setting specific writing challenges for myself before beginning a process of creation, how I deal with the figure of the narrator in my pieces and ultimately how they helped me shape a literary relationship of trust with the audience.

Do you revisit the work regularly or do you prefer to hold on to the magic of the first time?

I watched  Home of the Brave many times, in many different periods of my life. Always inspiring, it’s a work that never ends.

If on a winter’s night a traveller I read twice, the second time much more as an analysis of the structure of the book. The magic of the first time will probably stay as such, as it would be difficult to describe the feeling of discovery and excitement it provoked. I read many of Calvino’s books afterwards and it’s always like having a conversation with an old friend.

Have you ever recommended it to other people? 

To many. Mostly to students interested in text and narrative or to colleagues when trying to reveal something about my practice.

After all these years, are you still discovering new elements in the work? Is your view of the work still changing?

All the time. Not only in these specific works but in the whole oeuvre of these artists. Calvino’s novels and work on literary criticism has been a reference in my masterclasses and art research for many years. Laurie Anderson is an artist who is always coming up with new ways of relating  language to technology, always persisting with a sharp criticism on the way we live and our relation to language and technology and many other concepts like ‘coding’, ‘grammar’, ‘meaning’ or ‘perception’. I saw her perform at Bozar last year and it was such an amazing moment.