Those who walk on the ground, who climb trees, who bear wings

There are signals. There are rumours. The indians say one day the sky shall fall.

Those who walk on the ground, who climb trees, who bear wings, who dwell in the water, thus the Amazon tribes describe the peoples of the forest. At the beginning of times, everyone was human: the jaguars, the parrots, the tapirs, the wild pigs, the pirarucu fishes. Afterwards, they turned into something else and became prey. Nevertheless, for them, we are all animals. We are the prey who lives in houses. (Eduardo Viveiros de Castro)

Ignorant, alienated, innocent, angry, desperate, coward, melancholic, euphoric, childish, lost in warm happiness, men and women follow their destinies at the heart of a turning world. Under the fortune’s wheel that elevates, seduces and cast us away, we have all the same ground under our feet. Man runs into the landscape and the landscape runs into man amidst a falling zenith.

In a collapsing world, tragedies pile up, flood and challenge our luck. Heroes emerge nameless, swiftly as shooting stars in the dark. Fast, intense, their dramas render us more human, more vulnerable in our proximity to what is commonly lived. Through their dramas, we live a possible future. Through compassion, our eventual destiny.

Those who walk on the ground, who climb trees, who bear wings proposes us to rethink tragedy in a diorama. Commonly present in museums of natural sciences, dioramas merge view and atmosphere in realist reproductions of landscapes. In its origin, the term means through what is seen, a view. Through them, we dive into frozen times of an animal in its habitat. The museum of natural sciences visits the tragic, glides into comedy and builds up fictions creating views for a mutating panorama, a falling world, experienced by what distance preserves, underlines and makes vanish.

Première at Galpão das Artes, Espaço Tom Jobim, Botanical Garden of Rio de Janeiro : November 15th

From Nov 15th until Dec 7th. Fridays, Saturdays and Sundays.

Those who walk… is a project funded by OI Futuro and Secretaria de Estado de Cultura do Rio de Janeiro – SEC.

Artistic residencies : PAR – Programa Artistas en Residencia, a partnership between  Casa Rodante and Festival Internacional de Dança de Montevidéu – FidCU, Uruguay. 2 April- 11 May, 2014.

Barracão Maravilha (Sep-Nov), Rio de Janeiro.