Manifestações is a performance ritual realised with the Brazilian community in Europe. It revolves around the creation of collective memories for diasporic bodies, especially racialised ones, as a strategy of healing from the colonial past.

 

People from the Brazilian community in Europe are invited to take part in a ritual performance in which they together animate, accompanied by music, a tent that can accommodate up to seven people at a time. The performance seeks to create and retrieve memories of bodies in diaspora, coming from the former colony, now Brazil, where many memories have been torn by various forms of violence.

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The artist Jaq Lisboa, together with her mother, sister and friends, has assembled a mobile tent that is animated by human bodies. The tent is made of cotton, a material of great importance in her artistic research, because it has many meanings in this society. It is a contradictory material, in whose history slavery, environment, luxury, fetish, exploitation, comfort, pollution, monoculture, beauty, waste–and so on– are intertwined. Her mother wove crocheted ponchos in Brazil to protect and empower the bodies that inhabit them during the performance. The ponchos were sent to Europe and there, together with her sister and friends, they continued to create the tent. The shape of the tent defines how the performance unfolds. In the centre, a professional musician with a strong spiritual connection (it doesn’t matter which one) is invited to intervene in the process. After previous conversations, this person takes responsibility for creating a musical repertoire on which the performance will develop and radiates the necessary energy for there to be an exchange between the other participants. Manifestações is a collective commemoration of the diasporic body, it is the creation of memories in collectivity and it is pleasure as a strategy for healing traumatised bodies.