Mandacura

2015 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
10:20 minutes

biarritzzz is interested in how the development of the internet, and experimentation in the virtual world happens simultaneously with the experimentation in the material world of the human species; and how these developments reflect the precariousness of life within neoliberalism. The title of their video work Mandacura is a corruptela (a linguistic distortion on writing or pronunciation) of the Portuguese sentence Mão da Cura (Healing Hand), distorting Portuguese into what sounds as Brazilian Afro-Indigenous. Inspired by and using the music and poetry of Alberto Marques, and drawing sources from archival images, webcam videos, screenshots, gifs and memes, the video asks: What provokes our feelings toward society, history, culture, and the future? How do we need our Gods? What are they trying to tell us? Is what society has done to our ancestral people and knowledge a sign of an ending? Alberto Marques’ poem: The hand of cure is always attentive and always feeding our bodies with prayers with prices with deadlines proceedings with prizes with postures promises assumptions with primes primaries with nails auctions The hand of peace is always feeding our bodies with arms with squares with chats presences with prisms with claps feats poems with steps promenades with bridges lungs

biarritzzz is a Brazilian artist who inserts epistemological conversations through mass communication, specifically on and from the internet. The hybridity in the materialization of their production of aesthetic thought reflects the current moment, in relation to the dissolution of the separate fields of visual arts, music, digital art, and other artistic and cultural forms and production. The strategies that biarritzzz uses, such as their interest in gifs and memes, puts into question the circulation of knowledge in Western genealogies and the legitimacy of certain kinds of mediums—particularly writing.

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