A part of the Primal Matter Project.

 

The performance took place in the exhibition “En otro Poder”. In the fifteen-minute act, Isabella ingests the carbonated ashes of books from the library of the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro.

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 The anthropophagic manifesto by Oswald de An-drade argues that Brazil's greatest strength is its tendency to “cannibalize” the various cultures that have mixed there and, in this sense, the museum is consumed like a rite of passage. The artist draws inspirations from the meanders of immigration and affect, and, as Anna Maria Maiolino, they find in the act of consumption, a commentary of their own ingestion into another country and culture.

 

In the words of Maiolino, “to let herself be eaten as a ‘sacred enemy’, to be digested and expelled (...) as a cannibal version of myself”.

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