Nutrients of Longing

A performance-film explores memory, displacement, and the sensory experience of maintaining Brazilian identity while living in a cold and culturally isolating environment in Maine, United States. Situated between ritual, performance art, video installation, and embodied narration, the work investigates how cultural memory survives through the body, taste, sound, and gesture when one is physically distant from recognizable territories of belonging.

In the film, a luminous golden entity appears seated in a lotus position. The nude body, entirely painted in gold, evokes both the Brazilian carnavalesque feminine figure and Oxum, reinforced through the use of golden beaded adornments that partially cover and reconstruct the face as an act of performative identity-making. Positioned between the crossed legs of the figure are multiple pão de queijo arranged over pulsating golden LED lights that warm and illuminate the body. Referencing the iconography of Buddha surrounded by coins, the work replaces material wealth with affective and cultural memory: the pão de queijo becomes a source of axé, nourishment, and embodied remembrance.

Projected behind the performer are winter landscapes from Maine, images of coldness, silence, and isolation that contrast with the warmth, sensuality, rhythm, and luminosity activated through the ritualized act of eating. Each stylized gesture of consuming the pão de queijo triggers percussive Brazilian sounds such as cuíca, surdo, and rhythmic sonic textures. Simultaneously, a voice-over in Portuguese evokes memories, describing  places from Rio de Janeiro that now exist only internally through remembrance and longing. Rather than visually revealing these places, the work allows them to emerge through language, sound, and imagination, while English subtitles appear projected over the winter landscapes.

The work dialogues conceptually with artists such as Sophie Calle, particularly her exploration of absence, memory, and the reconstruction of places and images through subjective description rather than direct representation. Similar to Calle’s strategy of activating memory through language, this performance refuses documentary imagery of Brazil and instead constructs the country as an internal, sensory, and embodied landscape that survives through voice, taste, rhythm, and ritual.

The work transforms food into ritual technology, memory into sound, and the body into an archive of cultural survival. Rather than presenting Brazil as image or spectacle, the performance reconstructs it as a sensory and embodied experience that flickers through taste, rhythm, voice, warmth, and imagination.