Closed studio presentation ABIKU the unborn

RESEARCH TEXT
FLAVIA - ABIKU the unborn

Flavia Pinheiro is a bacteria from Recife, located in the Northeast of Brazil. Being a bacteria means to be a microorganism, living on earth for 3.5 billion years, and it means to become a performer, visual artist, choreographer, dancer, researcher, teacher, and a (click)activist. After being exposed to unhealthy, unsanitary and insalubrious environments, very hot temperatures, high relative air humidity, and high levels of contamination, she found in Amsterdam the most hygienic and aseptic conditions, with controlled variables, to develop in vitro her new science fiction experiment in technology and dance called ABIKU - the unborn . She investigates how sovereignty within hegemonic neoliberalism could be fractured by speculative fabulation and the embodiment of those non-human spectralites.

Her current research at DAS is called ABIKU the unborn. It is inserted in different practical procedures, scores, a bacteria education as a meta archive that can be addressed as attempts to survive in apnea. In the Yoruba language the word “àbíkú” means “the one who was predestined to die”.It refers to babies that died right after birth, to the ones who died in the uterus and to all those who died young. The family is cursed for these wandering souls. Can dance enable this connection to the unborn? How to build a public collective machine as technology to communicate to the invisible? Abiku is about researching and creating dances as a way of opening up an awareness to the unborn , a dance that can hear and communicate with ghosts, a magical dance that by clairvoyance can see with the eyes closed, a device that switches on a technological spectrality , paranormality by electromagnetic pumps that enables a queerness to become. 

This collective machine to be developed in the residency in ICK is intimate related with The scores called “Attempts to survive in apnea” as a utopian way of holding the displacement in current times . The transmission of an embodied practice and its transmutability are part of the process, is made of memory and of forgetfulness and is able to imagine a recapture of the public sphere by evoking the invisible and an unacknowledged loss . This unknown past has floated in a queer transatlantic ship and remained as a ghostly spectral experience embodied within a forbidden, mutilated, violated, foreign, queer body. The incantatory power of spoken words enables the invisible to take place, the unborn to become.

The methodology “Attempts to survive in apnea” applied for this choreography is immersed in a dazzling creativity which has been learned with the inhumane bacterias to investigate an epistemological turn , or to became a procedure; a training method for the world that is about to end but which in fact never disappears for some humans. Tragically it includes the enslaved, queer, disabled and indigenous ancestors speaking from the bottom and the surface of the ocean in between the falling sky among the never considered humans.

The intimate relationship between memory and the choreographic scores called “Attempts to survive in Apnea” are made to generate a discrete ontology that rejects imperialists technologies to light up what needs to be forgotten, to stay alive an to be remembered ; which includes the stories we will never know. These attempts to move in inversions, with no air, in constraints of inhalation or exhalation, working with body volumes and images which shifts perceptions are a result of a deep submersion in the blind dark cecum as a metaphor of an unacknowledged past enfleshed and encarved.