Flavia Pinheiro

Profile picture for user Flavia Pinheiro

FLAVIA PINHEIRO s 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. Her work involves the body in movement in relation to different devices. She investigates how sovereignty within hegemonic neoliberalism could be fractured by speculative fabulation and the embodiment of those non-human spectralites. By the intensive training for the end of the world, that never ends , she tensions the limits of resistance by creating images, performance programs, scores, installations, videos and urban interventions with a single goal: dancing not to die! Wondering how to keep herself alive. She works in different constellations: in collaboration with artists from different fields. She develops experiments engaging :Body, Art and Technology. 

Flavia investigates the body in its programmed obsolescence, in relation to the “gambiarras”, the analogical and digital devices, failure, error and catastrophic procedures.She worked as a dance teacher in different public and private institutions including Public Universities, NGOs, social projects, and private graduated schools. She also works as a researcher and facilitates pedagogical and international curatorial processes. She is currently fighting actively against antibiotics by proclaiming an insurgent contamination with the queerbacterias as germs or seed of a world to come. She also performs Antilope with the sound artist Yuri Bruscky in which they use different sensors (Gyroscope + Accelerometer + Temperature+ cerebral waves sensors) to produce sound ambience. She insists on the dystopia of hacking into existence. In 2020 she did her first individual Exhibition “Abysses of a failure body” with videos, photographs , and objects that were activated in a performance that remained as an installation. She had her performance “Ruins of a disappearance future” cancelled in SESC Av. Paulista due to the pandemic of COVID-19. With her videos and performance creations , she has participated in different national and international festivals.

Her current research at DAS is called ABIKU. 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 can technology extend perceptual possibilities? How to experience the surrounding world with a different, more attentive body to achieve an expanded perception that escapes the visual hegemony? 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 or the voices of the dead ghosts, a magical dance that by clairvoyance can see with the eyes closed, a dance that is a device that switches on a technological spectrality , paranormality by electromagnetic pumps.

2021
Creation residency

Abiku

In order for the apocalyptical end of humanity to take place, we believe that inhuman desires have to be overcome.
And what have to be accessed are:
the spectrums of materializations: ghostly presences and subjectivities that are deemed forbidden by the delusion of humanity and human sovereignty

as recovering the archive is not a possibility, 
as reparation is no longer an option, 
as the unborn is not claiming humanity
the following steps were generated in chaotic, random, failing and falling attempts
to breathe without air: we will develop technology to inhabit the invisible