Year: 2013
Length: 30 minutes
Conception and performance by Ludmilla Ramalho
Photos by Guto Muniz

Description
A woman walks along the main crossings of the avenues of a big city, perforating the asphalt with an iron stick showering its cracks with a scarlet red liquid.

About the work
After opening a gap on the asphalt of a big city, the woman of In memorium recaptures one of the most significant passages of the 20 th century Brazilian poetry: the poem “A Flor e a Náusea” (“The Flower and the Nausea”) by Carlos Drummond de Andrade who publishes it in his book “A Rosa do Povo” (The People’s Rose) in 1945, in which the flower breaks up the asphalt and for that, the tedium, the disgust, and the “surpriseless” and domesticated life provided by the capitalism. Concerning the performance itself, the gap opened in the machine of the world and fretted by the asphalt which allows us to see the earth, once hidden by the civilization, is showered with a red liquid.

In that way, we do not have vegetational way of life, as in Drummond’s, although we do have pure opening of a perspective for liquid that seeds, and also colors red, the blood tone of red. Then, we are taken to the blood as the feminine symbol and the uterus in which lives the potential of a forthcoming life: the liquid seems to shower the ground with the feminine. This crack on the stiff concrete is like a vagina, a fissure on the material that shelters the seed and makes life in the same way as the seeded earth is able to do. Moreover, as soon as the concrete is broken up and life is still domesticated, predictable and tedious, the red brings affection into the coldness and toughness of the material, contaminating repetitive and automatic actions of the bureaucracy and the market for sensations, temperature, colors, sounds, images and, therefore, memory (what used to be) and imagination (what can still be).