Ellen Pirá Wassu & Ritó Natálio

Fire Letters

ALKANARA - Assorted books with vibrant covers and handwritten notes spread out on a table. - ©Rui Palma — @ Rui Palma

29.11 — 30.11 2024

Casa da América Latina

29 NOV 19H00 // 30 NOV 17H00

*Free but ticketed. Book by email bilheteira@tndm.pt

ages 16+

60 min

Portuguese with surtitles in English and in Portuguese for the deaf and hard of hearing

Fire Letters is the result of a curatorial and artistic collaboration between Ellen Pirá Wassu and Ritó Natálio. Blending poetry and performance, Fire Letters is an experiment that transmutes and digests historical documents about deforestation and institutional policies of disappearance, conservation, and memory. In a live conversation about fire and nutrition, the artists explore these documents by bringing together episodes and practices applied to territory in Brazil and Portugal.

As we studied museums, we found ourselves turning ever more towards the forest. […] The materials kept in museums are question material. In an airconditioned room, thermal policies ensure that Indigenous masks, made of straw and buriti fibres, are kept half-alive and frozen for longer than was ever intended. If the palm and buriti fibres, lovers of hot temperatures and allies of rituals, could speak, they would say: “Warm me up so that I can go home.”

Contains descriptions of gender, identity, class, language, racial violence.

*Double-bill with The Interest in the Amazon is not the damn Trees. Free but ticketed. Book by email to bilheteira@tndm.pt. More info at www.tdmii.pt

29 NOV — 19H00
30 NOV — 17H00

Credits

Leitura performativa de Ellen Pirá Wassu & Ritó Natálio Sound João Pratas Flute Rebeca Letras Book design Isabel Lucena Research Collaborators António Gouveia, Idjahure Terena, Francy Baniwa, Francisco Baniwa, Julia Sá Earp, Zoy Anastassakis, Susana de Matos Viegas Research conducted in the following institutions Museu Nacional de História Natural e da Ciência (MUHNAC), Museu Nacional de Etnologia, Torre do Tombo, Museu da Ciência da Universidade de Coimbra, Academia das Ciências de Lisboa

Ellen Pirá Wassu

Ellen Pirá Wassu is animal, river, tree, root and seed. She is also a human being and writer, with a doctorate in Comparative Modernities: Literatures, Arts and Cultures, from the Centro de Estudos Humanísticos at Universidade do Minho (CEHUM). She researches the relations between expropriations of territory and identity in dominant visual and literary discourse, a study that she has termed “the poetics of expropriation”. In 2021, she published ixé ygara voltando pra y’kûá (Urutau) and in 2023, yby kûatiara um livro de terra (Urutau). Her writing has...

Ritó Natálio

Artist and researcher. Non-binary lesbian. Their areas of practice combine writing and performance, be it in production, teaching, research or in organising public programmes. They have organised a series of talk-performances dedicated to the relationship between language and geology, which have been presented internationally in a range of art spaces, theaters and academic contexts: Anthroposcenes (2017) with João dos Santos Martins, Geophagy (2018), and Fossil (2020). One of their most recent works — Spillovers (2023) — proposes a collectively imagined...