“In my first filmed performance, I place myself, covered in clay, in dialogue with a natural environment within a built structure. In this work, my body as landscape, blends with the walls and the trunks of the gameleira walking trees. These colonial walls of the third oldest church built in Brasil by the Jesuits, are monuments to violence, to imposition, to entities at odds with one another. And yet the flora is indifferent to their authority. Roots crack foundations, vines reclaim façades, life asserts itself without permission.

This is the architecture I am drawn to, not the original structure, but what emerges from the slow strangle. These trees and walls cannot exist in their current form without one another, my body holds the tension of this contradiction. My DNA is geological, the result of rampant historical forces: colonization, inhabitation, migration, and the melding of peoples across generations. I do not resolve the violence of my lineage instead I embody it and allow it to crumble into something new.

My movements in the film are slow, rhythmic, attuned to flora. I am not performing rupture, I am enacting a quieter process such as absorption, transformation, acceptance. A new architecture that could not exist without the despised, the imposed, the foreign. To emerge into what I am, I have to hold all of it.”

Lisa C Soto

Description: Chuch of Senhor de Vera Cruz founded in 1560 by the Jesuits on the island of Itaparica, Brasil, the third oldest church in the country.