Laura Castro and Candice Didonet: The secret writing of the Samaúma
SAMAÚMA is an enormous tree from the Amazon Forest, but it can also be found all over Brazil. Many indigenous peoples understand SAMAÚMA as a living library. Its large roots are a kind of device to communicate within the forest, through the
reverberation of sounds. In this proposal, SAMAÚMA presents to us a different way of writing with which we’re going to perform. Taking a tree as a collective body and as a crowd of different beings, like animals, microorganisms and plants, our role will be to create a translatory experience of multiple writings and bodies. In this way, this writing of a community of beings metabolized in the body of SAMAÚMA makes us think of the power of reading it as a cosmopolitical writing and gives us a chance to notice that writing is a trace existing in multiple senses. The SAMAUMA’S body is full of life blood creating a pathway that connects sinuous lines around the trunk. Pathway as a writing. Lines as a materiality/manifesting of writing. SAMAÚMA is a cellular and ancestral element that connects alive technologies into doing, seeing, and saying. The materiality connects moving procedures beyond words and letters. The text of writing is an alive body, strong, like SAMAÚMA’s trunk. A trunk, a tree with an enormous capacity to express their own language. The language of the forest, full of life. SAMAUMA gives us the possibility to address the writing in t(h)ree directions: 1) the power of a cosmopolitical writing, 2) a writing community around the SAMAUMA and its alive technologies, 3) a need for openness and a profound connection with epistemologies and ontologies of the indigenous peoples from the forest in an academic and experimental investigation.
Bios
Laura Castro is a poet, performer and adjunct professor at University of Bahia, in Brazil. She works in the Interdisciplinary Bachelor of Arts and the Postgraduate Programme in Visual Arts. She has a PhD in Arts and an MA in Literature. Her research interest’s cross literature in its expanded field and the different material possibilities of writing. Currently, her work is strongly influenced by the epistemologies and ontologies of indigenous peoples in Brazil, their poetics and aesthetics of life, to glimpse new possible worlds.
Candice Didonet is an artist of the body and assistant professor at University of Paraíba in Brazil where she works at the Performing Arts Department. She holds a MA in Dance from the University of Bahia. Her research interests cross the connections between writing and performance bringing images that suggest cosmopolitical views to choreography.