In 2011, I met Ana Maria Ramiro, a Brazilian poet and essayist, in Lisbon. From this meeting emerged a project by four hands. From the first half of 2013, the poet Ana Maria Ramiro and I, a fiction writer and performer, began exchanging objects/devices selected according to themes/concerns proposed by us in a project that we named “Private Collection.” It was up to each of us to write in response to the objects, without further information, creating a process/dialogical relationship. Gently we both lifted a map of emotions. Constructing and deconstructing possible realities through writing, we were reflected through words, while living particular and unspeakable scenarios as authors and coeval people. The project aimed to compile texts and images of the objects according to topics that raised them—Past/Memory, Loneliness, Language, Becoming—into a future book.

Ana Maria Ramiro returned to Brasilia city in 2014 and we continued the project, despite the distance. However, a few months later I received the news of the Brazilian poet’s death. The Private Collection we were creating was hung by this abrupt blow of death that brought a taste of ‘never more…’.

I decided to start sharing with others the process of the “Private Collection” via the performance “Private Collection Reloaded,” with the goal of exploring the importance of intimacy and the meaningful union between two people through language and literature. The performance presents and shares experiences in language through memories, words, and gestures documented on meetings and encounters of meaning. I surround myself by objects creating a route to explore the meaning of intimacy, feelings of loss, and the various connections between people in contemporary society.