“Piranguecer”—a performance and created word that materialized through my relationship with the urucum (annatto) and my saliva in an act of putting in the mouth, chewing, salivating, and returning this tangle to the body to become red. Urucum (annatto) is blood, earth, and memory. Salivating and chewing the entrails of the past, chewing as an act of recomposing, adding a part of yourself to the ancestral material, saliva. Engage the memory-matter with the mouth world to transform itself through word and action. Transforming yourself during the performance, as if exposing the body from the inside and out. Each portion of annatto brought by the hands to the mouth enters a metamorphosis space of an ancestry composed between memory and imagination, composed in the body that chews, in the body that salivates the memory itself, not to digest it and make it part of a process, but to throw it in the eyes. To make this part of it visible. The body of the entre that brings with it the violence with which things were mixed in a Brazilian colonial past. The things, the bodies. Bodies treated like things. “Piranguecer” is an act of restoring saliva and urucum to the body, it is an act of affirming other possibilities of existence, even if ephemeral, which considers Afro-Indigenous ancestry as part of the transformations of the present and the future.

The performance which was around 50 minutes was presented on October 4, 2020 at the event Perforcâmbio da Emabaixada da Performance. Held at my home and streamed from the Embassy’s YouTube Zoom. The performance was censored by YouTube and the transmission was interrupted from the middle to the end because it was a naked body in front of the camera. The image of a naked female body, then followed by the accusation of sexual content. A standardization of an American company that follows a whole logic of automatic thinking, in a mechanical sense, even because the images are analyzed by machines, which are even limited and disregarding of cultural plurality and diversity, as is the case with indigenous technology, and of the indigenous culture that assumes the nude without a dichotomy with sexuality.