Let’s be explicit and explain everything.

Alongside my artistic practice and studies, I have had many different work experiences. Working has been a way of coming into contact with the world. It has allowed me to experience capitalism in a very intimate way. It has also given me opportunities to play with identities and enter parts of society that do not often meet.

I studied cinema at university. At the same time, I took classes in martial arts, dance and music. I worked with data processing and video editing. Later, I worked with animation and web design. The combination of these practices led to my first attempts to connect movement and technology. I created short animations for the internet based on dance improvisations.

My relationship with movement began partly through Indian Kempo. This martial art uses movements inspired by animals. Animality became central to my early work as a dancer, movement coach and teacher. I was interested in how the body could change its gestures and perception by approaching non-human forms of movement.

Soon afterwards, I began working as a movement advisor for theatre companies. I was invited to teach at the Escola Livre de Teatro in Santo André. The school was based on artistic research and gave me the opportunity to collaborate with important figures from the theatre scene in São Paulo. I worked with Francisco Medeiros and Mariana Senne. I also collaborated with Georgette Fadel, Luis Fernando Marques and Vinicius Torres Machado. With some of them, I co-directed productions at the school or collaborated on external projects.

At the Escola Livre de Teatro, I coordinated a research group called Errantes. The group explored the relationship between Samuel Beckett’s novels and theatre. For two years, I developed a movement-based investigation with the students. The research eventually encompassed all of Beckett’s plays.

This work led to my master’s degree in Theatre Studies at UNESP in São Paulo. I completed it in 2012. During the programme, I studied Beckett’s personal notebooks. In them, he documented his experiences directing his own works from the 1960s to the 1980s.

The research developed with Errantes and during my master’s degree culminated in Vanitas. I wrote the piece with Ricardo Inhan and directed it with the group. Ricardo also accompanied the process as a dramaturgical assistant. This immersion in Beckett’s universe shaped my interest in restricted movement. It also brought me closer to absurdity, games and precariousness.

Alongside my work in theatre, I joined the contemporary dance company Cia. Oito Nova Dança. The company was directed by Lu Favoretto. I performed in works inspired by Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s research on Amerindian perspectivism.

I became interested in the way shamans transform their bodies and perceptions. They use body painting, singing and dancing. They may drink particular beverages. These actions allow them to communicate with spirits, gods or animals.

This encounter gave another dimension to a question that was already present in my movement practice. I wanted to understand how a body could cross the border between human and non-human perspectives. Metamorphosis would later become important to my research into migration and adaptation.

Just before moving to Europe, I was working as the pedagogical coordinator of the Escola Livre de Teatro. For many years, the school had been targeted by the municipality. The government tried in many ways to close it down. The political administration had changed. Although the school was nationally recognised, maintaining it was expensive. It did not bring many votes to the governing party.

During the same period, I began co-directing a new project with Vinicius Torres Machado and students from the school. The project was inspired by Franz Kafka’s The Castle. It was also inspired by the political struggle of the school. APORIA 23ºS 46ºO premiered shortly after my departure. It was later presented at several festivals in Brazil and received an enthusiastic response from critics and audiences.

The experience of creating this piece while coordinating the school made me want to continue investigating bureaucracy. Its absurdity became part of my daily life as soon as I arrived in Europe.

In 2017, I learned that I would have to take the Dutch civic integration exams. I came into contact with materials designed to teach me how to adapt to a new society. Later, the exams would be used to prove that I had succeeded.

My own adaptation felt very different. It seemed closer to the way an animal enters an unfamiliar territory. I was learning through smells and flavours. I was walking through new places and creating bonds with people. I was trying new foods and new words. I was learning through my body. It felt less like understanding the change than tasting it.

This difference led me to create Inburgering in. The project imagined fictional countries with their own integration procedures. These procedures tried to make room for the experience I was actually having. Belonging could be sensed. It could be rehearsed and negotiated. It did not have to be proved only through tests and documents.

The work did not reject the exams. It tried to include what they could not register.

Alongside my artistic practice in Belgium, I had several other jobs. I delivered food by bicycle and worked as a gardener. I was a game master in an escape room. I worked in bars and restaurants. I was a waiter and bartender. Later, I worked as a sommelier and kitchen assistant.

These jobs became part of my experience of migration and adaptation. Each one demanded a particular body. Each one had its own vocabulary and rhythm. Each one required me to perform a slightly different identity. They allowed me to enter social environments that would otherwise rarely meet.

These experiences entered directly into JOB, an online performance created in 2021. In it, I became a kind of video-game avatar. The audience gave me instructions through Zoom. I could obey them. I could delay them. I could also refuse.

The performance created friction between labour and artistic practice. It asked what happens when a person becomes an instrument expected to remain available and productive. Against this demand, the possibility of saying “I would prefer not to” became a gesture of resistance. It also became another kind of performance.

Later, I worked as an actor in Bernardo Zanotta’s Wild Fruits. This collaboration made me rediscover cannibalism and Brazilian Anthropophagy from the perspective of an immigrant living in Europe. I began looking at the relationship between Brazil and Europe through an anthropophagic lens.

I was no longer interested in adaptation only as assimilation. Anthropophagy offered another possibility. It involved desire and incorporation. It also involved conflict and transformation. The experience of working on Wild Fruits led me to begin developing CROC.

In CROC, this anthropophagic perspective meets my earlier research into animality. Cultural adaptation becomes a bodily process. A language enters the body. Work changes its gestures. New social codes affect its posture and behaviour. The body incorporates a culture and is transformed by it. At the same time, it transforms what it incorporates.

Cannibalism became a way of thinking about the immigrant body as both consuming and consumed. The body absorbs a new culture. It is also absorbed by it. Neither side remains intact.

My work as a sommelier and kitchen assistant later brought food and service into my artistic practice. Serving someone involves labour and attention. It can also involve storytelling and translation. The encounter between a host and a guest is never entirely neutral.

Food can carry memories and histories. It can connect a person to a place. It can also change the relationships between the people gathered in a room. After years of thinking about being assimilated or consumed by another culture, I became interested in feeding someone else. Service and hospitality became artistic materials.

My practice now moves between performance, choreography, moving image and participatory situations. I continue to work with migration and language. I work with labour, hospitality and animality. I think about the ways cultures and bodies incorporate one another.

These subjects are not separate. They are different parts of the same process. They describe bodies trying to adapt, resist and live together. Working remains one of the ways in which I come into contact with the world. It is also one of the ways in which I allow the world to act upon me.