Notes for a Hole, 2023

Discussing the conditions under which Chinese plantation workers worked in the United States in the last century, Maxine Hong Kingston in her book “Chinese Men” mentions that in most cases they were forbidden to talk to each other while working. So sometimes they dug holes in the ground and shouted out their news, secrets and dreams in the hope that the sound messages would be heard by loved ones on the other side of the world.

As part of the Silo - Arte e Latitude Rural residency, I worked on the project Notas para um buraco (Notes for the Hole), exploring Brazilian practices of communicating with the land during cultivation. By talking to peasants, researchers, community artists and farmers, I explored the potential of the idea of literally communicating with the land. By collecting notes from the present, secrets from the past and farmers' dreams, the polyphonic audiovisual portrait interspersed with sounds of places, faces, photographs, poetry and ideas for a sustainable future for agriculture was created.

Traveling between different media, I recorded short interviews, photographed the participants and collected their written wishes to the earth. Further processing of this data was done in the form of sound. The final audio narrative was visualized using software and then printed out for installation by manual hand printing. Thanks to the Notes for a Hole project, I was able to find and preserve inspiring, contrasting, in some ways very similar, but at the same time different ideas, the fruits of which can perhaps be collected in all corners of the world in the future.