28 June 2024
Salento, Italy

I suppose the big news today is, finally, the release of the performance video of Vivacissimo (2023) on the Institute of Chinese Martial Studies official YouTube channel – this is a piece that I never expected to find so much affinity with, but somehow it happened, and this rather short, twelve-minute work has ended up a sort of definitive book-end on my impossibly busy 2020-2022 when I completed four major works spanning art-tech and social justice. It is very different from those works- shorter, of course, but also even more focused and specific, perhaps even more approachable, and also, when I listen to it, the saddest.

That last characterisation is slightly mysterious but it is also undoubtable and I would be dishonest not to mention it. The work’s intensity stems from a deep despair. Its resolution is both final and unsatisfying- the violoncello trickles out in pizzicati as the martial artists/dancer fades into the darkness in a warlike pose. It is as if both, if they are even separate, musician and dancer must persist in the world just this way, whatever it is. No freedom from themselves, nor from their mind, nor from anything else. Perhaps it is an enforced solitude, too. We continue (and remain) together but alone.

The premiere of Otherhood (2022), that other project completed after the big 2020-2022 period, has also finally been confirmed for 6 October evening at the Helsinki Musiikkitalo. October is also the month when Vivacissimo (2023) should see its European premiere. After composing Os dias mais logos e os mais curtos (2022), I was at a crossroads of where to go; the work just sort of said everything I really wished to say. These two aforementioned works, smaller in scope, but no less so in meaning, propose different directions. I don’t know which I must follow or if I must split myself into unconnected halves, or even further, to only later reconstitute. I just really don’t know. But if the path of a artist is to continually search and in doing so, express at every stage something more raw and unexplored, then- here we are, and will be.