Recordatorio
2024, 12:37 min. Editing, recording, text, and performance: Mailza Bernard, music: Paulinho Breu.
Smell is memory. It is offered to the air, engraved in the body before words. Perfume dissipates, but leaves a trace. It perfumes absence, hides in folds of time, awakens what still breathes in memory. It has no outline, but it lingers. Its matter is volatile, its presence persists. It is a paperless file, a text the body translates before language.
Recordatorio stems from notes on smells she took during her stay at the Avanzada Sur artist-in-residence program, offered by the Cuerpo Sur Foundation in 2024. In Chiloé, the action takes place in a hybrid space merging ritual, dystopian and clinical gestures featuring lined-up bottles: fragrances extracted from the boundless nature of Abya Yala. A body dressed in white, with no identity, face, or senses. The figure manipulates fragrance vials as if someone were arranging scattered memories. The mask imposes distance until it breaks. The smell permeates the skin, the body is covered with red soil and the barrier dissolves. Among sounds and stories of colonization, the aromatic matter is transformed into a flow of times and geographies.
Smell operates at the intersection between body and time, activating memories that cannot be fixed in discourse or image. In the context of colonization, the trade of fragrances and spices consolidated systems of power that transformed smells into symbols of control, merchandise and cultural imposition. By extrapolating fragrances to the field of performance, the research proposes a sensory reactivation with native smells, turning them into agents of displacement and historical friction. The volatility of perfumes and its ability to cross borders without any visible barrier reveals a wisdom that rejects categorization and escapes the hierarchy of knowledge.
Brazil.
Bachelor’s degree in applied ceramic arts from the São João del-Rei Federal University.
Has participated in several group exhibitions in the São João del-Rei Regional Museum, the International Festival of Ceramic Culture in Bogota, Colombia, and the virtual Black Brazil Art Biennial, among others.
Winner of the Ceramics Prize in the Young Talents Award (2024). Has participated in artist-in-residence programs in Chile, Uruguay, etc.
