In the Yoruba language, the word Abiku means “the one who was predestined to die”. It refers to babies who died right after birth, and to the ones who remain cursed by wandering souls. This project is about an unacknowledged past, from a queer transatlantic ship that remains as a ghostly memory embodied in a mutilated, foreign existence.7 Abiku Solos for 11 Bacteria Falling Trough is a performance installation that merges sounds, texts, images and movement in a multidisciplinary attempt to conjure the ghostly traces of the unborn. This research project is framed as anti-colonial practice due to its insistence on creating a choreography of the struggling body; who flees from the danger environment; crossborders. A choreography of escape ,a fugitivity displacement to become.The work has a trans-disciplinary approach and its urgency is to materialize and give shape to non hegemonic voices, to dream about impossible choreographies and imagine other cosmological futurities to happen .The research project mingles multiple medias and its enormous failure of hacking the system relies on transmission, translation and transduction procedures. The power hierarchy of the macro structures falling through the visualization of bacteria is an attempt to dive into the deep traumas encarved in the gastrointestinal tract and to acknolowged the impossibility to collaborate for a radical aesthetic shift.The installation is a magic operation that the visible words can perform to evoke the invisible through magic, enchantments and secrets. Due to the analogical/digital friction sometimes a glitch overlaps the multiple layers of meaning opening up space for troublemakers, errors, defaults and their vitality and anger.But it fails in building up a public machine for individual use to communicate with ghosts ,as an art of living in disruption; the art of surviving ,in the other way round of the art of living.

One might assume that flight ends when the borders that stood between the captive and their freedom have been successfully crossed ;but that is not true. With Abiku we would like to share the potential of fabulating narratives, a pathway of self-discovery and reconstruction that allows an openness to communicate and listen to the unborn,.This process converges a deep reflection of the ongoing colonization technologies and the neoliberal power dynamics by presenting a gap, a portal to the world of those who have not yet been born. A crossroads of bacteria and ghosts ; from micro organisms falling through the macropolitcal power structures of sovereignty and power.

There’s a precursor to the history of performance and its theory, even of performance art and its theory, that anticipated in way that know seemss totally uncanny, that the real problem of performance, performance’s essential problem with (its) real is not the question of “the lifve” Life but the question of Life -- or rather, the question of living. That anticipation, written with no concerns whatsoever with anything remotely related to the arts, is the amazingly insightful, prescient, indeed oracular short technical book, published in 1951 and titled, “Qu’est-ce que la documentation?” by Suzanne Briet. It is, supposedly, a purely technocratic study. 

In its 48 brief pages, many filled with tables and graphs, Briet advances her ontology of the document by addressing first of all, not the bureaucratic machine, or not the technological apparatuses required for that new concern of the liberal nation-state, the document, not the archiving procedures for the ever-expanding realm of documentation, “that new word,” she writes, “to be found everywhere these days.” Rather, Briet starts her book with an animal. An antelope running in an African savannah. It is from that life roaming free in the wild, that Briet slowly builds her techno-ontology of the document, and therefore, of the political unconscious subsisting in the act of documentation. She writes: “An antelope running in the wild in an African savannah is not a document. An antelope in a zoo, is a document.” In other words: it is not that the document “captures” the surface of the real and represents it otherwise, for some rational future accessing it, . Ii. it is rather that whenever there is captivity, there is “documentation.” Whenever one is to find a life (form) fixed, in vitro, there one will find a document. Even if the antelope is “live,” alive, its existence behind the fences of a zoo turns it already into an after-life, or a sub-life, a kind of hollowed-out existence. 

Flávia Pinheiro knows this mechanism of living while in a state of being sequestered from Life quite well. It is, in itself, the logic of coloniality . Aa and in knowing that mechanism, with all its colonial(ist) anti-biotic, anti-zootic impulses and implications, she dances with it nevertheless, moving at the edge of an impossibility. For, isn’t every step within the frame of representation (including that mechanism of representation called “identity”) already a kind of suffocation of what in everything living actually lives? Pinheiro choreographs and dances then on the fine line/fine life between representation and the anti-colonial(ist) imperative to detonate with the very logic that makes possible even to conceive that such entrapment could ever make any sense at all; particularly as the majoritarian logic driving the organization of human collectives and their ways of desiring and sexing. Pinheiro’s ''video-performance-manifesto-farcsce-tragedy'' in one act danced to a cacophonic sound composition for buffalo, deer, different species of monkeys and (unsurprisingly) antelopes, and where she is dressed as a large white macaw, enacts this knowledge of what it means to being condemned to live as a a document of oneself (which is the generalized condition of technocratic state power, ever more so, particularly in what Shoshana Zuboff has called our current state of “surveillance capitalism,” where onee compulsively documents one’s life 24/7). Meanwhile, in the zoo (actual zoos, or the zoo of Instagram-tik-tok-FB) the animals may not consciously know that all life behind bars is never quite life anymore. But their bodies’ do. Animals may very well be presenting themselves to their audiences “live,” in full color and smell, tridimensional, sonic… And yet, they might as well be embalmed, so deflated are they of vitality and movement-that-matters. 

Flávia Pinheiro, in her ridiculous and hilarious, and deeply sad costume, dancing half lost, half found, in the half-life of parody, in the quasi-death of tragedy.,.GgGesticulating sometimes no more than half a meter of the zoo’s visitors, embodies then, before the captive animals and besides the humans, a frontier. As frontier, as limit, her roaming presence on the side of humans, of the visitors, of the public produces a quiet restlessness that subtly annoys, that cannot be properly contained as proper. The restlessness derives from the slow realization of this fact: the bars and fences separating the animals/documents from the humans/public,, function as a kind of screen, or rather as a kindas kindas a kind of mirror. Looking at the animals as documents of themselves, living but devoid of Life, “aalive” but definitely already dead, is to look at the eyes of the genre of humanity that makes that captivity entertaining, scientific, even.,.YyYes, an an expression of Goodness. At that moment, with Flávia Pinheiro-Macaw going about her dance, the public cannot help but suspect their apneic condition in their “live” eventness of ''being-there' ' . In the “open” zone of the supposedly free humans, captivity and ''living-while-dead'' also rule. 

In this sense, Pinheiro’s choreography becomes a necrography. The only way out: embracing joyfully that danse macabre and then escape, run away.,.LlLaughing like a herd of buffalos and antelopes while monkeys jump high above the canopies; fucking like pansexual bacteria; joining the proliferating cacophony of non-human animals; running away without papers, without documents, without comment. Finally get totally get get rid of any “genre of the human” (to use Sylvia Wynter’s expression) that posits captivity, hollowed-out life, anti-biotic being, living in vitro, as the only mode of understanding the living. As Flávia Pinheiro writes, or maybe as something writes through Flávia Pinheiro:

In the land of enchantments

A polyi yrhythmic language arises

In an absent presence

The unstoppable troubling spirits

Somersaults , levitates , turn their heads, tear theirs limbs apart,  Ss, shattering the edges

The anti-antibiotic formula-poem-dance.

André Lepecki, March 15, 202

7 Abiku Solos for 11 Bacteria Falling Through

Dates: Friday April 1st (19.30), Saturday April 2nd (19.30)

Location: IDLab (Jodenbreestraat 3, 1011 NG Amsterdam)

Concept, Choreography and articulator :Flavia Pinheiro

Producer and artistic collaboration: Tom Oliver Jacobson

Text: Chakirou Salami (Baba Ketu) and Flavia Pinheiro

Costume: Marc Andrade

Wearable sculpture : Daphne Kartens

Performers : Tom Oliver, Mario Lopes and Rodrigo Batista

Software Programmers: Leandro Oliván, Jakob Povel, Willem Veemhoff  and Emanuel Nijkerk

Music: Gabriel de Oliveira,Niels Luteijn, DJ Dolores.

Sound Design :Kris Mcdonald & Misha MacLaren

Light Design & Technology: Emanuel Nijkerk and Rembrandt Pieplenbosch

Light operator: Rembrand Pieplenbosch

Video design: Emanuel Nijkerk

Performers : Tom Oliver, Mario Lopes and Rodrigo Batista 

Photographer: JEAN

Support:Erick Lint and ID LAB, Cross Academy Fund, AartJanszen Fonds, AHK Internationalisation Fund, Funcultura Brazil.

Mentors and tutors: André Lepecki, Ana Lira, Pedro Manoel. Konstantina Georgelou and  Jeroen Fabius.

Thanks to: Tom Oliver; my beloved one. Rodrigo Batista and Mario Lopes for the friendship. Adriana Gehres, Paula Montecinos, Mariana Senne, Ana Lira, Annick Kleizen, and Laura Cull for all your support. Thanks to  Didier Djelehounde , Marcel Gbffa  and Chakirou (Baba Ketu) for making it possible. Thanks to everyone who collaborated : Lia Leticia, Yuri Bruscky, Aurora Jamelo, Guilherme Luigi, Joachim Odebrecht, Peter Michael Dietz.

And everyone involved in Glitch: Agnė Auželytė, Dora Brkarić, YuJing LIU (Hugo),Ciro Goudsmit(Zero),Sára Korom (Sashu) and  Gabriel de Oliveira. Thanks to Suzy Block and ICK Amsterdam for the space. Glitch was supported by Balcony Funds-Funding by Fonds Podiumkunsten and MITsp Platform  Brazil