I would like to start from what Pol Merchan talked about in the context of his project during our workshop. I liked a lot his metaphor of the detonator.

I don’t remember it.

I don’t remember it either.

Pol told us about how he started working on his film, that he wanted to film something in Barcelona, and that this idea became a detonator of this film. I imagined that he asked himself, “What do I need to do to be able to work there?” I really liked this idea as an inciting thought leading to a project. You and me have talked about your project a few times, about the pandemic that prolonged it. So the question is about any specific thing, a moment, or a funding opportunity that jump-started the project.

I started the project, or having “feelings” about the project, during the pandemic. Me and Evandro spent the first lockdown together at my home nearby Reumannplatz in order to have company with each other. We watched the news, we monitored our behaviors. I remember one moment, both funny and serious. We saw people standing outside and talking to each other without keeping distance, which was not allowed then. And we had this immediate impulse of wanting to tell them to stop doing that and go home. So we needed to have a moment to reflect that this is not what we should be doing, that otherwise we would become policemen for other people, while we have no idea what they do and they are there, outside, talking to each other. So, in the midst of all this, I saw a post that somebody published on social media about how what we were living through was similar to the times of the AIDS epidemic. It was a naive thought, there was a ton of comments under this post, saying “Yes, but it’s not the same…” But this was, at least to some extent, the beginning. It’s true that the COVID pandemic is not the same thing as the AIDS epidemic, as it manifested during the 1980s and 1990s. For a long time, I’d had a desire to deal with the topic of HIV, as it’s part of the community, even though it’s not discussed so much anymore because we’re “cool” about it. So these two contexts together gave me an entry point. This is also related to the need to justify, when you apply for project funding in Vienna, how a project is about a topic that’s relevant today. This gave me an idea that the connection to COVID could be a shortcut to talking about other aspects of HIV and AIDS. This was the idea behind the project’s conceptualization and articulation. Initially, I wanted the piece to also touch on “Corona,” but, in the end, we didn’t do this explicitly. Concerning the project funding, I started describing the project a week before the deadline, which was maybe a bit quick.

It is fascinating to think of the gap that sometimes happens between the moment you start thinking of the show and the time you show it. In your case, between the beginning of the process and the show in Brut, it was six months?

A year, more than a year, actually. I applied in February 2022, which is when you apply to be able to show something during the spring the following year. This time, there was no space in the spring, so we did the show in November, one and a half years after.

Could you talk about your decision about working with Evandro? Did you work on this project because you spent the first lockdown together? Why did you want to work with him?

No, I wanted to work with Evandro because we know each other really well. We used to be partners, we’re now best friends. I needed to work with somebody whom I can talk to about things very intimately and in a cool way. He was the only such person. Our collaboration had nothing to do with the fact that we spent the lockdown together. It’s more about being best friends, sharing stories about our sex lives, sharing situations that have to do with the community and HIV, sharing information about what people said about different stuff in regards to the topic. It was more about feeling comfortable and intimate in the creative process. Also, at the beginning, I didn’t have a clear plan about the methodology. If you work with somebody that you know, things can flow, even if things don’t flow. I needed to work in an environment in which it was possible to just try stuff out, and our relationship and our comfort helped that, we didn’t have to think too much on how to communicating between each other, how to talk about things, because we already had that. The stories that feed the piece came from both of us, as well as from other people in Vienna, who were confronted with not necessarily HIV stigma, but with the isolation from their community during the COVID pandemic because, for instance, they were not vaccinated, though they were not anti-vaxxers. There was this context around us that we would hear stories about, including stories about people within the queer community that we would expect to show solidarity or to think more critically than just assume that if someone is not vaccinated, they must be an anti-vaxxer. I just assumed they would be smart enough to ask further before making an opinion. For me, this was an important topic: the social aspect of the epidemic, the governmentality, the management of social relations, which informed people and communities that you wouldn’t expect. This also showed the impact of the bombarding from the media, which was so intense that we sometimes didn’t have enough time to think about certain things.

Can you talk about more about this creative process. How did you do it, did you talk to each other, write down stuff, who was responsible for what?

I was the only person responsible for it, this was clear from the beginning. I wanted Kevin Clash to be in the project for the music and for the intergenerational presence that he would bring, he is now 57. He also comes from elsewhere, he has a different locality. But wait, let me talk about the project step by step. First of all, cast: I wanted Kevin to be part of it, we had known and talked to each other before the project about HIV in the times of rave. Kevin was part of the London scene, in the UK, where it was more present. He not only was a DJ, but he would also frequent clubs and outdoor raves. It was important for me to have a bit of the 1980s aspect, in terms of history, in terms of him as a person who participated in this history, also in terms of him being a person of color, which is another important layer. I knew that I wanted to create a kind of junk-punk aesthetics, to have an imagery of ruins, but in a careful way, not to have the stage filled with stuff. I did some reading around ruins and came across this current called accelerationism, which is supposedly a new Marxist approach to politics. I didn’t go too deep into it because it didn’t fully convince me, but I came across other things through this. What they talk about in the context of ruins is that the “new world” will be built out of the ruins of the current one. This is what I kept. What is it that you actually destroy, what do you keep from what is destroyed, I don’t want to call it “a post-apocalyptic situation,” but we used such aesthetics in the space. Then I started working with Evandro, at the beginning only in the studio, we did a bit of research together. We watched Greg Araki’s The Living End, documentary The Gift, and another documentary produced by the UN’s AIDS department that follows the virus around the globe. Interestingly enough, they also drew a parallel between the AIDS epidemic and the COVID pandemic, in terms of how they inform the economy. They recognized the same problems with healthcare systems that need support rather than being cut down, as well as with the Global South having more issues because of the vaccine prices and patents, produced in the Global North. Not that they can or will do something about it, they just described the issues. We also found some insightful statistical information about the epidemic. We watched one more documentary that I got from Helmut at QWIEN, Vom Leben Lieben Sterben, to bring some local connection to the German-speaking world.

What did you think about it?

It’s old. (laughter)

I am asking because I found it interesting that it’s so straight style-wise. xxx also shared with us a video of a video protest that they did in the 1980s, where they projected the coming-out videos on the facade of several buildings. I don’t have much of a connection with like Austrian activism of that time, so it was quite interesting.

Another thing that we watched was a series of lectures by Cael Keegan, Associate Professor of Film and Moving Image Studies at Concordia University, Montréal, who is a trans man. The lectures were about how HIV developed, mostly in the U.S., and how it has been portrayed in the media and in the arts, starting in the 1980s until nowadays. It was interesting for me in terms of thinking of the positions that one takes, of the differences between types of activist work that was happening back then, how it informed the law, also about the change in terms of thinking of activist goals: liberation VS “just” rights. I found out about Greg Araki’s The Living End in that context. I think he also brought Halberstam as an extra layer, speaking of this “antisocial” turn, of this position of “Fuck it all, I’m sick, I’m gonna go away from the world.” This is how he describes The Living End in a way. I found this a particularly interesting position in terms of finding ways to relate to it, to think of this systemic issue within which this “fuck it all” is said. In The Living End, it’s about knowing that nobody’s going to take care of us, so let’s just live our lives. So this is what we watched. Then I tried to figure out in the studio how we move, because it’s easy to make a lecture about it, there are so many things written down, but it’s an artistic challenge how to create a physical work around it. Kevin brought this concept that the rave was “a place of salvation for the faggots of that time.” You could go out to dance without anyone asking you about your HIV status. You could kiss whomever you wanted to kiss and without danger. You could release all your feelings about Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s in the UK, all the shit that was happening. So in that sense rave was a place of salvation, this setting of dancing into music was a basic thing. I listen to a lot of music every day. The way I listen to music has changed over the years. Shortly before COVID, I started appreciating House music, which I didn’t like much before. I suddenly found House nicer to my ears. If you pay attention, you can realize that House music has so many elements, similarly to disco. Now, choosing things to listen gives me more interest about the actual tracks than it used to. (I don’t even understand myself this sentence. Maybe we could take it out.) When I was a kid, I liked playing loud music at home and just dancing, so listening to rave at home was my salvation, I guess. I started creating this method that we called “filthy dancing” or “surfing the beat,” because I noticed the specific way that I dance to certain music, both in clubs and at home. And with House music, I would notice all those other sound elements, apart from the beat, that are so interesting to dance to. They give you extra inputs of movement to your upper body or to your feet, they make you create tiny choreographies in your head. I think of the beat in terms of the “main ideology,” and if you manage to put it aside, you can find other interesting things to listen to, like lyrics, for example. And this can relate to your other contexts of “listening,” like discourse, to train the listening without falling into ecstatic dance situations, but working the rhythm and “surfing.” It was a very active process, from day one, of sharing imaginaries. I would come to the studio and propose trying something that I had thought of doing. For example, we had “crazy laughter” situations, which never made it to the show. But the main thing was “filthy dancing,” which we did by playing music and listening to what exactly we hear. This involved thinking of music choices in terms of what we need. We tried out different types of music, we thought of how much lyrics we needed or what instruments would work for both of us. We also had a conflict about old school breakbeat drum ‘n’ bass, which fits time-wise to the performance, but Evandro hates it.

So Evandro put a stop to it?

Yes, he said, “I cannot move. It’s so boring.” Maybe I can use it in “LO4D II.”

“Re-LO4D” (laughter).

Was there anything that Evandro liked and you did not want to have? Do you remember anything else?

No, because I was the one proposing the music, it was my playlist. I have 150GB of music, I don’t use Spotify, we are both Soulseek users. We knew that some electronic music wouldn’t work, as it’s too “poor”, and you have to really search for particular things. So in the end more housey stuff gave us interest on how to move. Then Kevin joined us and added other music. Also, Evandro is a sucker for pop music, some tracks are good, but…

Contemporary pop music?

Beyoncé, for example. The thing is that there’s a lot of meaning there, also because of the lyrics, and there’s a lot of over-layering. We wanted to find an interesting relation that the music would bring to the show, and, if we had chosen something super pop, then everything goes somewhere else. There’s too many lyrics. Although some tracks with a lot of lyrics could have worked for me. Contemporary hip-hop or rap would work because of the way the voice moves, which was also enriching for releasing my ear and listening to sound, which was very particular. In this case, voice is another music instrument. But  again there’s too much linguistic context on that music. So basically, with Evandro, we had been practicing forever, this was the main strategy.

I wanted to ask you about the imaginary and the ruins, which you talked about earlier. I thought that sometimes, in performance pieces, people work a lot with images…

Not me.

That’s the thing! I didn’t feel that this was your case.

No, I don’t work with images at all. I also don’t like the word “image” because it implies stillness, and I’m interested in moving and movement. I like to see abstract things, but the interplay of abstraction or form with fiction and with representation has been an important space to me for a few years. The issue that I sometimes have with images is that they become too representational and this is not a spectrum I am currently interested in working. Even if I worked with an image, I might bring it into the space and then it would probably disappear, it would become part of history. The only image that we used comes from a scene from The Gift, the last scene with cowboys and a rodeo, they have a riderless horse walking around. A person comes out with a saddled horse without a rider, they just walk the horse around, and there is a voice saying, “This is to memorize all the riders whom we have lost.” It’s a moment of silence. This is the only image we used. There is a scene at the beginning where I have Evandro on a leash, walking around the space. That’s our riderless horse ritual, which also has a fetish aspect to it. I don’t work with images also because I’m interested in physical processes, improvisation. I’m trying to figure out what body I need, not what images I need. Though we used a lot of images  projected on stage. This was the physical part. The costumes were informed by the junk punk aesthetics. I told Evandro that we would find stuff and remake them. We needed torn clothes, not necessarily so beautiful. I mean, the costumes were very beautiful, but you know what I mean. We used wigs as a wink to drag culture and to dressing up, which we used to share stories that are sometimes tough, like a camouflage. Kevin’s DJ booth was a surfboard because I wanted to have something other than a table, also something hanging. The images of the ruins came from Frederick Marroquín, who found and bought elements of a skate park on Willhaben. We used it to make the bars that we had on the sides of the stage. He found other great broken stuff.  We had a ball that was a broken element of what used to be a street lamp. The projected images and the lights were done by Resa Lut, to whom I gave mostly the aesthetics of what I wanted. It was Resa, who brought the images of the horses running, which was a funny coincidence because I don’t think we had talked about the riderless horse ritual. Resa had a whole bank of images that she worked with, and she was relatively free, maybe too free, as I left her on her own at some point because of time restrictions. She’s very talented, and I knew she would have found her way anyway. There are also other elements, like a scene at the beginning with Evandro singing a song by Renato Russo, who died of AIDS-related complications and had not accepted his condition almost until the very end. While the dance method is part of my biography, Evandro is connected to this song, as he used to listen to it when he was a teenager. At the end of the piece, there’s Kevin’s song, his personal remake and singing of “You make me feel (mighty real)” by Sylvester, released in 1977. We created bent timelines. If you think of House music as the mother, then Disco is the grandmother to certain types of electronic music. Similarly, if you think of the 1970s as the time of the sexual liberation, then the 1980s, with the AIDS epidemics, brought an end to the future that the 1970s promised. This is an observation that I am borrowing from Cael Keegan, the professor whose lectures I watched in YouTube. What would have happened as a follow-up to the sexual revolution of the 1970s, if HIV hadn’t appeared? It’s this kind of a positive queer utopia. There’s a film or a series that I only have heard of, which talks about it. I think it’s called Fathers, which is this imagination of the “queer utopia” that could have been if AIDS had never happened. So, with all these references, I wanted to give a bit of a throwback to the 1970s, mostly Euro-centric, to this sexual liberation that HIV put a stop to. I wanted to rethink how we talk about and how we deal with these topics, to think of another way of putting ourselves in this timeline, of being more activist/political about what sex and sexual liberation than just focusing on the stigma, which, of course, we have to deal with. But this is a question of what can happen afterwards. If we keep being busy with the same questions, which re-appeared also with COVID, we are missing out on a potential revolution that started 50 years ago and never got completed because of HIV. This was the concept behind this project. I told Kevin that we had to finish the piece with disco, with something light. I didn’t want to have disco all over the piece, just at the end.

I didn’t want to talk about different films all the time, but… Celine Song, who did Past Lives, which I really liked, talked in one podcast about the difference between the temporalities of storytelling in theatre and film works. She said that she had wanted to make a film to be able to use time jumps in between different spaces, which is limited when you work in theater. I thought that this was an interesting idea to use music for such time jumps.

And also having stories from people like Kevin, who is from an older generation even though he doesn’t show his age. There’s this scene, we called it the “cruising scene,” where each of us speaks their mother language, it’s a multiple space situation, with Brazil, Greece, and the UK. It’s a combination of secretive stories, stories told in the dark, in cruising spaces in the park, in the bedroom, in the chill out area of the club…. The audience doesn’t have to be a part of the situation, we wanted them just to listen. In this scene, Kevin, who speaks English, refers to the time when he was young and cruised with some later known DJs in Hampstead Heath in London or the moment when Jimi Dean aka James Davidson gifted him all his vinyls with house music before he died. So what Kevin brought was about a different time. We also had the images of ruins, which was a bit like using “old tricks.”

I liked how you used this, it was more an evocation than a specific setting. You mentioned different languages, and I wanted to ask about something about strategies of working. What does it do for you in a way to speak something in Greek on stage where most people in the audience not necessarily understand them?

First of all, we had a text where me and Evandro wrote about our experiences in a “prose-poetry” style. We wrote about the stories that we know from ourselves, from others, from interviews. There’s some sex going on, some opinions, some problematic questions. Speaking a language that most people don’t understand creates a distance which allows you to be able to say things. That’s number one. Wigs work in a similar way, you can choose how much face you actually show. I was thinking of how I would feel about performing the piece in one of our countries, where the whole audience would understand everything. Once, I had an idea of using subtitles selectively, not for the whole piece, but out of the practical and artistic reasons I decided against it. This was supposed to be a private space. So there was a conscious language barrier, and there was a reason for this barrier. However, in order not to make it too exclusive, we had Kevin speaking in English, thanks to which the audience could get at least a bit of what we talked about. It doesn’t matter, and it does matter, because these stories about neoliberalism and healthcare systems may resonate with certain people in the audience. Also, it seemed a bit boring to have only English spoken on stage, I mean maybe not “boring,” but it’s a bigger discussion about colonial knowledge and colonial languages. So yes, English is the lingua franca, but sometimes it doesn’t matter if you don’t understand, sometimes you have subtitles, sometimes you have somebody doing translation on stage. It’s an interesting effect. I had Greek friends who came to watch the show. I could hear some people in the audience, who reacted and were laughing when Evandro spoke Portuguese.

I was thinking about this the other day, how for me in Vienna it is more naturalized to hear English on stage than German. We all are speaking English, and it is the standard language, but I also find it funny that it’s not the language from here.

It’s true, but that’s what I meant with the lingua franca and the colonialism of English not only in a historical sense but also with the fact that English is so common that it may make us think, by default, that it’s okay. But is it okay? How much of a choice do I have? Also, I was interested in writing in our own languages because we have forgotten a little bit, by “we, I mean some artists, how to write in one’s own language, to use rhyme, intonation, melody. We did rehearsals, as we wanted to have a specific way of saying things, which was hard for me to guide Evandro on Portuguese. I understand a lot, but these were questions about where to put a full stop, or how something spoken would sound exactly, or what kind of words to use. I’m not a writer or a poet, I’m quite horrible, but I had an intuition about certain things, like: not being afraid to use really long words because they impose a certain musicality without you needing to do anything on top of it. It’s enough if you just say the whole long word. And with shorter words, you may need to  think more of how to say them to create musicality. Also, for example, Evandro’s writing was, at some point, too “nice,” and I was inviting him to use more explicit words. “If you want to say ‘fuck,’ say ‘fuck’…

What would he say instead?

I don’t know, “make love”? (laughter) No, he never wrote exactly that, but there was some lyricism in what he wrote. And I was like, “No, just write as you would talk to a friend, with all the explicit words, all the thoughts around it. Say the things as they are supposed to be said in the direct form, without making too much of a fuss or going around it.” Likely because I understand a bit of Portuguese, I knew how to, let’s say, guide the words. With the melody of speech, we had to figure out the rhythmic qualities of the words. Same with Kevin, in the things that he wrote, I would sometimes say, “Can you rewrite it more precisely? Can you go to detail?” I wanted to avoid text that sounds generic. On the contrary, I wanted precise storytelling, gossip, sex talk, political speech, for instance.

Was it also about being descriptive?

As well, yes. It was both about being personal, as a general thing, and about finding extensions in the story to whatever the questions are inside the text. There is a mixture of “political” words and “intimacy” words, which stay private, because the setting is private. The language is a disguise, a camouflage of what you want to say, in the same way that costumes and wigs are. Words are a type of drag. We spent a lot of time writing, correcting and finding measures and lengths. There’s also the text that I wrote and I sing, horribly, in the end. Afterwards, a friend of mine, Panagis Marketos – who is also an artist – told me that the way I was singing reminded him of Greek folk from a particular area, Epirus…

Was it about how you sang or about the melody?

It was about the melody, as well as the range and the extension of the vowels. It’s a way of singing. There’s this polyphonic singing in, for example, Epirus, which is the area between northwestern Greece and southern Albania, where they sing a little bit like this. It also has a bit of the lament concept, which is a certain tradition in Greece and in the Balkans, with professional women who perform lamenting at funerals. So there are all these connections to different folk traditions, made through personal biographies. During the artist talk, somebody commented that my way of singing reminded them of the Orthodox church, which is also related to Greek folk music. And then Panagis told me about an archive of queer polyphonic singers from Epirus, found in a library somewhere in the States, someone wrote about them. So, through this, we had a queer reclaiming of the whole thing. In the background of my song, Kevin also plays in loop the bass line of “You got the love” by Frankie Knuckles ft. Candi Staton, which was in rotation/a major hit in the clubs in the late ‘80s to early ‘90s. Florence and the Machine recorded its version more recently / in 2008. In this way, we interplayed with different timelines. One thing that I developed in the process, partly thanks to Kevin’s influence, is that, as an artist, you can do anything you want. I mean, you can think and be creative in whatever way you wish, you can dare to do things that seem weird, or try out things that are not fully thought through. That’s what I’m telling every artist. It’s a very privileged thing in terms of one’s feeling of safety. But certain things start making sense only after you try them. Me talking now about “L04D” makes me discover new stuff. If we do this interview again next year, I may come up with other stuff that I just discovered. This is also a way of relating to this idea of bent timelines, like this idea of the broken “queer identities” because of the emergence of HIV. Just when you are about to get over the trauma, HIV comes and breaks everything apart, and we again have to talk about survival, about access to healthcare systems. We have this in the 1990s, but at the same time, this was what the politics of the time took away from the movement. We end up again into some situation of “I feel pity for you, I will help you.” But we’re not talking about liberation anymore, we’re talking about being inside the system and being okay with sharing the same dream as the system…

…being allowed into the system.

Exactly because we are in danger also, and we cannot now visualize other ways, which is valid, but…

I wanted to ask one more thing about your creative process. Do you remember how long this process was? How long did you prepare for it ? Was it super intense, would you do this every day? Or was it something more loose, and you would work on it more slowly, bit by bit?

It was more loose, because I’m lazy (laughter). I cannot work concentrated for long time stretches anymore, I used to be a very good student at school, but now that I don’t have a frame, I’m not going to sit down, read, and do constant research. Now that I’ve turned 40, I’m trying to make “messy inputs” a thing (laughter). No, but I know that this makes sense. The thing is that there are two deadlines per year for project-funding applications in Vienna, so you know roughly by when things need to be ready. It’s a different thing about when to start: I may start earlier, or wait for a few months until I have inspiration. With this project, I didn’t do very deep research in the sense of sitting down and spending intense and concentrated long timeframes studying and gathering knowledge, it was actually funny: I would watch a film on my own, then I would watch a few seminars on YouTube, then I would develop an opinion about the topic, which is an important part of the process. It is not only about what you read, but also about what opinions you come up with. I don’t remember exactly how long in advance before the application I had watched all this material, but I had already known most of it. But it was an expanded timeframe, which did not feel like I am doing a specific intense study on something.

I’ve asked this question because I was curious if there was something about the shape of this conceptualization process that became part of the piece.

No, because I never think of the piece beforehand in that way. I work a lot with improvisation. I knew who I wanted to have on stage and what we were going to do, I didn’t have a specific space in mind or how it would develop. For me, these things come in the rehearsal process, which, in this case, lasted 9–10 weeks. With Evandro, we would practice every day. When Kevin joined, we started thinking of individual scenes. I often work with structured improvisation, this is what me and Evandro did for this piece too. We would have some anchor points that need to appear, but, in between them, there’s a lot of space to fill in with improvisation. There was an interesting and very touching input that we received afterwards, an interesting one, I had a thought about it, and it was just very touching. Karla Max Aschenbrenner, who did the artist talk, said in response to someone’s question, “They’re not dancing alone, they’re dancing with the ghosts.” This kind of messy space, in the end, created a rave situation of other people being there, ghosts from the past, people who died, our references, and ghost stories. It was not just the trio of me, Evandro, and Kevin on stage, but there were also other presences. This constant movement that we had in space actually created other partners that we danced with. Also, the wigs that were hanging in the background projection surface created an impression of a wardrobe or a monument. This was probably the latest addition to the piece, added as a another conceptual layer after the artist talk.

I have a comment, because I just thought of a piece by Tubi Malcharzik, which, at its end, had a song in Russian. Also, when we did a performance, we used references that were imbued with so much meaning for us, they were almost like a love thing, on top of which you put a text. I thought that such choices are like tiny monuments that we keep gathering throughout our lives. “Oh, this was so ‘me’ when I was 17.” Or “I watched this when I was 13.” I am fascinated by this affect that we create and try to push it out on stage or through artistic work. I am interested in how it can traverse people. I like this idea of the stage being filled with the ghosts of these references and of the people that you thought of when doing the piece.

Also, it is about choices of how you want to present your biography: what moments from it, in what ways, through language or otherwise. Certain things are understood better not on the cognitive level, but through “Ah, I can relate to that.” Even if specific histories are not shared on stage, there is still a history behind what you have created, and it usually shows, not in the sense of “I know the history behind,” but you see it in the performance or in the performers that there is some kind of working over there. You can read it, you may not get everything, but you see that there’s something more going on than just people moving. It’s also different when I see people come in with just their material, and for me there’s something missing, something like the history behind what they do, something from the rehearsal process that doesn’t belong to the piece’s actual context, but something about how you ended up with these movements or spaces. For me, there’s tons of things that we do through creative processes, and, while some things don’t make it to the piece on stage, we still keep them as a vibe, as a history, or as a reference. Something that lets me see that, for the piece to reach its stage form, it had passed through all these other things that don’t look at all like it, or that have nothing to do with what ends up being the piece. For me, these are the things that give more volume to the body of the piece, more thickness or fat. This is what I also use in feedback situations, when I ask people about how they make their pieces “thicker,” not “deeper”. “Deeper” may be a bit pretentious and also, since it’s vertical, implies hierarchies. It is related to the intellectual tradition. I think of research as connecting and finding connections, as spreading things on the surface, on its sides. Going “deeper,” to me, implies that we have resolved the “surface” issues, and I want to wait before doing that, to pay more attention to the surface, and then, together, we can try to break it to go deeper. It’s a metaphor, of course, but it’s a way for me to de-stress research, what it does, what you do with. You may need to read  10,000 books, but you also need to do your own connections, spread your tentacles far away on the surface, so that something deep can come up.

Do you have anything else to add?

Are you working on something now?

Wow, that’s such a Hollywood interview question.

I am asking also because me and Gui are preparing a new project, and I’ve been intensely thinking of two videos that we’ve been working on. Do you have on your mind right now something that you’re working on right now?

I’m currently working a lot on other people’s stuff, but I have in mind something that I’m curious of, I think it could be a “L04D 2.0” situation. It relates to feelings, just like “L04D” did. I’m curious about the concepts of grief and anger as feelings that are related or relatable. I find anger to be a healthy and generative feeling. It is also a neck of what was going on during “Corona.” There’s this thing that some people are against getting angry because they don’t want to spoil their energy. The people who say that are sad…

No judgement (laughter).

No, but if you don’t express anger, if you even don’t just bang on the table at the moment of having something that has made you angry, then it’s really weird. I’m still conceptualizing it. When I was in Helsinki, I met Patricia Daniel Scalco, a Brazilian anthropologist from Veranópolis, a “sworn lesbian,” as she described herself. She does research around dance, audience, and negative emotions. I was excited to talk to her. She asked me, “But grief and anger about what?” I realized that I hadn’t thought of it, but the following day I realized that the “what” is a future or futurity. It was still very abstract, but I started thinking of grief and anger as stages of feelings that create action. In “queerness,” we talk a lot about grief and trauma, while I want to go to the next stage: anger. I don’t want to say “activism,” but “action.” I notice that there’s a tendency to recycle grief around trauma, which is safe and fine, people need it too, but I have a feeling that sometimes people stay in this loop. Some aspects of psychoanalysis help, but others don’t, because you can easily stay there. I’m interested in that. My experience is that grief is usually followed by anger. Why did this happen? Why did this have to happen? What would be the next stage, I don’t know. I was reading this book about Antigone, a character in the ancient Greek tragedy and a very interesting persona. She’s grieving, and she’s very angry. She is grieving for her lost brother, she cannot bury him, it is not allowed, because he was a traitor. The book is about different aspects of Antigone: feminist Antigone, political Antigone, poetic Antigone. The book is called Antigonisms, a publication by the Athens and Epidaurus festival. There are different readings of Antigone: against the politics, against the state. She is an interesting figure of both grief and anger. For now, this idea is still fuzzy, but it’s the one that has stayed with me for a while now. Sometimes, when I am out or busy, I have an idea that excites me, and I test it if it stays with me for the following two weeks. If I forget it, it’s also fine, I’m getting old, and I’m forgetting things. I also want to present Bounce, an older work that I did with Mzamo Nondlwana, Asher O’Gorman, mirabella paidamwoyo dziruni, Daniel Nasr, and Marcio Kerber Canabarro on the dance, Tanja Fuchs aka Abu Gabi on the sound, Panagis Marketos on the scenography and costumes. We only did it online.