-–– Santarcangelo / São Paulo
We have a Skype call with Rachel. It's 3 pm in Italy and 10 am in Brazil, where she lives. Futuro Fantastico, the festival, has just begun. We ask her how things are over there, telling her we heard about the protests happening all over Brazil and the impeachment proceedings moving forward. She tells us how much she misses N. and that she will come to Italy in the autumn. She's enthusiastic about her new collective project, Every extinction is forever, and about the festival in the making. She tells us that the number of contagions is increasing, the health system is about to collapse, and many people have no access to vaccines or medical care, especially in the favelas and especially black, indigenous, poor people. She says Bolsonaro is a murderer, and he is currently hospitalised because he has been having hiccups uninterruptedly for ten days. We laugh. We root for hiccups. The newspapers have been publishing countless articles on the origins of hiccups, the possible causes and remedies, presenting it as a potential symptom of chronic or acute illnesses. Hiccups are a contraction of the diaphragm, a respiratory spasm that happens when the glottis is closed. It's usually a transitory phenomenon. It can happen while crying convulsively. As for its origins, some hypothesise that it might be a residual primordial reflex, an ancestral, involuntary memory of our amphibious phase. Back when we had gills. The organ is extinct, but hiccups remained.
While we tell Rachel about the project, she thinks of some artists who work on the imagination of bodies in public spaces. They're not from São Paulo, but none of us thinks that'll be a problem. We start thinking about the current times. We tell her about the struggles of our artistic and cultural system and the upcoming economic crisis.
