My Drowning Looks Like Dancing, 2021.
Art Basel Miami x Vernacular Institute.
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Vernacular Institute is pleased to announce its participation in ‘Together’ for its inaugural edition during Miami Art Week 2021. Set to debut on the evening of November twenty ninth, Vernacular Institute will present My Drowning Looks like Dancing, a performance by Cuban Brazilian artist Renata Pereira Lima. The piece will take place at the Seven Seas Motel in the historic corridor of Biscayne Boulevard.
Folklorists draw from American Indian, Central Asian, and Indian mythology to speak of earth diver, a character or deity who presents itself usually in the form of an animal. The earth diver, who is sent by a creator, plunges to the seabed through a primordial ocean to bring up sand or mud which, in turn, transforms our world.
My Drowning Looks like Dancing explores the concept of dualism and how contrary forces may be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world; a demonstration of how these forces may give rise to each other and interrelate to one another. What may be holy to one, is marked sinful to another — distinctions which are commonly understood, yet arbitrary nonetheless.
The piece employs dance, soil, a sprinkler, running water from a hose, and a score of urinary sounds to uncover the false lines we cleave through the intrinsic, reciprocating oneness of our world and our appetite for partition: Heaven’s mud laps the earth.
My Drowning Looks like Dancing is made by Renata Pereira Lima in collaboration with writer Addison Bale, and sculptor and co-composer of the sound score, Oshay Green.
Art Basel Miami x Vernacular Institute.
Vernacular Institute is pleased to announce its participation in ‘Together’ for its inaugural edition during Miami Art Week 2021. Set to debut on the evening of November twenty ninth, Vernacular Institute will present My Drowning Looks like Dancing, a performance by Cuban Brazilian artist Renata Pereira Lima. The piece will take place at the Seven Seas Motel in the historic corridor of Biscayne Boulevard.
Folklorists draw from American Indian, Central Asian, and Indian mythology to speak of earth diver, a character or deity who presents itself usually in the form of an animal. The earth diver, who is sent by a creator, plunges to the seabed through a primordial ocean to bring up sand or mud which, in turn, transforms our world.
My Drowning Looks like Dancing explores the concept of dualism and how contrary forces may be complementary, interconnected, and interdependent in the natural world; a demonstration of how these forces may give rise to each other and interrelate to one another. What may be holy to one, is marked sinful to another — distinctions which are commonly understood, yet arbitrary nonetheless.
The piece employs dance, soil, a sprinkler, running water from a hose, and a score of urinary sounds to uncover the false lines we cleave through the intrinsic, reciprocating oneness of our world and our appetite for partition: Heaven’s mud laps the earth.
My Drowning Looks like Dancing is made by Renata Pereira Lima in collaboration with writer Addison Bale, and sculptor and co-composer of the sound score, Oshay Green.