Coffee with…

The idea of “Coffee with…” is to capture my encounter with an inspiring person as genuinely as possible and to emphasise our meeting as flesh and blood persons to fight the creeping domination of disincarnated relations of social media.

… Gabriela Carneiro da Cunha

Gabriela is an actress, director and researcher from Brazil. For the past 5 years, she has developed the Riverbank Project: about rivers, buiúnas and fireflies, an art research dedicated to listening to and amplifying the testimony of Brazilian rivers that are living an experience of catastrophe. The performance installation Altamira 2042 is created from the testimony of the Rio Xingu about the catastrophe caused by the Belo Monte hydroelectric dam.

Gabriela was an Artist in Residence at the Institute for Human Sciences in August 2021.

I spoke with Gabriela four days after seeing her work Altamira 2042, which took place during the Wiener Festwochen festival. I was still full of wonders and emotions…

We spoke about feminism and about Gabriela’s techno-shamanistic work which starts with the invitation of seven women and with the question:

“a road or a river?”

Gabriela, you told me once that you do not want to give voice to the river because she has its voice already, but you want to help others open their ears to listen to her. I love to read books; reading and writing books is my work after all. But in the conversation with you, I truly understood how much can we learn from listening to others, if only we were aware of what “to listen” really means…:-) Thank you once again for sharing your work with me, and I hope to see you again!