THE FUNCEB LITERARY FELLOWSHIPS

In 2014, we established a partnership with the Fundação Cultural do Estado da Bahia—the cultural agency of the State of Bahia—to promote writers in the Portuguese language. Between 2014 and 2021, we hosted eight individual Bahian writers, one per year, selected through annual Open Calls. In 2022, FUNCEB expanded the program to award residency Fellowships to five local writers, which were selected from over eighty applicants from across the State of Bahia.

The stay at Instituto Sacatar made it possible to give full attention to the creation of the script for the play “Antessala” and to organize my days around its creation. I believe that being in an environment like this gave me more discipline and focus on the work I came here to do.

I worked on the first draft of a fictional novel, drawn upon documents, transcripts, interviews, and photographs of my grandmother. Complementary activities, however, imposed significant changes, as I turned to artistic interventions in Itaparica and the expansion of a project I call “Andografias,” a multisensory exhibition.

I worked on writing the script for a short fiction film (about racial profiling through AI facial recognition software). The script expanded to something larger than a short film. I can talk about my experience in Itaparica, a transforming and inspiring place that generated two concepts for future projects.

(Literature

My project had two well-defined objectives: to prepare the originals of a book of illustrated poems based on the theme Exu (ed: the orixá that serves as the messenger between humankind and the orixás) and to present a performance created with poems from the book. I achieved both goals. However, the idea was to present two versions of the performance, one in Itaparica and the other in Salvador. I performed at the Instituto Sacatar during Open Studios, but with the advance of a new wave of Covid19, the performance in Salvador—planned for the patio of Museu de Arte Moderna—must wait for a safer moment. I went beyond these initial objectives, as I turned my studio into another work, an installation. The studio became a space transformed by written, sound and visual interventions. Thank You, Exu!

I planned to develop an audiovisual script for a future video-performance. Certain elements impacted the creation of the script, including the studio where I worked and the aesthetic and literary exchanges and intense and rich dialogues I had with Nelson Maca and the twins Ting and Wei. I had intended to adapt my master’s thesis, but the landscape here and the contacts I made with women who play the sacred drums in Itaparica modified my path. I abandoned the academic text for other textualities that go beyond the bibliography. Local conditions changed my project for the better, and it has become far more than I had initially intended.