Prologue

My human/own journey – a minimal story

The beginning of this journey/research started when I took a DNA test to genetically map my own ancestry in 2017 in New York (US). What I discovered was more than just a highly mixed genetic composition I found an atlas (Fig. 0-1); a geographic blueprint that traced my ancestors’ routes across times and spaces – the testimonial of all diaspora stories about the formation of myself, my family, and my country (Brazil) – in relation to the global human journey across the millennia, since the first homo sapiens. I faced the fact that I am an individual carrying in my blood the diversity of most ethnicities and lands of this race and planet, as it can be seen on figures 0-2 and 0-3. Whether physically traversed or through abstraction, this realisation brought me to embark on this research about origin, identity, and legacy, translated into cultures, lands, and memory, and how to make art from all this, in first person.

2 The map in the Ancestry Detail Reports relates to the recent ancestor locations countries and territories that may appear in the results if one shares a significant amount of identical DNA with the 150+ reference populations that 23andMe has assembled. The shaded regions of each map show specific regions within each country or territory where we have found evidence of the family’s recent ancestry. The stronger the evidence of ancestry, the darker the shading is for that region (23andme website 2018).

3 A list of the population percentages arranged in a hierarchy from the continental-level to more fine-scale regional ancestries. For example, my DNA results suggest 72% European ancestry, further subdivided into smaller regional populations, like 38,8% Iberian and 0,8% British & Irish (23andme 2018)

My known family origins are from the northeast of Brazil. I was raised consistently crossing the country between North (Bahia) and South (Rio de Janeiro). The contact with these extremely different cultures, musicalities, food, accents, and landscapes strongly marked my impressions and made me realize how diverse my country was. Also, the vacation moments with foreign family members gave me a sense of the world’s richness. Early in age, due to my musical career demands, I started exploring South America and the US, where I became based in 2013.

It was in New York – outside my home-place – in intense friction of cultures, habits, and landscapes from this multi-ethnic and territorial city, that I recognised and framed myself and my art through singularities versus similarities with other (never imagined) cultures. Also, finally I found ground for the ideas of interdisciplinarity, for technology supporting arts creation, and for the freedom of cross-border-styles. It changed my route from a musician4 to a transmedial artist, educator, and composer/producer.

This distance from my own culture and land was a way to sculpt and transform my background into a new form of expression of my art and thoughts. Therefore, I questioned how the migration processes of my ancestors also impacted their life, culture, and identity as an idea to be explored in my compositional practice.

Based on this experience, in the last years I’ve been interested in creating artistic works reflecting on identity, diversity, memories, cultural, and social transformations gained through movement – of space (migration) and time (generations) – by expanding my artistic practice beyond music composition5. I am artistically interested in the connected stories, narratives, and the combination of persistently displaced and reinvented time/space crossings, which take to current expressions of culture. It became my main research for material and processes for art composition, and this is how I framed my artistic exploration.

Driven by the investigation of how an artistic practice can respond to the millennial global human journey6, in this thesis, I relate the concept of ancestry with migration, and I research how artists have been creating works based on these themes, in order to consider my own creation. The body of concepts deriving from the prefix trans- bring the theoretical construction needed to discuss this research. Transhumance and the nomadic thought, transculture and anthropophagy, and a proposal of approach to composition from a

4 I graduated in Classical Piano in 2000 from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil), where I also completed the Master in Piano in 2005, and also studied singing and composition. I acted actively as an interpreter and educator in Brazil and the US. The move to New York was motivated by winning the FUNARTE Prise (National Foundation of Arts/ Brazil, 2012), which granted me funds to study Electronic Music Production, and consolidate my practice as a composer/producer, beside an interpreter.

5 My portfolio can be found in my website www.candidaborges.com

6 From the introduction “This research is driven by the investigation of how an artistic practice can respond to the migration phenomena performed by human beings across the planet over millennia – that I refer to as the millennial global human journey”.