British Council
Venice Biennale
Fellowship 2024
 

MISTÉRIOS GOZOSOS

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is the first step of an audiovisual exercise, and draws inspiration from John Akomfrah’s Auto da Fé. Read as a pop piece about histories of forceful uprooting traversing Barbados, Brazil, Iraq and Mali, Auto da Fé invites us to meditate upon universal experiences of belonging, identity, self-agency — and their respective opposites and crossings. The (demo) track correlates narratives of displacement depicted in Akomfrah's piece with the struggles of indigenous Brazilian cultures. Token of historical complexities, the lyrics derive from a sermon by Padre Antônio Vieira, a Catholic priest active in Brazil amidst the violent religious persecution refered to in Auto da Fé. While Vieira was notorious for his defiance against the church, particularly in defence of Jews and native populations, the lyrics underscore the inherent ambivalence of his helping hand. The track incorporates words related to ideas such as home, welcoming and care, in Albanian, Baoulé, Chinese, Czech, English, French, Hungarian, Italian, Kinyarwanda, Korean, Portuguese, Nigerian Yoruba, Romanian, Scouse, Tupi, and Yiddish, offered by

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Alkestid Sterjo

Amy Townsend-Lowcock

Anna Jane Houghton

Becky Schutt

Caterina Edrich

Elyon (Xiaoyi) Liu

Hannah Kemp-Welch

Isabella So

Julia Fry

Kelly Rappleye

Laszlo Molnar

Lisa Ogun' 

Maria Aoyama

Marilyn Henderson

Maurane Gadeau

Nell Hardy

Rachel Hutchison

Riz Ali

Sara Downham-Lotto

Toni Adebajo

Viktorie Brezinova

 

combined with protest chants by the Tupinambás during demonstrations held in Brasília in 2021 against newly imposed limitations to their land protection, and recordings of the singing of capoeira bird, a species the Tupinambá culture associates with man-made forest clearings.