URBE

30’, cast of 2, urban performance/Installation, Rio de Janeiro - Choreographer

Waste, perishable matter. Urbe explores the transitory quality of the body: the relentless cycles of birth, decay and death - and through this molecular disintegration reach a non-verbal ‘existential essence’. The objectified body’s and its ritual cadence, in the face of urban abstraction and compartmentalization.

Urbe, an installation occupying an entire street - a landscape of food waste and two performers - was created in the decaying centre of Rio de Janeiro. Urbe reflects on a city’s vast amounts of still-edible discarded food, where humans themselves are perishable waste, and on Brazil’s lack of cultural memory.

The street’s inhabitants – all of them squatters - were integrated in the project as crew (set construction, lighting). On the soundtrack: ‘Miserere’, a classical piece of music from Brazilian colonial times, composed by an anonymous, forgotten composer.