HLIO OITICICA AND THE PARANGOLS: (AD)DRESSING NIETZSCHES BERMENSCH Paula Braga

Samba, dance and carnival are crucial cultural references when discussing the work of Brazilian artist Hlio Oiticica. In addition to these local elements and less often discussed in the existing literature about the artist the ideas of Friedrich Nietzsche permeate Oiticicas production. This paper provides a new interpretation for Oiticicas Parangol capes of the 1960s, which, I argue, relate to Nietzsche's concept of the superman (bermensch). Oiticica created the capes while living among the population of the most marginalized and stigmatised segment of Brazilian society, the communities that live in the slums and organize the quintessential Brazilian, and certainly Dionysiac, artistic manifestation the annual Carnival parades. The parallel reading of Oiticicas works and Nietzsches texts reveals the philosophical background of an oeuvre concerned with the creation of new moral values through an intriguing juxtaposition of social criticism, samba, and super-heroes. Born in 1937, Hlio Oiticica wrote prolifically throughout his life, from articles about his own works to art criticism. Discontent with the art world, at times he preferred to make a living selling articles to magazines than seeking galleries and collectors for his work. Oiticica was raised in an intellectual environment, and had an unusual education, taught at home by his mother and grandfather, a philologist who was prominent in the anarchist movement in Brazil. Oiticicas contacts with the work of Nietzsche started when he was 13 years old.1 While explicit references to Nietzsche appear in some of

Oiticicas writings and in at least in one drawing, it is dissociated from verbal language that the thoughts of Nietzsche more clearly arise in the creations of Hlio Oiticica. The Brazilian artist was undoubtedly one of the future readers to whom Nietzsche referred when he affirmed in 1888 in The Antichrist: This book belongs to the very few. Perhaps not one of them is living yet. Maybe they will be the readers who understand my Zarathustra: how could I mistake myself for one of those for whom there are ears even now? Only the day after tomorrow belongs to me. Some are born posthumously. 2 In his first book, The Birth of Tragedy out of the Spirit of Music, from 1871, Nietzsche defends art as a substitute for metaphysical searches, the only way to verge on the immanent essence of the world.3 For the young Nietzsche, there could be no other explanation for the existence of the world except as an aesthetic phenomenon. That art, and not morality, should guide mankinds existence is a key element of the life-affirming, anti-nihilistic concept he named Dionysian. The Dionysian attitude refutes the faith in otherworldly solutions for the terrors of life and, acknowledging the horror, engages in artistic creation to withstand the knowledge of suffering and of the unavoidable end of individual existence. These ideas would return over and over in Nietzsches subsequent texts, and finally in Thus Spoke Zarathustra, he defines the bermensch (overman or superman) as someone who abandons morality and any other form of conditioned, dogmatic behaviour in favour of living according to his own will. The overman is able to avoid falling into nihilism when facing the terrors of the only existent life, the earthly one. Likewise, he refuses any form of transcendence or idealism to escape life. In several passages of the book Nietzsche points to art, mainly dance, as the means to achieve this supreme state of being and freedom of thought: Lift up your hearts, my brothers, high,

higher! And do not forget your legs either. Lift up your legs too, you good dancers; and better yet, stand on your heads!4 Zarathustras narrative is one of disillusionment and recovery of confidence as he looks for disciples for his teachings of the overman. Hlio Oiticicas decision to join the communities of the slums and the subsequent development of his career approaches a Zarathustrian journey. Nietzsches hero at one point concludes that far from the market place and from fame happens all that is great: far from the market place and from fame the inventors of new values have always dwelt.5 Similarly, Oiticica gave up the market place and joined the common man to develop a new kind of art based on audience participation, a pioneer proposal in the art of the 1960s. He never had a dealer, participated in few exhibitions, and rejected the art market system. The current growing interest in Oiticicas work among scholars and critics contrasts sharply with the indifference of the art world toward his oeuvre at the time of his death, in 1980. In fact, he rejected the art market to the point of referring to his own work as anti-art, a modality in which the artist is a motivator for the spectator engagement in art making: Anti-art would be a completion of the latent collective necessity for creative activity, which would be motivated in a certain way by the artist. That invalidates, therefore, any metaphysical, intellectualist, or aesthetic tendencies It is, therefore, a creative fulfilment devoid of any moral, intellectual or aesthetic premises, it is man's simple stance within himself and his vital creative potentialities.6 (1966) Oiticica started his involvement with the community of the Mangueira slums in 1964, the year of the military coup that established a twenty-five-year dictatorship in Brazil. By that time he had already invented categories of art works such as spatial reliefs (hanging

colourful planes), penetrables (environments that surround the audience with colourful sliding doors or boards hanging from the ceiling) and bolides (containers with powdered pigment or soil, boxes with drawers and hidden compartments, inviting the viewer to manipulate the objects), in the systematic fashion that characterized his production of objects and written texts. The collective art making of the Carnival preparations in the slums and the very aesthetic qualities of the surroundings of Mangueira Hill were central for the development of the concept of the Parangol. These colourful capes, banners, and tents interact with the movements of the participator, who dresses or holds them while dancing. Oiticica intended the Parangols to incite an experience of colour, time, and space, leading to a magical incorporation of these elements of the art work into a total creative experience [vivncia] of the spectator, who I now call the participator.7 In the Parangols the body is not merely a support but becomes part of a kinetic work of art. Mangueira is one of the most traditional schools of samba of Rio de Janeiro and Morro da Mangueira (Mangueira Hill) one of the various labyrinthine clusters of houses that form marginalized neighbourhoods, favelas, an unofficial urban housing system present in all large Brazilian cities. For Oiticica, the favela was not only a source of carnivalesque dance and collective art making, but mainly an environment that incited creative changes, a characteristic he later tried to reproduce in installations like Tropiclia and Eden. He called these investigations on the relation between space and ethics Environmental Program: The socio-environmental position is the starting point of all social and political changes, or the fermenting of them at least it is incompatible with any law which is not determined by a defined interior need, laws being

constantly remade it is the retaking of confidence by the individual in his or her intuitions and most precious aspirations For me the most complete expression of this environmentation was the formulation of what I called Parangol Parangol is the definitive formulation of what environmental anti-art is, precisely because, in these works, I was given the opportunity, the idea, of fusing together colour, structures, poetic sense, dance, words, photography and I intend to extend the practice of appropriation to things of the world which I come across in the streets, vacant lots, fields, the ambient world, things which would not be transportable, but which I would invite the public to participate in. This would be a fatal blow to the concept of the museum, art gallery, etc Museum is the world: daily experience.8 (1966) Parangol, therefore, is not just a cape, but also an environmental structure that stimulates one to take a different ethical and social stance, and to integrate art in daily experience. The physical structure of a Parangol cape would be better revealed through movement, dance, and at this point Oiticicas invention of the Parangol converged with his experience of self-marginalization in the slums, where he learned to dance samba: I was feeling threatened by an excessive intellectualisation. [Dance] would be the definite step in search of the myth, a reintroduction of myth in my art There was a convergence of this experience with the form that my art undertook, the Parangol Dance is the search for the expressive act, for the immanence of this act; not the ballet, which is excessively intellectualised by the existence of a choreography and which seeks for the transcendence of this act, but the Dionysiac dance, which comes from a collective inner rhythm there is some sort of immersion in the rhythm a fluency where the intellect remains obscured by an internal mythical force which is individual and

collective (actually it is not possible to establish such a distinction). The images are mobile, fast, fleeting the immersion in the rhythm is a purely creative act, an art it is also, like all acts of expressive creativity, a creator of images9 (1965) This passage recalls Nietzsche's concept of the merging of the Apollonian force an individual creative energy that reveals itself in images as pleasurable as dreamed images and its Dionysiac counterpart the collective delight of intoxication also achieved through music and dance. Also, Oiticicas writings on his experiences with samba dance emphasize the collective character of those popular performances and its function as demolisher of prejudices and social barriers. He participated in the Carnival parades as a member of Mangueira School and took part in the yearlong rehearsals at Mangueira Hill, where he improved his dance skills to the level of passista, the top performer of complex samba steps. Nietzsche too identified a social role emanating from Dionysiac forces, which would awake naturally with music or intoxication and, growing in intensity, break barriers between man and man, substituting notions of individuality by a collective sense, a return to a primordial unity: in song and dance man expresses himself as a member of a higher community; he has forgotten how to walk and speak and is on the way toward flying into the air, dancing He is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art.10 Dance, laughter, and flight are recurrent metaphors in Nietzsche's writings. In Thus Spoke Zarathustra flying and defying gravity are examples of liberation from rules and dogmas, and the ecstatic states Nietzsche describes are very similar to Oiticica's joyful accounts on samba and dance: I would believe only a

god who could dance Now I am light, now I fly, now I see myself beneath myself, now a god dances through me.11 The creative stance proposed by Oiticica through dance is not, as carnival is often seen, opium for the people, or distraction from misery, but a vehicle for change. Some of the Parangol capes play with the awareness of suffering and simultaneous aesthetic joy, including verses like I embody revolt, I am possessed, We live of adversity, Cape of Freedom, We are hungry. The work of art, for Oiticica, should switch from a position of transcendence to one of immanence, stressing the participators full state of being in this world. As he stated, dance does not propose an escape from this immanent world but reveals it in its plenitude what would be for Nietzsche a Dionysian intoxication is in fact an expressive awareness of the immanence of the act, this act being characterized not by partiality but by its totality a total expression of the self. Wouldnt this be the founding stone of art?12

Nildo of Mangueira with Parangol P15 Cape 11, I Embody Revolt, 1967. photo: Desdmone Bardin The pictures of Nildo of Mangueira with P15 cape 11, I Embody Revolt explain well Oiticicas ideas. The photographs suggest the dancer's movements with the heavy,

burdensome cape. With pillows hanging on his chest and back, Nildo both moves and is moved by the cape. If worn in a static way, the cape is weighty and constricting, but as one dances its weight adds energy to the movement and launches the performer further up, revealing the red pillow with the verse I Embody Revolt below. In Portuguese, and especially in the context of Brazilian candombl, to embody (incorporar) conveys spiritual aspects, to embody a super-natural entity. Oiticica's cape substitutes the metaphysical entity with a political stance, Nildo's body being guided not by a candombl spirit, but rather by social revolt and by the weight of the cape he wears, an artistic guidance.

Nildo of Mangueira with Parangol P17, Cape 13, I am Possessed, 1967. photo: In another picture, Nildo dresses in a black toga, Parangol P17 Cape 13, I am Possessed from 1967, and in this more Dionysiac instance he is possessed by the intoxicating spirit of dance, as demonstrated by his ample movement and the ballet-like gesture of his left hand. The semi- transparent attachment ends on a stuffed bag, again provoking sensorial interaction and extra impetus to his action. The sentence I am possessed works also as a warning, an announcement that he is in a change-making, impulsive state, a superman ready to be propelled by the weight of the cape.

Also in a Dionysiac fashion, often times Oiticica engaged in a cycle of creation and destruction, in which he invented a new concept and later angrily rejected it after its absorption by mainstream media. Such was the case with the installation Tropiclia, presented in 1967 at the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro. The main module of the piece was a penetrable, an environment made of cheap curtains, with tropical plants, living macaws, and objects and materials that the viewer steps on or touches (little stones, sand, carpet). At the end of the labyrinth, the participant encountered a dark room with a TV set switched on that, in contrast to the previous environments and tactile experiences provoked a cultural and sensorial rupture. With Tropiclia, Oiticica was not defending the narrow view that foreign elements would destroy the local culture actually he praised and paid homage to foreign artists throughout his life but rejecting what he called the unacceptable Aryanism of Brazilian culture, proposing that an authentic Brazilian culture would only be born from the absorption of North American and European cultures by the Indian and African cultures of Brazil.13 With its tropical plants and macaws, Tropiclia intended to counter the folklorization of these elements. Oiticica declared that he used the same materials usually employed in the cultural camouflage and folkloric characterizations of Brazil to propose the search for a structural-root and not a mere image of the country.14 The word root was problematic for Oiticica and entered his text as structure and not origin: There are people who spend the whole day looking for roots, which is what one should extract, it's a very dangerous thing. It's incestuous to look for roots; it's like searching for the uterus again. Why search for the uterus again? When its enough to have been born, to be out of the uterus, why wish a return to the uterus.15

Oiticica struggled to create a language complex enough to be Brazilian and at the same time escape the absorption, the inclusion in the stereotype, establishing a perpetually unfixed characterization, rejoicing in what some academic discourses have placed as a flaw, a lack, the issue of Latin American post-colonial search for identity. In a carnivalesque fashion and inheriting from the modernist Anthropophagic movement from the 1920s in Brazil, Oiticica inverted the discourse and empowered Brazilian culture with a positive attitude of eternally repeating a circle of appropriations and creation, as opposed to stagnating itself with a well-defined, immutable cultural identity.16 After spending the Fall of 1969 as an artist in residence at Sussex University, in Brighton, Oiticica returned to Rio, only to leave again at the end of 1970, when he received a Guggenheim fellowship and moved to New York City.17 While living in New York, in the early seventies, Oiticica played even more explicitly with the concept of the overman and of the superman. In a photograph from 1972, his friend Romero stands, heroically, with the Parangol Cape 26 still flowing behind him, as if he had just landed on that spot, and the angle of the picture confers upon him a super-human quality.

Romero with Parangol Cape 26, New York City, 1972. photo: Andreas Valentin

While the Parangols from the sixties relate to magic and transformation through the metaphor of possession and of the Dionysiac, these capes and photographs developed during his American exile suggest transformation through a connection to American cartoons. Likewise, during the early seventies, rock substituted samba in Oiticica's work, as he was very interested in the Rolling Stones and Jimi Hendrix. Brett observes like samba, rock was euphoric dance.18 Oiticica's writings from this phase also became more chaotic, intense, bi-lingual, and neologistic. The work of Nietzsche continues to appear in some of Oiticica's notes, side-by-side new influences and inventions. The Dionysiac intoxication returns in the form of cocaine in a new kind of work that makes reference to pop culture icons. In Cosmococa, CC5 Hendrix-War, from 1973, the face of the rock musician, associated with the concept of the hero in the original text that accompanied the picture, is outlined by cocaine. Also part of this series, the standard Pop art image, the face of Marilyn Monroe, receives a layer of cocaine above the mouth and eyes, areas usually offset in Warhol's works. The medium itself is intoxicating and, as pointed out by Brett the work becomes the support both for the graphical manipulation and for the consumption of the substance. The images of the Cosmococa series were filmed and were supposed to be seen as a slide show in leisure-oriented environments.19

Quasi-cinema, Block-experiments in Cosmococa CC5 Hendrix-War, 1973. photo: Andreas Valentin

The faces covered by white lines recall, at once, Nietzsche's concept of the mask and, in its similarity to tribal face painting, the warriors who, for Nietzsche, are those who fight against established values and overcome man. Brett mentions that Oiticica named these masks mancoquilagens, from Manco Capac, the Inca whose names incorporates COCA, and maquilagens, make-up.20

Parangol SomethinFa the Head 2, 1974. photo: Andreas Valentin. A sketch page from 1974 shows the design for a head Parangol, and a description, in English, of a photo-event featuring a red head Parangol that would mask the participants' faces. Oiticica transcribed a text on the right of the drawing from Nietzsche's The Will to Power: Nietzsche states in The Will to Power (p.412, Vintage Giant)() individualism is the most modest stage of the will to power. hum! yeah! Necessary but yet modest! Romero: listen!: victor you shall be! And further in Nietzsche (idem, p.451) (...) Those imposing artists who let a harmony sound forth from every conflict are those who bestow upon things their own power and self-redemption: they express their innermost experience in the symbolism of every work of art they produce their creativity is gratitude for their existence. The profundity of the tragic artist lies in this,

that his aesthetic instinct surveys the more remote consequences, that he does not halt shortsightedly at what is closely at hand, that he affirms the large scale economy which justifies the terrifying, the evil, the questionable and more than merely justifies them.21 The mask is a concept that appears in several of Nietzsche's works. In The Birth of Tragedy the mask explains the appearance in Greek tragedy of several heroes who are actually masquerades of Dionysus. In the following passage from The Birth of Tragedy, the hero, entangled in a net of individualism, recalls immediately the head Parangol: Greek tragedy in its earliest form had for its sole theme the sufferings of Dionysus himself. But it may be claimed with equal confidence that until Euripides, Dionysus never ceased to be the tragic hero; that all the celebrated figures of the Greek stage Prometheus, Oedipus, etc. - are masks of this original hero, Dionysus [T]he only truly Dionysus appears in a variety of forms, in the mask of a fighting hero, and entangled, as it were, in the net of the individual will.22 While the figure of Apollo appears in The Birth of Tragedy, from 1871, the Dionisyac constitutes the concept around which Nietzsches oeuvre was developed until the time of his collapse in Turin in 1889. The Dionysian is the symbol of Nietzsche's world-view, a life-affirming force that will be eternally reborn and return again from destruction, as explained in the following posthumously published fragment of 1888: The word Dionysian is: an urge to unity, a reach out beyond personality, the everyday, society, reality, across the abyss of transitoriness: a passionate-painful overflowing into darker, fuller, more floating states; an ecstatic affirmation of the total character of life as that which remains the same, just as powerful, just as blissful, throughout all change; the great pantheistic sharing of joy and sorrow that sanctifies and calls good even the most terrible

and questionable qualities of life; the eternal will to procreation, to fruitfulness, to recurrence; the feeling of the necessary unity of creation and destruction.23
Oiticica refers to the ever-affirming Dionysiac character of art in a letter to Lygia Clark from 1974: One can be incompetent in everything in life, except in what one does! Never! Again, it is Nietzsche who brilliantly says that the artist is never a pessimistic, for even in times of crisis he only says YES [SIM], and his life and activity and the horrible are approached in a variety of YESs [SIMS] (or sins24) far from losses and anantissement25; 26

A text by Oiticica from 1979 also mentions Oiticicas proximity to the concept of the Dionysiac. In What I do is Music he writes: for Nietzsche the discovery of art (or of what art is) is the discovery of something stronger than pessimism, of something more divine than truth I found that what I do is music and that music is not one of the arts but the synthesis of the consequences of the discovery of the body: Thats why rock, for instance, became most important for my placing the key problems of creation in check (Samba, in which I initiated myself came along with this discovery of the body in the early sixties: Parangol and dance were born together, and it is impossible to separate one from the other) wouldnt experiences as diverse and radically rich in the art of the first half of the century as those of MALEVICH KLEE MONDRIAN BRANCUSI have been directed to this synthesis MUSIC-plastic totality? but this is left to a larger text somewhere else since the subject is very complex and points to what Nietzsche conceived as being the tragic artist (that, contrary to the general thought is not the reassembling of the Greek Apollonian-Dionysiac artist but something that did not exist before in its plenitude and only now starts to emerge in its entirety and totality).27

In What I do is Music, Oiticica seems to be offering one possible answer to the question Nietzsche raised in 1886: what would a music have to be like that would no longer be of romantic origin, like German music but Dionysian?28 The convergence of Oiticicas work and Nietzsches thought will certainly be even clearer as more writings by the Brazilian artist become public. Understanding the work of the authors he so avidly read (and Nietzsche is only one of them) and studying his interpretation of such texts opens new ways to see his creations.

Notes 1 See Wally Salomo, Hlio Oiticica: Qual o Parangol, Relume Dumar, Rio de Janeiro, 1996, p 96. The author recalls Oiticicas explanation about his intellectual background: I am Nietzsches son and Artaud stepson. I read Nietzsche since I was 13 years-old. 2 Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1976, p 568. 3. Commenting on his first book, Nietzsche wrote in 1886: Already in the preface to Richard Wagner, art, and not morality, is presented as the truly metaphysical activity of man. In the book itself the suggestive sentence is repeated several times, that the existence of the world is justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon. Indeed, the whole book knows only an artistic meaning and crypto-meaning behind all event. Friedrich

Nietzsche, Attempt at a Self-Criticism in The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York 1967, p 22. 4. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1976, p 406. 5. ibid, pp 163-164. 6. Hlio Oiticica, Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 1986, p 77. All quotes from this source were translated by the author unless otherwise noted. 7. ibid, p 71. 8. Hlio Oiticica, Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 1986, p 78 as translated in Guy Brett and others, eds., Hlio Oiticica, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art Rotterdam, 1993, p 103. 9. Hlio Oiticica, Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 1986, p 73. 10. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann ,Vintage Books, New York, 1967, pp 36-37. 11. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1976, p 153. 12. Hlio Oiticica, Aspiro ao Grande Labirinto, Rocco, Rio de Janeiro, 1986, p 74. 13. ibid, 108. 14. ibid, 116. 15. Hlio Oiticica, cited in Carlos Zilio, Da Antropofagia Tropicalia in O Nacional e o Popular na Cultura Brasileira, ed. Adauto Novaes, Brasiliense, So Paulo, 1982, p 40. Translated by the author.

16. The

first modernist ideas appeared in Brazilian art in the 1920s, in a series of

exhibitions, avant-garde magazines and manifestos that sought to apply international artistic developments to Brazilian subject matter. In 1928, the poet Oswald de Andrade issued the Anthropophagite Manifesto and the Anthropophagite Magazine, employing the metaphor of the cannibal to develop a theory about the ambiguous relationship between Brazilian native culture and international influences. The cannibal eats the powerful opponent not out of revenge or out of hunger, but as a ceremonial act of absorbing the force of the admired enemy, and as homage to the defeated individual. Andrade proposed that Brazilian artists should add some aspects of European art to their indigenous culture, digesting all influences to create something strong and new. 17. To follow the chronology of Hlio Oiticicas trips to London and New York, see his letters to Lygia Clark published in Lygia Clark and Hlio Oiticica. Cartas 1964-74, org. Luciano Figueiredo, Editora da UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 1998. 18. Guy Brett, The Experimental Exercise of Liberty, in Guy Brett and others, eds., Hlio Oiticica, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 1993, p 234. 19. ibid, 235 20. ibid. 21. The first publication of this drawing appears in Guy Brett and others, eds., Hlio Oiticica, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, and Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art, Rotterdam, 1993, pp 170-171. 22. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1967, p 73.

23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, ed. and trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1968, p 539. 24. In English in the original. Oiticica is playing with the word sim, which means yes in Portuguese and the graphically similar sin, in a linguistic summary of Nietzsches life-long fight against the life-denying doctrine of Christianity. 25. Despair, in French in the original. 26. Lygia Clark and Hlio Oiticica. Cartas 1964-74, org. Luciano Figueiredo, Editora da UFRJ, Rio de Janeiro, 1998, p 242. Translated by the author. 27. Hlio Oiticica, O q Fao Msica, November 1979, in the catalogue of the exhibition of same title, Galeria So Paulo, So Paulo, Brazil, 1986. Translated by the author. 28. Friedrich Nietzsche, Attempt at a Self-Criticismin The Birth of Tragedy and the Case of Wagner, trans. Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, New York, 1967, p 25.

Paula Priscila Braga Institutional Address: Museu de Arte Contempornea da Universidade de So Paulo Rua da Reitoria, 160 Cidade Universitria 05508-900 So Paulo SP Brazil

Home Address: R. Passo da Patria, 1407 ap. 82- A1 05085-902 So Paulo SP Brazil

e-mail: pbraga@usp.br Phone: +55 11 3835-2547 Fax.: +55 11 3091-3023

Biography: Paula Braga received her B.A. in Painting and M.A. in Art History from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (USA), having previously graduated in Computer Science at the University of So Paulo, Brazil. She currently carries out doctoral studies at the University of So Paulo, Brazil, and is a staff member of the Museum of Contemporary Art of the University of So Paulo.