© HP IBAX hans peter diop ibaghino

​

​​

​

To Remember Not to Die emerges from the desire to create not a piece, but an amulet: a magical gesture capable of restoring vitality to what seems irreversibly lost. From the unfolding of the image of a freshly slaughtered deer carcass at the center of a red forest clearing, the solo asks: how can something be brought back to life? More than reanimating a dead body, it seeks to reactivate interrupted futures, wounded pasts, exhausted hopes — gradually fabricating a magical body made of remnants, echoes, and insistent fictions.

​

In Brazil, the word veado [deer] carries both the violence and the power of also naming a queer body like mine. It is within this mirroring between carcass and identity that the work finds its necromantic force. The piece invokes fiction as a radical political technology: a collision between inner and outer worlds that allows the imagining of the invisible, the unspeakable, and the untouchable. If insisting on mouth-to-mouth resuscitation over a carcass seems useless, what matters here is not the miracle of the outcome, but the intensity of the kiss — the decision to insist, to desire, to imagine life where everything announces death.

Inspired by the enchanted cunning of the Curupira — who walks with his feet turned backwards to mislead the hunter — the solo activates the principle of n o t b e i n g c a p t u r e d. Repeating this spell until death loses its authority. Blurring one’s own footprints. Devouring the joyful, fantastic flesh of what should never have been hunted down. Between queer necromancy and anthropophagic metaphysics, the work unfolds as a rite of reanimation and collective protection — a practice of vigilant joy that affirms: perhaps the opposite of death is being awake inside, together.

​

​

*