AYRSON HERÁCLITO (BRAZIL)
Ayrson Heráclito (b. 1968, Macaúbas, Bahia, Brazil) is an artist, curator, and professor who deals with elements of Afro-Brazilian culture in installation, performance, photography, and video. He often incorporates culinary elements with local significance to reference Bahia’s regional history and makes transnational references to Africa and its influences on Brazilian society through his use of palm oil, sugar, and dried beef. Through his installations and performances, Heráclito draws from many of the familiar signs and themes of the Afro-Brazilian religion Candomblé, while taking a more conceptual approach to the subject matter.
Heráclito obtained a Master in Visual Arts at the Universidade Federal da Bahia (UFBA), Salvador and PhD in Communication and Semiotics at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), Brazil.
Heráclito lives and works between Cachoeira and Salvador, Bahia, Brazil.
FUNFUN
Theme: Mythology |
Year: 2012 |
Thursday, 3 November 2016 |
Duration (mins): 4:08 |
Funfun is a requiem based on shots from the wake for Estelita de Souza Santana, lifetime leader of the Sisterhood of Our Lady of the Good Death from Cachoeira, Bahia, who passed away at the age of 105.
In the two-channel video installation, the image’s double nature is far more than an aesthetic choice: it obeys significant concepts that emerge from Ayrson Heráclito’s artistic and spiritual practices. The artist’s recurrent employment of pairs generates symbolic associations through split screens, photographic diptychs, and mirror images. In the film Funfun, such strategy materializes in the kaleidoscopic editing of the image, revealing a connection between the herons and the black priestesses as inspired by a local myth.
The imagery is embedded in the symbology of the colour white (funfun in Yoruba language), commonly associated with purity, maturity, and wisdom, and present in the garments worn by the black god Obatalá, who reigns over the Yoruba deities’ pantheon.
Out of a profusion of symbols and signifiers deeply rooted in the culture of Bahia, the association of white beads and the line of the horizon become the poetic expression of the artist’s own funeral rite.
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Country: Brazil. Genre: Video installation. CREW: Production: Ayrson Heráclito. Cinematography and Camera: Ayrson Heráclito. Edition: Ayrson Heráclito. Music: João Omar. Soundtrack mix: João Omar. Image post-production: Ayrson Heráclito. Coordination of post-production: Ayrson Heráclito. Graphic Design: Ayrson Heráclito
