Yuri Firmeza: Agapanto Sísmico
After premiering in Portugal in 2022, this is the first time that Yuri Firmeza's film Seismic Agapanthus is shown in Brazil. Occupying Athena's Sala Casa, this work was commissioned during the Fuso Insular artist residency in São Miguel Island, Portugal, with the objective of promoting a connection between the island's landscape and the people who inhabit it, offering a new look and a new discourse that enriches the artistic heritage of the Azores. The project was produced by Duplacena.
Taking a popular festivity as its starting point - the traditional “Saint Peter's Cavalcades” - Firmeza proposes a speculative fiction about the relationship between this patron saint, a natural disaster (the image of Saint Peter and the church after which he was named were unharmed by the Pico do Sapateiro volcanic eruption that occurred in the 16th century), the colonial past, religiosity, and (re)staging the cavalcades for the present time.
The compilation of experiences about a volcanic eruption, an act of faith in Saint Peter's Cavalcades, the re-enacted empire, and nature surveillance technologies are all intertwined during the 18 minutes of Seismic Agapanthus. Such a plot is no exception in Firmeza's research, which proposes a deepening of investigations that evoke various possibilities for reflection on temporality, memory, individual and collective experiences, pushing the limits between fiction, the possible, and the real.
"I was out of Brazil for four years. Producing Seismic Agapanthus during my residency on São Miguel Island was a way to once again understand historical asymmetries, and their colonial violences in the relationship between Brazil and Portugal. The Azorean presence in Brazil is significant, therefore, after so many years of being geographically distant, going to the Azores was, in some way, revisiting Brazil as well," says Yuri Firmeza.
For the Brazilian premiere of Seismic Agapanthus, the Sala Casa also includes a TV with the video Prologue - a nearly seven-minute scene, of which only an excerpt was used in the final version of the film.
Tendo como ponto de partida um festejo popular - as tradicionais Cavalhadas de São Pedro -, Firmeza propõe uma ficção especulativa sobre a relação entre este santo padroeiro, um desastre natural (a imagem de São Pedro e a igreja a que deu o nome saíram ilesas da erupção vulcânica ocorrida no Pico do Sapateiro no século 16), o passado colonial, a religiosidade e a (re)encenação das cavalhadas para o tempo presente.
