Salvar o homem de si mesmo
Residency
Vila-Sul Residence, Salvador, Brazil
Sept. 2025 - Nov. 2025
In collaboration with Goethe Institut and Music Board Berlin, I was awarded a scholarship to go and spend 2 months in Brazil researching the different underground music scenes from the city. In this two month period, I collaborated with local music and art institutions, including Prackatum, Ennio, Alt Blck Collective and performed at the International Artvism conference.
I also presented my work Salvar o homem de si mesmo // (to save man from himself) a collaboration between myself, local Peixador Leo Papel and costume designer Celeste. The work aimed to present fluid art forms as a form of resistance, with the final project being presented at the Museum of Modern Art (MAM), Salvador.
About the work:
"Salvar o homem de si mesmo" is a project that brings together multiple art practices around the narratives of resistance and transformation found in Salvador. It combines the languages of musical improvisation, pixação’s and pajubá to explore themes of otherness, of the unseen and as art as forms of resistance.
For this work, Henry collaborated with Leo Papel, one of the many peixador’s of Savaldor. Peixador’s are artists who are rarely seen but are able to transform the city through their own stories and acts as a form of resistance. With the city's concrete walls often in a state of flux, their work is one of impermanence and constant transformation whilst also being an integral part of the foundations of the city. Drawing on the many parallels between peixa and improvisation, Papel’s work provides the backdrop to Henry’s own musical performance.
Henry has also collaborated with Celeste Victorio to create a piece inspired by unseen bodies. Inspired by indigenous mythology of the boto, the veil, covered with pixação, acts as its own mode of transformation into the world of the other. This is part of Henry’s own exploration of gender identity, the freeing nature of gender fluidity and the need to escape normal expectations. The work uses words from pajubá, a language born out of necessity for trans and non-binary people to express themselves and avoid persecution from the state. Both pajubá and pixação’s are connected by being spiritual technologies of resistance, born out of working-class struggles to express the needs of unseen bodies.
More broadly, the performance aims to highlight forms of resistance that are needed to fight draconian forms of power often put in place as a thin veil of protecting people. Often, “otherness” in any form is seen as a danger and is persecuted to keep patriarchal power in place. This is a celebration of the otherness, the strange, and also acts as a gratitude to the city which provided so much inspiration in such a short space of time.
