BRAZILIAN WOOD
2022-2023, Brazil/Germany. Video, color, sound, 23’18”.
2022-2023, Brazil/Germany. Video, color, sound, 23’18”.
"Pau-Brasil: from colour to sound" takes as its starting point the tree that lends its name to the country of Brazil, its first resource exploited by Portuguese colonisers in the Americas. Beginning in fifteenth-century Europe, the wood became widely used in the production of violin bows worldwide. Due to its historical and current overexploitation, it is a highly endangered species. The dependence of traditional violin bow production on the endangered species Pau-Brasil and the increasing mass production of bows have led to an international socio-environmental conflict. It seems to me that the case study of this specific material, as well as its history of circulation, use and risk of extinction, can raise important and poetic connections for the writing of an alternative history of the wood and some relations between Brazil and Germany. Moreover, the two year artistic research also proposes a critical dialogue with the centenary of Brazilian modernism from 1922, and one of its most famous manifestos: the Pau-Brasil manifesto.
The project was developed within the Berlin Artistic Research Programme, of which Barbara Marcel was a fellow between 2022 and 2023.
