Odete wants to “destroy the performative display that transforms our bodies into commodities” and “lie about history so that we can remodel the future”. The project “On Revelations and Muddy Becomings” is the culmination of a work about shadows and politics which Odete, a multidisciplinary artist that operates within the spheres of music, visual arts, performance and theatre, has been creating.

“On Revelations and Muddy Becomings” is constituted by three elements – a magical book, a video-game and a performance – that relate to each other and count on the collaboration and performance by Tita Maravilha, Herlander and Odete herself. Set in a future archive of planet Earth, this piece creates and inhabits a fictional territory where archaeology is involved, where the ancestral body is somatically brought to the present, where poems are rituals and ghosts can laugh. Among oils and magical dildos, hermaphrodite goddesses and interplanetary travel, the performers care for each other, uncovering perhaps a community beyond the truths of history.

Odete fictionalises a secret society linked to names like Joan of Arc, Eliogabalus or Chevalier D’Eon. Through a number of symbols and secrets passed from generation to generation, the artist speculates about this occult group that has remained undiscovered by historians or archaeologists. A critical approach to historical silence, around questions of the body, gender identity and the queer universe.

The project was the winner of the first edition of RExFORM – Projeto Internacional de Performance, which is the result of a collaboration between BoCA and maat.