ARDER ÉPICA (CAP. 1)
Reinaldo RibeiroSunday 10 May 18:30h
City of Culture | CINC Building
The fire that consumed the National Museum of Brazil in 2018 did not only destroy artefacts: it devoured memories. From the ashes, ARDER ÉPICA.
Who assumes responsibility for that loss?
And what happens if we are no longer here to tell HISTORY?
Who will tell it for us?
In response to the official narratives that the fire silenced forever, and traversed by a family secret, Reinaldo Ribeiro creates a lecture-performance in which the body becomes both voice and contested territory. ARDER ÉPICA honours orality as an ancestral technology for telling what archives could not preserve.
Through fabulation, ritual and the feminine, the work inhabits the border space between loss and archival absence: the public and the private. It is not a reconstruction, but a reconfiguration. An alternative epic that challenges patriarchal narratives of memory and proposes new ways of remembering from the collective, the corporeal, the sacred and the feminine.
ARDER ÉPICA is the final chapter of a trilogy that Reinaldo Ribeiro began from the end towards the beginning: 3, 2, 1. Chapter 3, addressing his experience of Blackness, and Chapter 2, exploring the spectator’s gaze towards otherness, were presented at Escenas do Cambio 2025. Now, in Chapter 1, he shares his intimacy in a public act, ‘as a sabotage of a patriarchal system founded on silence and lies’.
Reinaldo Ribeiro
Brazilian artist — ‘Transoceanic · Conceptual Bitch · Afrofuturist Lover’. His work moves between choreography, live arts and what he calls cosmic perreo. He explores what he defines as the 4P concept: the relationship between the political, the poetic, the personal and the pathetic. He has a particular interest in expanded performance and in practices and projects that activate decolonial thinking and ways of seeing. He is a creator and performer, and co-founder of the collective Lamajara (Barcelona).