Brodja Miseri in Buracas do Casmilo
with Miguel de Carvalho, Ody Saban, Bruno Barnabé, Rik Lina and Seixas Peixoto
Buracas do Casmilo, Portugal, 2026
In May, six artists gathered at Buracas do Casmilo, a limestone cave system in the Portuguese interior, for the ultimate collaboration. The experiment failed lamentably. The cause, in hindsight, was simple: the collaboration would succeed the moment the participants entered a state of brodja-miseri*. But none of them knew what the term means. They waited several hours for it to set in. The collective went solo. Only a month later did I come across the word, in a dream where it sounded perfectly self-evident and everyone already knew it. Upon waking it had vanished once more.
* brodja-miseri = the faint giddiness that arises when six people try to be the same name at once.
Portraits
Aranha Napoleão
On a flower at the mouth of the cave, a female crab spider sat motionless over a bee she had caught. The bee was already dead, slowly drained while we worked nearby. She had waited, and her waiting had been rewarded, which was more than could be said for the six of us inside.
Magic Carpet Ride
The film and the three photographs show one of the works we made together: a large sheet of cardboard the others had painted. My own contribution was small. I picked the daisies growing in front of the cave and fixed them to the board with acrylic. Then I let a thick rope fall onto the cardboard at random. Once everything had dried, I carried it to the edge of the cave. Earlier, in the Brodja Miseri film, you can see me throwing paper planes into the gorge. Now it was the cardboard's turn. So I launched it, and our flying carpet went down like one more paper plane, until it crashed below with a bang.