© Carlos Valverde ; Markus Garscha
The Last Archive
On September 2, 2018, a fire devastated the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro (MNRJ), reducing nearly ninety percent of its cultural heritage to ruins. The museum’s collection comprised more than twenty million items, including one of the world’s most significant holdings of Indigenous artifacts, as well as historical objects from Afro-Brazilian and Pacific cultures, Egyptian relics, and works from Greco-Roman antiquity. In the aftermath of this catastrophe, urgent questions emerge: How can someone who has never visited the museum gain access to a heritage that no longer exists? How can one evoke or visit a museum without a collection or even a building? To explore these questions, individuals were invited to speak about an object from the museum that, for one reason or another, holds personal significance for them. Through oral testimony, embodied gestures, and the sensory dimension of these narratives, a museum emerges that transcends its material form. The artistic outcome of this research is The Last Archive, currently in development.
The residency hosted by Santarcangelo Festival will end with a public sharing and debate with the local community of Santarcangelo di Romagna.
Credits
Authors Carolina Bonfim, Flavio Rodrigo
Performer Flavio Rodrigo
With the support of Wallonie-Brussels International
Carolina Bonfim & Flavio Rodrigo
Carolina Felice Bonfim is a brazilian artist, researcher, and educator. She holds a practice-based PhD at the Université libre de Bruxelles and ENSAV La Cambre and develops an interdisciplinary practice combining performance, text, photography, and video. Her work explores the invisible archives of the body and memory, inventing sensitive and experimental modes of transmission and translation. Her artistic, pedagogical, and research work has been presented in the form of performances, exhibitions, and workshops in Belgium (La Bellone, Musée L, Théâtre de Liège / Société Libre d’Émulation, Hôtel van de Velde / La Cambre), France (Centre national de danse contemporaine d’Angers, Saline Royale d’Arc-et-Senans) Spain (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Vigo, Fundació Miró, Museo de Arte Contemporáneo de Castilla y León, La Capella, Arts Santa Mònica, Graner – Centre de creació del cos i el moviment, La Poderosa, among others), Argentina (Museo de Arte Contemporáneo del Sur), Colombia (Lugar a dudas), Canada (Concordia University), and Brazil (Casa do Povo, Centro Cultural São Paulo, Teatro Arena, SESC, Galeria A Gentil Carioca, among others). She currently teaches at the École supérieure des Arts Saint-Luc Liège and collaborates regularly with other artists.
Flavio Rodrigo is a Brazilian artist, educator, and researcher based in Brussels. His interdisciplinary practice combines performance, video, and dramaturgy to explore memory, queer bodies, and speculative storytelling. He creates immersive works that investigate the relationships between the body, pedagogy, and contemporary narratives. Recent projects include The Last Archive of the National Museum of Rio de Janeiro (2022-present), Fantasma Pédé (2022), and The Ghost Scar (2019–2024). His work has been presented internationally, including at A.PASS (2020), ERG (2021 and 2022), the Pink Screens Festival (2022), Société libre d’Émulation in Liège, Festival Éclats at Beursschouwburg, the ARIC International Congress at Université Laval (Québec, 2023), SI Cinéma – Festival de Caen (2024), and the Holland Festival in Amsterdam (2024). In 2020, he was awarded the PROAC program, a brazilian public grant supporting artistic creation, for the project Kuradorya.