In her essay, Lena Giuliano tells how she ended up writing obituaries for people very much alive around Europe. She took her work Writing on someone’s grave to all the three annual events of the One-to-One art project, in Finland, Croatia and Portugal. Was it different to die in the different corners of Europe?
writing on Europeans’ grave
Lena Giuliano
OBITUARY
Keumbyul Lim died in the middle of the road. She was travelling once again, as she did many many times. She experienced the cold of Antarctica and the heat of the desert. She saw the immensity of Earth in so many textures and colors. The animals by the road watched her death. It was Keumbyul’s last performance. They danced and sang after eating her body. Her loved ones noticed she was gone because she didn’t call them to say goodnight, as she did everyday. All the people, nature and animals can say it back to her now: good night, Keumbyul.
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Roosa died from a walnut, the sweetest walnut she ever had. She made it prepare to die a calm and tasty death. On her food, she was kind of a bird. But also on her freedom. Roosa had important research on the relation between art and nature and created beautiful artworks inspired by such as beautiful landscapes. Now, Roosa is probably flying out there as a bird, playing with little balls, eating nuts and visiting forests and funerals.
OBITUARY
Timo died surrounded by lovely people. There were lots of hands willing to hold his. In life, he organized lots of events, but his funeral was not one of those. His children throw him a beautiful celebration. Timo swam in different lakes, rivers and seas, touched the softest hairs, tasted the coldest snowflakes and wrote the most passionate love poems dedicated to his children, who read it all at the funeral.
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A young woman in her early twenties, with pink hair and eye-catching earrings and rings, welcomes you into a room. That woman is me — about to write your obituary. You’ve probably been waiting outside for a while, watching people leave the room every twenty minutes, visibly moved, as if they had just met with a healer. I sit at a small table, where a typewriter, a lamp, and a few papers are scattered. Next to me stands an open, empty coffin, quietly inviting you inside. In just a few minutes, it will be you lying there. “Writing on Someone’s Grave” is the only performance piece that connected all three points of the One-to-One Art project: the residency at Kuca Klajn in Klanjec, Croatia; the Keha Festival in Oulu, Finland; and the One-to-One Festival in Oeiras, Portugal. Later, in March 2025, I spent eight days writing obituaries during the Farofa do Processo showcase in São Paulo — the city where I was born, raised, and still live today.
First, I invite you to sit in the armchair across from me. I introduce myself and explain how it works: I’ll ask you a few questions about your life and death — you can answer however you wish, with truths, lies, or pure invention. Then, I’ll invite you to lie down in the coffin while I write your obituary based on what you shared. I hand you a piece of paper and ask you to write your name — exactly as you want it to appear in the text. Some people write their full names; others use only a nickname; the more superstitious invent a completely fictional name. When I ask for your age, it’s often where I sense if someone is lying — fake ages rarely match their faces.
Then come the deeper questions, asked always with kindness, curiosity, and careful listening, trying to create a space where you can be as comfortable as possible: What are your dreams and aspirations? Is there something that you really enjoy doing, that you want to do until your last day alive? What do you think there is after death? If you could choose, how would you choose to die? Do you have any wishes for your body after you have died? And do you have any wishes for your funeral? At the end of our ten-minute conversation, I ask you to choose two songs to play while you lie down inside the coffin, that will be played out loud, on a speaker, just like at a funeral. That’s the time I have to write your obituary. When I’m done, I take a photo, read it aloud to you, and hand over the text. Now, it belongs to you.
The end of the performances does not have standing ovations. It’s a funny interaction. Usually, people thank or compliment me in a kind of feedback while lying inside the coffin. Most get up and give me a hug. Or they stay a little longer and ask me to take a picture of them inside the coffin. When they leave the room, the absence of the audience and the silence of the music expand. And I remain alone for a few minutes, next to the coffin (sometimes I lie down to take a nap, already drained of its meaning).
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OBITUARY
Danielle Toney is now a pink vibration somewhere in the universe. If you pay attention, you could hear some intense music, maybe with a piano or a flute. It makes you wanna dance in a weird way. Why am I dancing to this song? Danielle was full of joy and great answers. She received many love letters after drowning. Her students were shocked, but she enjoyed floating on clear water. Danielle experienced everything. Felt all the most intense emotions. Her funeral was a reunion to listen to her favourite songs in an ancient forest, where her ashes were thrown. Maybe Danielle will grow into a pink flower.
OBITUARY
Anna-Kaisa has passed along with the sun, watching the night arrive through the window of her room. She was having wine and listening to her own music, an album with a reunion of all her greatest hits. At her funeral, people danced, sang and got drunk to celebrate her life. Anna-Kaisa broke the family superstition and had a long and peaceful life with her sister. Now, they are both growing into big trees by a beautiful river. In silence, they can still hear people laughing.
OBITUARY
Mari died out of the blue in a public park in Oulu. They were turned into an apple tree on the same spot, where children play and run and adults collect fruits to bake apple pies. Mari had a long life full of love. They had great conversations with loved ones, watched lots of great pieces in theatre and ate food so good that made them dance. Despite being a fan of Peter Pan, Mari’s soul and energy are still growing up. Unlike the lost kids, they were very well located in life and death Mari loved and was loved by their friends and family. The apple doesn’t fall far from the tree.
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When getting up from the coffin, people often ask me where the idea for the performance came from. And the truth is, I don’t really know how to answer. Death has never been a subject that particularly caught my attention. I was never afraid of death. In fact, I always felt it like a friend. And it was only while developing and doing this work that I realized how much death tends to scare people. From people who didn’t even want to enter a room because the scenic coffin was stored there, to others who already found me strange just by hearing about the idea. It’s morbid, funereal, macabre, scary. At the beginning of 2024, I did a theater play where I wrote obituaries for dogs based on their tutors’ accounts. The first obituary was written sitting in a park — where the show took place — right after the conversation about a dog who had died. I quickly scribbled it down on a clipboard. From there, I started envisioning ideas for performances that would begin with someone else’s story and end with a text written quickly in front of them. But there was a question I couldn’t figure out: what would people do while I was writing?
That’s when I went back to the idea of obituaries, and with them, the coffin. So death, in fact, came as an excuse for me to be able to write. But for the audience, death is what calls the most attention. Some people said that sitting in front of me was like sitting in front of death and telling it their wishes, in an almost soothing way. Death was listening carefully and smiling. They also said that the obituary became almost a goal. “I want a death like the one you wrote.” The obituaries always carry a hopeful character. Depending on the openness I sense in each person, I feel more or less freedom to write comedic passages or to exaggerate the facts of death. All texts carry a great load of hope — after all, everyone has the same desires. I came across very few people who were intimately boring, uninteresting, or bad — here, I use this rough word to refer to someone whose intimate desires, even if naively, could harm others. When this happened, it was quite sad. In these cases, I keep my frustrations to myself and listen without apparent judgment. I still write an obituary wanting that person to like it, respecting that other person’s wishes. However, as a general analysis, the exercise of writing obituaries stirred in me a faith in humanity I didn’t possess before. It’s an ant’s work: helping another person to elaborate their death and, with it, to plan their life, awaken their dreams, and make concrete — even if on paper — the possibility of imagining a future.
Having done almost one hundred and fifty obituaries, I have also heard almost one hundred and fifty imaginaries about death. There are some patterns, especially if we think regionally, which I will elaborate further later. The main thing, however, is that everyone speaks about death as if they were right about it, or as if their thoughts were obvious. Many times, one person would affirm something with absolute certainty, and the very next person would state the exact opposite with the same certainty. I always agree with all of them. In my role as death, beside a coffin, my main goal is always to offer comfort by listening very carefully, paying attention without taking notes, not interrupting people’s reasoning line and not contradicting anything they say, only making questions to delve deeper into their thoughts.Each imaginary is very personal and intimate. Even when people belong to a religion, their elaboration on the dogma is very much their own. And most of the time, people are answering these questions for the first time and improvising a personal philosophy.
A very recurring idea is that of the funeral as a happy celebration, a party. It’s the wish of the great majority. Yet, everyone says something like “I don’t want a sad funeral, like everyone else wants.” Which is funny, because almost no one wants a sad funeral. Many people have playlists ready for their funerals and concrete ideas of objects to leave to loved ones: photos, letters. Others have never thought about the subject and don’t want to. There are very few people who want to be buried in a coffin. Most who want to be buried wish to go directly into contact with the earth, aiming to return to nature; otherwise, the greatest desire is to be cremated. And throw the ashes into seas, streets, and forests, or to turn them into seeds and become trees, or into jewelry to wear, or even to ask friends to smoke them.
As I presented at performing arts festivals, a large part of the audience was made up of cultural workers, which influenced their wishes. The dreams of the majority were related to being an artist. They weren’t just dreams of working, but of achieving personal fulfillment through artistic creation, of achieving fulfillment as a person. Many actors, writers, directors had big dreams but jobs outside the arts in order to survive. Some entered the room more convinced that it would be possible “to live only from art”, others less so. Many ideas of dying in the theater, on stage, or in the audience, or of leaving their ashes in those same places. At the same time, because of the audience profile, little was said about marriage and children. When traditional family dreams appeared, they were timid. Many people talked about living with friends, cats, and dogs. The exercise of talking about your aspirations is very important. It helps to make ideas concrete that seem childish and difficult to achieve. Moreover, reading a text written based on those desires makes them even more possible.
Regarding the choice of the way of dying, the most chosen death by far was dying in one’s sleep. Most people want painless and peaceful deaths. However, there are people who are bothered by the idea of dying during sleep because of the impossibility of living a conscious death. These people speak of getting shot or having a heart attack. Something quick, but awake. Some people want a poetic, almost theatrical death, others want to suffer a terminal illness — without losing lucidity — so they can properly say goodbye. And then, there are my favorites: the ridiculous deaths — from people who want their death to become a joke, a funny story in the family. Dying in the middle of a joke, dying walking down the street when a piano suddenly falls on their head.
The idea of what happens after death divides opinions. Many believe that nothing happens and we materially return to nature; others believe in the idea of reincarnation, and most of them believe we can reincarnate as other beings, not necessarily humans; finally, a large number of people believe in some version of the Christian heaven, without the existence of hell. This heaven mostly has nature, loved ones, music, celebration. And above all, no work or money. More than one person said that “heaven is life without capitalism.” People love life as it is, but they don’t love surviving it, and they see in death a hope for a life “with rest”, as I was told over and over again. The construction of an imaginary of life without capitalism is also important for the anti-capitalist struggle, so that this idea of paradise can be attainable in life, without needing to die first. The exercise of imagining your own death carries various personal and collective political urgencies. It is about keeping alive the possibility of invention.
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OBITUARY
Himalaya died in a very conscious death. He enjoyed the moment and didn’t suffer. Despite the pain, he was laughing and telling jokes. He filmed lots of movies in his last years and was excellent at doing nothing. Directors loved to work with this kind of acting, which was created by Himalaya. He is now floating, swimming, dancing and having the time of his life in space, watching everything like a little camera. Himalaya’s body is buried inside a giant seed, which has grown into a giant tree. People play, eat and rest under his shadow, birds build nests and dogs run around him. Himalaya still carries lots of life.
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Marko died wet and clean, after a long and relaxing bath. He was using bath salts he bought on a street market in Nepal, soaps he bought in the south of France and homemade shampoo from the Amazon Forest. Marko was a well travelled man. He has dived in all seven seas from around the world. And after the swimmings, there was always a cold beer waiting for him. Marko is still wet and travelling. He is everywhere – his ashes are in the ocean. From the beaches in Split, to the coast of every country and then to his final bath. If you pay attention, you can still hear a little trumpet playing underwater.
OBITUARY
Daniel had a long life full of adventures. He travelled all over the world: saw corals of all colors in Australia, flew over new-zealand airs and wandered immensities of snow, ice, sand and salt. What he could, he did on foot. The other, he did on the steering wheel, that was what led him into the precipice where he died. It wasn’t all bad. He was a big cinema fan and honored Thelma and Louise. He had at home lots of stars, some from the cinema, others just from life. His body was donated to science and helped lots of people. His carcass, the rest of the remains, continued on adventures: Daniel was thrown to the pigs and was very well eaten.
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One of the most beautiful elements of the work, which was proposed and studied by the project between the three institutions, is precisely the one-to-one character. I collect intimacies from people I will never see again in my life. I know about the fears and desires of strangers whom I wouldn’t have even looked at if I had met them on the street. And I also learned new — always touching — layers from dear people I’ve known for years, but with whom I had never touched on the subject of death. One-to-one is a format of performing arts designed for an audience of only one person, in which t e two involved usually produce something together or have some kind of intimate experience. This structure allows the access to the other’s intimacy to be guided lightly, with the other being the one to set the limits of what they want to tell me. Death is lots of times a terrorizing topic, so all the performance is built around the idea of lightening the mood so people can be comfortable with talking about dying and, after that, lying down in a coffin.
According to the British researcher of one-to-one performances Rachel Zerihan, the first experience of this kind was incidental. The performer Chris Burden, in Five-Day Locker Piece (1971), decided to lock himself inside a locker for one hundred and twenty hours. He was surprised by people who would come to talk to him through the locker and tell him personal stories. Almost like a pagan confessional. Around the same time as the boom of performance art in the West, numerous one-to-one experiments emerged, some quite well-known, such as Yoko Ono’s Cut Piece or Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0.
The one-to-one scene is based not only on the participation of the audience but also on interactivity. The Brazilian PhD in Performing Arts Andrea Saturnino, who is also the general director of Theatro Municipal de São Paulo, says that “Interactive theater is proposed through connections and shifts the real, not in the sense of replicating realities or unveiling unknown worlds, but within us, where the real is constituted and gains meaning.” After writing nearly one hundred and fifty obituaries, I consider that one of the structuring elements of the experience is precisely this openness to the other, which allows the real to shift within the two people forming the one-to-one. It is an openness to the other’s particular universe, embracing any idea of death as possible — after all, there is no certainty on this subject — while maintaining enough distance to avoid being invaded. Compared to Ono’s and Abramovic’s pieces, which I consider are also open to the other, my performance understands that death can be a violent subject and chooses to revert this thought, instead of deepening it.
Several people have told me that I am too young to do a work about death, as if I couldn’t suddenly die halfway through writing this sentence just because I’m twenty-one years old. Death is imminent for everyone. On the other hand, I imagine that old age naturally brings this theme up more frequently, and I have not experienced anything that brought me closer to death more than usual. Acknowledging my inability to fully embrace this topic with the magnitude it deserves, I structured the performance so that the audience would generously offer me their worldview. Andrea Saturnino continues: “The intersubjective relationships created in interactive works can be as or even more powerful than creation models in collective processes. (…) The concept of interactive theater seems to encompass a larger number of works that foresee audience participation in their aesthetic and conceptual experiences, including, in the composition of the performances, subjectivities other than those of the artists. Thus, when analyzing the perspective of those who create the works, interactivity is precisely an openness to the other.”
As with any performance-art, rehearsing is not possible. But in a work so based on interactivity, where the action is built four hands together, even imagining the conduct is imprecise. I did not learn how to perform this piece; each time I do it, I learn in the moment how to do it with that specific person. Just as I did not learn how to write obituaries; instead, I learn, right there, how to write that person’s obituary. Each performance is original. It was even harder to deal with this in São Paulo, where I did it with people very close to me. The idea of writing my parents’ obituaries still makes me apprehensive. I think my biggest difficulty in performing Writing from someone’s grave, in this craft of talking and writing about death, is preparing to welcome the next person. If I do many sessions in a row, I need to take a breath, leave the room, and talk to people about another subject. Sometimes the stories blend together, and exhaustion prevents me from being present. Even so, it is difficult to disconnect during a few minutes of break. I still haven’t learned how to handle it. The one-to-one is the radicalization of that old idea that to make theater all you need is one person in the audience. One person in the audience already makes an entire play. Six people mean two hours I will spend sitting next to the coffin, in front of the typewriter.
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OBITUARY
Jub died “old, very old,” just as their father had wished. She had a peaceful and painless death while sleeping in a bed in the middle of nowhere. Despite the old age, Jub’s body was completely healthy and was entirely donated to science. The ashes are scattered across the world, along every street where Jub once woke up to drink coffee with milk and eat buttered bread. Today, Jub is probably building rockets and being admired once again in her profession. Jub left behind fascinating podcasts, money in the sock drawer, and diaries filled with her deepest secrets.
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Carla Gomes had a coffin surrounded by red carnations, despite the pink life she lived. Carla was an important theater artist. She traveled all over the world with her performances and made significant contributions to life in Portugal. Her work contributed to the rights of Portuguese women. Carla died peacefully in her sleep, after a day swimming in the Lusitanian seas, where she encountered a Portuguese caravel. Carla is gone, but her memory in life and art remains. A gente vai continuar.
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Aino Maria Granlund died at a very old age, in a very pacific death. Her disease never interrupted her life and only made her think more about life. Aino had an amazing life full of love. She loved a lot and was even more loved. At her funeral, her children hosted a beautiful ceremony, full of people who could experience Aino’s love. It was a privilege. Now, Aino is forever enjoying the forest, the cabinet and the lovely journey between the lake and the sauna, along with herbrother. In life, people can still feel her love.
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The death, the coffin and the obituaries are all excuses to fulfill a much greater desire: to write on stage. For months, I have been on an intimate quest to discover why writing is so dear to me that I want to bring it to the stage. And I still don’t really know where to start this search, but what I would like to do in this text is to share some conclusions about the craft that I perform with great tranquility. The truth is that writing on stage, improvising, has never scared me. I entered as calmly the first time as I did the last, and it is always very pleasant.
The first thing is the material: the typewriter. It is more than an object on stage. It is a device, a producer of subjectivities, bringing peace through acceptance. It is not possible to erase words on a typewriter. There is no option to start over or go back. Time is short, there are no second chances. The only possibility is to correct a letter here or there, but never entire sentences. This is liberating for me because it forces me to write without looking back. Furthermore, the paper — which in those minutes is all I have — will soon be handed over to the person who will be resurrected from the coffin. I will never see that text I just wrote again — only through photos, which I take of all the obituaries. I can write without worries. What I write here may mean a lot to someone else, but it doesn’t have to mean anything to me.
Concretely, the ritual for writing the obituaries is to play the music on my phone screen, type the word “obituary” at the top center of the page, and right after, on the next line, type the name handwritten by the person themselves. From that moment, I find the addictive sensation I pursue like a drug where inspiration does not meet my reason, nor my emotion, but the mechanical movement of my hands typing on a keyboard, a typewriter, or on paper. At the moment when inspiration — this divine force — finds me, I am what I write, and what I write is me. When I finish, I am alone again, and what I wrote has a life of its own beyond me. These moments where I merge with the words are my incessant search.
Often I find it; sometimes it comes easily, other times it takes longer. It almost never comes, actually, the moment I sit down willing to write. The thought that leads to inspiration comes in moments of idleness — like in the shower, in bed before sleeping, on public transport — or in moments when I am hyper-stimulated by the world around me, such as during plays, delightful books, or festive nights. In the performance “Writing in Someone’s Grave,” I found a technology that controls inspiration and invites it into my body at the exact moment it is needed. When I write on stage, under pressure, I feel like I’m in rain boots, stretching my legs and propelling my body to jump through puddles of water. And I always end up having fun inevitably getting wet.
Who describes this sensation better than I do is the Mexican poet Octavio Paz, in the book The Bow and the Lyre: “Surrendered ‘to the inexhaustible flow of murmuring,’ with eyes closed to the external world, the poet writes without stopping. At first, the sentences get ahead or lag behind, but little by little the rhythm of the writing hand matches the rhythm of the dictating thought. Fusion has been achieved; there is no longer a distance between thinking and saying. The poet loses consciousness of the act he performs: he no longer knows whether he writes or not, nor what he writes. Everything flows happily until an interruption occurs: there is a word — or the opposite of a word: a silence — that blocks the way. The poet tries repeatedly to overcome the obstacle, to go around it, to dodge it somehow and move on. It is useless: all paths lead to the same wall. The source has stopped flowing. The poet rereads what he has just written and discovers, not without astonishment, that the intricate text possesses a secret coherence. The poem has an undeniable unity of tone, rhythm, and temperature. It is a whole. Or fragments, still alive, still glowing, of a whole. But the unity of the poem is not physical or material; tone, temperature, rhythm, and images have unity because the poem is a work. And a work, every work, is the result of a will that transforms and subjects the raw material to its ends. In this text, where critical consciousness barely participated, there are repeated words, images that birth others according to certain tendencies, sentences that seem to stretch their arms seeking an intangible word. The poem flows, advances. And this flowing is what gives it unity.”
What helps me in my craft is the constant work that I do outside of it. For example, finding a balance between confidence in my own work and the insignificance of it. In the end, it is just a paragraph written in thetime it takes to listen to two songs. To write on stage, I adopt an attitude of living an active writing life and do not keep texts in the drawer. I am very interested in being read, criticized, questioned, and willing to defend and oxygenate my text. I only read the obituary I wrote when I read it out loud to the person lying in the coffin. I experience the text along with its intended audience. It is necessary to build self-esteem in the work, a confidence to be worked on daily in the act of writing that is not shaken by my own thoughts or by the criticism of others, without ceasing to listen to it.
Another task I constantly work on in my life is being a porous person. Of course — almost obviously — it is important to fill oneself with artistic and cultural references. Anyone, especially those interested in writing, knows that it is necessary to read, go to the theater, to the cinema, to museums. However, I would like to highlight the less erudite, more unexpected cultural experiences, or even those of leisure. I believe that a porous person is one who is capable of transforming everyday events into experiences. One who listens to a conversation in the subway car and becomes interested in those strangers, who hears a song on a sidewalk and is moved by the lyrics, who is committed to turning any weekend outing into an unforgettable night. When the poet encounters the blank page, it is those things that materialize on paper: the conversations, the songs, the weekend outings.
The Spanish philosopher Jorge Larrosa Bondía gave a description of what the subject of experience would be, which I reclaim here, in a famous lecture at Unicamp, an important Brazilian university: “Experience, the possibility that something happens to us or touches us, requires a gesture of interruption, a gesture that is almost impossible nowadays: it requires stopping to think, stopping to look, stopping to listen, thinking more slowly, looking more slowly, listening more slowly; stopping to feel, feeling more slowly, lingering on details, suspending opinion, suspending judgment, suspending will, suspending the automatism of action, cultivating attention and delicacy, opening the eyes and ears, speaking about what happens to us, learning slowness, listening to others, cultivating the art of encounter, being silent a lot, having patience and giving oneself time and space. (…) The subject of experience is defined not by his activity, but by his passivity, his receptivity, his availability, his openness. However, it is a passivity prior to the opposition between active and passive, a passivity made of passion, of suffering, of patience, of attention, as a primary receptivity, as a fundamental availability, as an essential openness.”
I always say that my two favorite things in the world are studying and partying. The typewriter, for example, was bought between one carnival block and another. And all my artistic work is directly influenced by the fact that I love parties. I love to dance a lot, to sing loudly, to walk through the streets, to spend hours talking about nothing with my friends and even with strangers. I treat the parties as something sacred. I go prepared with objectives and methodologies, just as I do when going to a classroom or opening the pages of a book. I grew up in Brazil, so I have a postgraduate degree in Carnival. The party cannot be wasted; I constantly seek purposes, openness to experiences, and try to leave with a full heart and a story to tell. I do not leave home for nothing. And here I am not associating the party with drug use, but with the unexpected encounters that only this environment provides. Like poetry, the party is also a device that displaces us from ourselves.
I believe that this attitude towards parties directly influences my attitude toward the page. Countless times I have arrived home sweaty after hours of dancing but with an immense urge to write. The texts that stay with me, that are not delivered to any audience, are usually written late at night in the state of farewell to euphoria. They are not reports about the night’s events — on the contrary. It is about the state of the body, a body that writes, that is not just a guardian of a genius mind. I think what I am trying to reclaim is a poetic work of life that goes beyond the page and, in this case, returns to it. Again, I call upon the same book by Octavio Paz:
“The poetic operation is inseparable from the word. To poetize is, first and foremost, to name. Theword distinguishes the poetic activity from all others. To poetize is to create with words: to make poems. The poetic is not something given, not something man is born with, but something man makes and which, reciprocally, makes man. The poetic is a possibility, not a priori category nor an innate faculty. But it is a possibility we create by ourselves. By naming, by creating with words, we create that which we name and which before existed only as threat, emptiness, and chaos. When the poet says he does not know ‘what he is going to write,’ he means he does not yet know the name of that which his poem will name, and which, until named, presents itself as unintelligible silence. Poet and reader create each other through the poem that only exists through and for them. Thus, there are no poetic states, just as there are no poetic words. Poetry is a continuous creation and thus removes us from ourselves, displaces us, and leads us to our most extreme possibilities.”
The performance “Writing in Someone’s Grave” is a tool I used to reframe my relationship with writing. In various long-term writing projects, I found myself anguished by the act of writing. I would sleep and wake up thinking that I had to do this boring task. And I discovered, through writing on stage, that I much prefer writing in minutes rather than months. As I said at the beginning, every time I must answer why I write, I feel extremely lost. To this day, I don’t know. Writing is so deeply within me that I have not yet found ways to distance myself from it in order to start understanding my craft. The Chilean playwright Inés Stranger writes in her book Cuadernos de Dramaturgia: Teoría, técnica y ejercicios that there is something in meaning — a concept for which she offers numerous definitions, but here I choose the one that says meaning is the reason for being — of life and storytelling that only arises when the experience is completed. Maybe that is why I cannot justify my writing, and if so, there is a part of me that never wants to find out.
Thinking on a broader, political, collective level, and in yet another effort by this Latin American artist to bring references from the Global South into a text that will be read in Europe, I choose to end these musings about writing with a quote from the Malian writer Amadou Hampâté Bâ. In the text The Living Tradition, he discusses African societies that prioritize oral traditions over written ones, which the colonialist Western vision judged as a lack of culture: “What lies behind the testimony, therefore, is the very value of the man who bears witness, the value of the chain of transmission of which he is a part, the fidelity of individual and collective memories, and the value attributed to truth in a given society. In short: the link between man and word. And so, in oral societies, not only is the function of memory more developed, but also the bond between man and the Word is stronger. Where writing does not exist, man is bound to the word he utters. He is committed to it. He is the word, and the word carries testimony of who he is. The very cohesion of society rests on the value and respect for the word. Conversely, as writing spreads, we see the spoken word gradually replaced, becoming the only proof and resource; we see the signature become the only recognized commitment, while the sacred and deep bond between man and word progressively disappears, giving way to conventional academic degrees.”
This reflection is excellent to remind us that writing — this craft I chose, and which chose me — is much bigger than any typewriter, any book, any library. It is necessary to handle words with great care when choosing to register them on paper. Words do not die. They do not lie down in coffins nor await their obituary. Words are alive, and they claim for their life all the time.
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OBITUARY
Aleksandar Svabic died while picking meat at the supermarket. The butcher was the first one to see his corpse. Aleksandar was planning a barbecue for his friends and family. He was known for being a great cook and an excellent eater. In his life, Aleksandar had lots of fun, drank lots of red wine and fell in love everyday. His body was used in performances that honored his career as a theatre director. After that, his useful organs were donated to science and helped lots of people. Finally, his body was left in the forest, helping trees to grow and deers to eat. He became like the meat he was buying. Aleksandar had a long death, and, just like in life, made lots of people happier.
OBITUARY
Marko died wet and clean, after a long and relaxing bath. He was using bath salts he bought on a street market in Nepal, soaps he bought in the south of France and homemade shampoo from the Amazon Forest. Marko was a well travelled man. He has dived in all seven seas from around the world. And after the swimmings, there was always a cold beer waiting for him. Marko is still wet and travelling. He is everywhere – his ashes are in the ocean. From the beaches in Split, to the coast of every country and then to his final bath. If you pay attention, you can still hear a little trumpet playing underwater.
OBITUARY
Maria Fernandes died “velhotinha”, in an old age, while sleeping. Her husband threw her ashes at the foot of an orange tree in the backyard of the house they built together. Maria blooms in sweet and perfumed fruits, in the same color as the sunrise sky. She felt fulfilled from a very young age, living an extremely happy life. Today, she continues her adventures in Portuguese fields and beaches turned into an elegant cat that roams alone during the day and is pampered at night. Maria smiled a lot herself, and chose the most beautiful lipsticks to tease the most beautiful smiles in all the people around her.
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Beyond all the experiences and conclusions that the act of writing obituaries has allowed me to have, there is another very important dimension that inevitably crosses all events. I was born in Argentina, grew up in Brazil, and traveled to Europe to carry out this performance. My friends joke that I went there to deliver justice by (metaphorically) killing Europeans. I came to know three cities and their people through death: Klanjec, a small Croatian town between Zagreb and Ljubljana; Oulu, in northern Finland; and Oeiras, in the metropolitan area of Lisbon. These three immensely different places form the vertices of what is the One-to-One Art project.
In September, I spent twenty days living with Dunja and Jerko, who welcomed me spectacularly into their home, which also serves as a cultural center nestled among the mountains. Alongside me were the artists Eva Holts and Dmytro Grynov. I knew almost nothing about Croatia, other than it being a filming location for Game of Thrones—a TV show I have never watched a single episode of. I could easily pass for Croatian because of my really white skin and, at the time, my reddish hair. I was just like most girls I saw walking through the streets. Perhaps a trend in the region inspired by Dua Lipa, who is Albanian. In desperation, I would say, “Sorry, I don’t speak Croatian.” Even after twenty days immersed in the language—which sounded to me as musical as Italian—I only remember a few words: dobre dan, good morning; hvala, thank you; pivo, beer; and svila, silk, and also the name of the house dog. Just the essentials.
During the residency, we had some scheduled commitments: attending theater and circus performances, meetings about technical needs, and encounters with artists. On the last day, we held an open house for artist friends from the residency, where I was finally able to conduct the experiments I had been planning. The setting was exactly what one imagines for an artist residency: in the middle of the mountains, in a tiny town surrounded by trails. A beautiful horizon, calm and silent streets. Even Zagreb felt small to me—the entire country’s population is smaller than that of São Paulo’s eastern zone, where I grew up and still live today. The house’s generous fridge was always full. I miss ajvar, a pepper and eggplant spread, and burek, a traditional Balkan pastry usually filled with spinach and cheese, commonly eaten during the hangovers of late nights, accompanied by a glass of natural yogurt.
Many afternoons were spent reading and writing about death at the office tables, on the living room armchairs, or on the balcony chairs. At night and at midday, I took every opportunity to flood my hosts with questions. They told me everything about the wars, about Yugoslavia, and about languages, which fascinates me most. In Slovenian, the word for “theater” is associated with the verb to watch; in Croatian, with the verb to show; and in Serbian, with the idea of attention. Literally different ways of seeing theater—which, by the way, is a word of Greek origin, containing the ideas of place and gaze. That kitchen table became a classroom. Within those walls, I was truly treated as an artist, with dignity and respect for the time needed to create, for the inevitable crises, and for dialogue that always brought new ideas and references from every corner of the world.
The second stop of this adventure was Oulu, a city that immediately enchanted me with the first images I found online. It has a real winter, an irresistible phenomenon for anyone born near the equator. Although known in Finland as the “Shitty City,” it gave me wonderful experiences. Our first day was spent in a winter cabin like the ones I had only seen illustrated in children’s books. Wooden walls, colorful wool socks loaned to us by the festival’s organizers, a fully vegan lunch. Everyone was very welcoming, especially Aino and Timo, who led the activities. After just two days in Finland, it already felt like I had been there for months. I tasted cloudberries, raspberries, blueberries—every kind of berry offered to me. I saw children walking alone down the streets without concern, and robots delivering food. The future arrives early in the North.
On the first day of the festival, I went to pick up the coffin from a festival warehouse across the river. It was considered far by Oulu standards—by São Paulo standards, it was right next door. I saw the river just beginning to freeze, bare trees, footprints in the distant snow. It was beautiful to watch the city preparing for the coming cold. People told me it was the first snow of the year, and we hoped together that it would snow again while I was still there – and it did! Several told me they wished they could experience their first snowfall as adults, as I was. Snow had lost its magic through age.
One of the festival directors told me he had seen more northern lights in his life than rainbows. Snow for the Finnish holds no magic—it’s a bother. Skiing is just another boring school sport. The idea of a tropical December seemed completely alien to many I met. How could Christmas be spent in a tank top, or New Year’s jumping ocean waves? They’ve never looked down; we’ve – by we, I mean all of us from the Southern countries – strained our necks from looking up. Snow-covered streets, Christmas pines, reindeer, sleighs, Halloween pumpkins— the winter arrives early in Oulu — all tragically familiar. We are constantly celebrating a culture that was pushed onto us. Recently the Brazilian actress Fernanda Torres explained to me my own feelings in an interview: I feel both pity for them and anger at them that my culture isn’t celebrated too.
Which finally brings me to Portugal—a country with whom I share a language, foods, surnames, and a horrific history. Everything felt somewhat familiar. The ocean I saw from my hotel window was the same I see in Brazil, but from the other side. The bridge spanning the city, I knew from photos; the river beneath it, I knew from poems. Some compliments were new: que fixe!, que giro! And some everyday expressions were charmingly poetic, like pequeno almoço, like little lunch, for breakfast, or chapéu de chuva, like a rain’s hat, instead of guarda-chuva, a rain’s keeper, for the word umbrella. I found Brazilians waiting for tables and driving Ubers; Brazilian music playing in bars and on corners. I found Brazil in many Portuguese people, too—those obsessed with Brazilian memes. They finally had someone who understood all the jokes beyond the internet. The scars of colonization were subtle, like the fact that the festival was held at the Barcarena Gunpowder Factory, inaugurated in 1540. We still breathe that dust. I believe no Brazilian has ever been treated as kindly in that place as I was, thanks to Ana, David, and everyone involved in the production.
Where I come from, it’s common to think of all European countries as very similar—a way to return the stigmas Northern countries place on Southern ones. But traveling through these places, I noticed especially stark differences in how death is imagined. In Oulu, there was a deep concern for the environment when considering the destination of one’s body after death. In Portugal, that concern existed but wasn’t a barrier to imagining personal wishes. In Finland, it often was. The landscapes cultivated in their visions of paradise mirrored their actual geographies. In Finland, paradise was a snowy forest with lakes and cabins; in Portugal, warm beaches; in Croatia, a blend—sometimes beaches, sometimes mountains.
As expected, in Finland I felt people were generally much happier than elsewhere. They seemed less worried about their futures, careers, or desires to build families. In Croatia and Portugal, uncertainty and anxiety loomed larger, fueled by fears that artistic dreams might never be realized under capitalism’s pressures. In Portugal and Croatia, there was a strong desire to migrate elsewhere. In Portugal, I heard some unsettling comments, disguised behind friendly smiles. Some elderly men sincerely expressed dreams of retracing the routes of imperial conquest, or moving to other once-powerful empires. They praised Brazil as “a great achievement of our empire” revealing a dangerous and persistent nationalism.
Returning to Brazil, I noticed something funny. When I asked people what they wished to do before their last day, many answered: have sex. No one said that in Europe. I also heard many expressing the desire to die in the middle of a Carnival block party. I love that idea. That’s how I want to die: suddenly, during Carnival, in the streets, in a moment of pure happiness. And I want each of my loved ones to write an obituary for me at my funeral, on my own typewriter. I want to have many, many obituaries written in my name. And then I want them to burn my body along with these obituaries, with the words of my loved ones laid on my body. With the ashes, maybe throw them in between the pages of books waiting for life on library shelves all around the world.
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OBITUARY
Hilla Harju died reading on her couch at a very old age. All of her enormous family was reunited in her house in Lapland. Her children were wearing wool sweaters she made and her grandchildren were playing with the sheeps. Hilla had a long life full of love. After dying, she received a big homage from all the students she ever taught. Her funeral was very crowded. Now, she is probably growing apples in the form of a tree and stills making people happy.
OBITUARY
Eerika died at a very old age. She was meditating with her sister when she passed. In her last years, she could spend most of the time at her house, dancing and reading to her children. Eerika was buried directly to the ground, covered by an ocre woolen cape her friends made. In Eerika’s death, she was never cold, and also never bored. She is dancing now with Bob Marley, having a good laugh. Her loved ones remember her joy. No woman, no cry.
OBITUARY
Fátima Dias died in her house surrounded by loved ones; her children, grandchildrens and her husband. They did with Fátima the same she had done her whole life in her profession. She was known as a good nurse, a great mother, and an excellent grandmother. In her life, she shone on stage with dramas, comedies, songs and cavaquinhos. In her death, on the other hand, she remains in the wings, peeking behind the curtain at what is happening with the people she loves, those who took such good care of Fátima in her life and continue treating her with the same generosity in her death.
References:
*BÂ, Amadou Hampâté. A tradição viva. In:KI-ZERBO, Joseph (Org.).História Geral da
África I. 2010.
*BONDÍA, Jorge Larrosa. Notas sobre a experiência e o saber de experiência. 2002.
*PAZ, Octavio. The bow and the lyre. 1956.
*SATURNINO, Andrea. Ligeiro deslocamento do real. 2021.
*ZERIGAN, RACHEL. One to one Performance: a study room guide on works devised for an audience of one. 2009.