Footage by Guilherme Tostes

Cut by Danilo Cippolino

A long durational performance at Me Enterra Na Quarta, a Rio Carnival bloco 2024.

In 2005, Marina Abramovic performed ‘Entering the Other Side’, a 7-hour-long piece that placed the artist in the middle of the Guggenheim rotunda, wearing a gigantic dress and gazing around her at the gathered audience. Harkening back to this almost 20-year-old work by my mentor and friend, I shrank it in size while adding an element of interaction. Instead of placing it safely inside an institutional space, I opened it to all four winds on a city street.

As a breakwater, I faced down the bloco moving towards me, effectively splitting the procession into two parts. Some of the bloco participants would stop in front of me, and were invited by an assistant to try and get under the skirt. At the start of the bloco, the visitors, still shy, wouldn’t spend longer than a minute inside the dress. By the end, nearly every visitor was spending at least a few minutes inside (the private nature of the performance prevents these details from being revealed). I kept my arms up while the dress was empty, only lowering them when a visitor dared to come inside the dress.