book-installation (2018)
About the work
Prefiro rir was a piece developed during a one-year residency in the training program at the Parque Lage Visual Arts School. The project began after an invitation from one of the residence’s facilitators, who asked us to write a letter to an interlocutor in the past. I wrote a letter to my mother. In it, I told her that I had discovered the box that she kept in a closet in her house, a box containing several letters, photographs and a diary which she wrote in my voice during my first year of life. After discovering this archive and writing this letter, I worked with this material to draw a parallel between that moment in the past when the son appears, and the moment in the present when the mother gradually disappears due to dementia.
Executed in a wide variety of media (text in prose and verse, scans and clippings of documents, images and video), the work was exhibited at the exhibition Formação e Deformação at EAV Parque Lage in 2018. This book-installation was later developed into the novel Triste não é ao certo a palavra, published in 2023 by Companhia das Letras.
gabriel abreu 