The New World Syrup & The Fever Hand is a performance–lecture inspired by the return of yellow fever in South America. This old disease is deeply connected to the colonial sugar plantations in the Americas: it thrived in the sugar production region on Brazil’s northeast coast, where plantations created the perfect environment for Aedes aegypti, the carrier mosquito imported by European slave ships from Africa to the Americas. With at least thirty-six deaths between 2018 and 2019, Brazil still has a season for yellow fever, which occurs from December to May.
“It’s ironic that yellow fever ‘chose’ to come back during such political turmoil in Brazil. This is why the main form for the performance is that of a historical hallucination,” says Vivian Caccuri. She makes links between sugar cane, yellow fever, Catholicism, the way in which music is reflected in colonial interactions, and the consequences for South American bodies. The artist makes use of a music piece composed by herself on a large church-style pipe organ, drawings, historical images, video, sounds, and her own voice to tell this semi-fictional story.
Critical Cooking Show is a collaboration between e-flux Architecture and the Istanbul Design Biennial within the context of its fifth edition, Empathy Revisited: Designs for more than one.
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