Political Drama
Political Drama is a hybrid of live art, sound piece and audio-documentary based on the political chaos and the crisis of representation that has taken place in Brazil in recent years. Paloma Klisys starts by compiling speeches, leaked audios, fragments of national and international news, among other sources, to create a mosaic of sounds and images manipulated in real time.
Among the hundred fragments used, the set mixes and "schizophrenizes" several clippings of the speeches of Brazilian state deputies since April 17, 2016, during the session that approved the forwarding of the process of impeachment of the president Dilma. A day considered historical in which it became particularly evident the Tower of Babel that is the current Brazilian politics, given the disparity of speeches and the reigning insanity.
The work began to be presented in July 2016, still during the impeachment trial process, and since then has been incorporating sound and visual references that emerge as the political scenario and the course of new events that seem to maintain a sui generis relationship with fantastic realism works.
Political Drama wishes to provoke the perception of citizens through the proposition of other possibilities of listening to the speeches that, unavoidably, affect and construct our reality. To treat political criticism as textual criticism, following the recurrences and disparities in the speech tracks of our inconsequential politicians.
The live polyphonic Political Drama that triggered the creative process was divided into five chapters, along which the author develops a narrative about Dilma Rousseff's impeachment process with interrelated audio and video fragments. The transitions between chapters are marked by changes in rhythm and tempo of the sound content and in the editing and presentation of the visual content.
The videos - projected and manipulated in real time concomitantly with the audio fragments - explore the repertoire of markedly rhetorical gestures, focusing as much as possible on details of body language such as looks, facial expressions, hugs, and gestures of support and/or repulsion and clash between the characters in question, among them: politicians, journalists, activists, and other social actors for and against the impeachment, affirming or rejecting the coup discourse.
The visual content of this work is composed of fragments of images and videos of the remarkable session of April 17, 2016, cut from the coverage of TV Senado and other media, but also of the entire exhaustive process of hearing defense and prosecution witnesses of the Special Committee of Impeachment, the historic session in which the former president personally made her defense in the Senate and significant events after her removal from office, and other moments in the recent history of the country. The national and international repercussion is also contemplated in the process of composing the videos
In the presentations of the live Political Drama, Paloma proposes a semiotic shock by using simultaneously in the composition of her costume elements that, currently in Brazil, represent different political stances.
The shirt of the Brazilian national soccer team used in several demonstrations to demarcate groups that affirm a thought considered to be right-wing or extreme right-wing, and the red shirt, a color considered to be the color of communists who should be persecuted and eliminated according to some more radical groups.
The artist also mixes jeans, a piece historically produced to be a workers' outfit, and the tie in reference to the formality of the corporate world.