Book-Performance is an ongoing project composed by a series of actions devised in response to autobiographical texts particularly influenced by traumatic transgenerational memories connected to gender and race issues.

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Between 2017 - 2018, I decided to write about the challenge of living in another country. My struggle with another ground, language, bodies and atmosphere. I also decided to write about my difficulties with postpartum, exhaustion and emotional collapse. At the time I made a commitment to write something every day for a year using automatic writing exercises and the psychographic practice proposed by the spiritualist Alan Kardec to communicate with the dead. To my surprise these daily activities opened a channel for a deep catharsis, in which layers of traumas related to motherhood, racism and misogyny emerged from oblivion. After months I realised the obvious: becoming immigrant and mother at the same time caused me a brusque biographical rupture. As a way of finding my voice, ancestral heritage and inner power, I slowly began to use the language to reimagine, reconstruct and rewrite fragments of my life story, embedding the urgency of offering attention, listening and care for the transgenerational traumas that affect the most part of black people. In its methodology, the Book-Performance project has become a series of actions, and related texts shaped in accordance with the contexts of each new presentation. However, all chapters are focused on a part of the body as the purpose of metabolising through it complex or indigestible memories into small doses of healing and freedom. The Book-Performance is always presented by me with an invited collaborator, another black woman.

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Rubiane Maia