For this piece, commissioned by Le Quartz, in Brest, and by Porto 2001 European Cultural Capital, Vera Mantero decided that she wanted to think together (one of her favourite activities!). She gathered several artists during one month in Brest, with the aim of thinking with them: the choreographers/performers Sabina Holzer, Litó Walkey, João Samões and Martin Nachbar, the writer-performer António Poppe, musician Boris Hauf and, in the field of the visual arts, Nadia Lauro and Helena Inverno. For four weeks the subjects turned around some of the following: how does energy appear? How does it appear in our lives? What makes us move in life, what is it that makes a human being get into movement? What is it that creates curiosity, what is the motor of curiosity? How to go through an existence that takes advantage of all of its potential?
These nine artists had the desire of inhabiting, and making others inhabit, these other places of existence, less tangible, less linear, less functional, but equally necessary. Or actually more necessary, since its hard to find sense to our “functions” without inhabiting such places. Inhabiting those things, which seem inexplicable and indescribable through our daily language, but possible to say through these other languages that are in our body, in our perception, in the existence of all of us. They thought we need this practice of tuning in to these other languages, of emitting and perceiving what crosses us across them.
In a process of one month they reflected upon, talked about, improvised over and observed thoroughly. They exchanged and created links between words, actions, movements, sounds, spaces or objects. A performance created by artists of different fields and which takes, successively or simultaneously, several forms: the concert, the reading, the choreography, the installation... and where the public will find its place likewise under different forms, be it in terms of space, time or perception. Jean-Michel Le Lez joined this group to work the lights of the performance, which concluded this whole path.

Vera Mantero
If they ask: of the arts of the world?
Among the arts of the world I choose the one of seeing comets
crushing down
on the big masses of water: then, the hot coal over the nooks,
marshes between them.
I want in the darkness digged over by the lights
to win baptism, skill.
Burned on the edges of fire of the puddles.
That is my name.
And the days cross the nights until the other days, the nights
fall into the days – and I study
crumbled heavenly bodies, abundant sources, the secret.

Herberto Helder in “Do Mundo”
translated by Vera Mantero with the help of the French translation by Christian Mérer and Nicole Siganos
“If I can’t dance in your revolution, I’m not coming”.
Emma Goldman

the connections between freedom and desire. between openness and the emergence of motion/movement. to create that which creates motion. to create that which creates desire. to create that which creates openings.

to include in life all the potency of the body, all the potency of its knowledge, and all the potency of its desire, of all its extremely varied desires.
to understand life sensually, to understand life socially.
to live in the presence of the whole poetic pattern.

to continue doing readings of the world, creative readings of the world, readings which create meanings. to give sense to the being here. a being here full. which necessarily implies a being here full of exchange.

Vera Mantero got together a group of artists, writers and thinkers determined to put into practice, and through different fields, the idea of a potent life.

Vera Mantero
overflow the animal in the waves
A thousand auditoriums of nerves

main nerves

when learning by heart I am creating a plateau of euphoric nerves, supernatural nerves, authentic wild animals of the memory : to weigh atoms to measure instants to break indivisible nerve auditoriums. when learning by heart I am giving blood to certain words or I'm diving certain words in my blood, in a way they can circulate again in a living being with the authentic energy of death : I am a thief of time, I am a powerful half distance, I am a lesion of truthful energy. when learning by heart I am being born of the same admiration; of the same word in the natural sense; in the same extraordinary place of the texts that I adore; if so high I imagine that of memory I get lost, I write this: I am a thief of time ! reviewing the loving matter – living genealogical tree – I was born with a slap of sound that never stops the revelation of nature. I believe in this euphoric memory, in this discovery of the main nerves : love magnitude death an explosion of silence, for a fascinating life. I learn by heart the laborious sketch of the sound, the alphabetical animals in panic, the verbal calamity, that is real for those who live in a loving life solution with the word: nerve privileged to articulate the dimension of feeling, and to formulate the lesion of the whole human and inhuman nature. this book exposes or expresses a memory over crowded of well known passages. words.

António Poppe

word
universal nerve living genealogical tree
the truthful energy elaborating life
the euphoric memory

word
Well known passage

love magnitude the same word in the natural sense
portion of sound to articulate the dimension of the feeling

word
By vertiginous capitulation to laugh capitulation if capitulation vertiginous recapitulation

the memory in flagrant: ― the sound in flagrant: ― the word in flagrant
a thousand nerves auditoriums the main nerve imagines the voice present infinite nerve fibre supple nature the love love full nature it filtered the diction the lesion nerve out of the ordinary position the matter infinite a thousand auditoriums of nerves

creatures of that element living genealogical tree the lesion it nurtures the sound of nature the sixth voice the voice and me the recapitulations in matter it nurtures the sixth voice the voice and me the earth answers salient apple if it makes nerves of generation extraordinary bones of the cranial filigree box
to lilliputian the voice of the nerves a danube of the sound a danube of the trespassed memory pressure was overstepped in the intervention of the cranium jaws out of the ordinary position only the beautiful cranial box

: the creature in bewilderment and magnitude reviewxing the loving matter

António Poppe