Lucas Albuquerque: In “Lambada Estranha” [Strange Lambada], the time-space location is given to the viewer right at the beginning of the video: the city is Rio de Janeiro, the year is 2020. The first scenes leave no doubt as to the location: a plane seems about to land at Santos Dumont airport, with the Rio-Niterói bridge and the Central do Brasil tower as hosts. The image doesn’t seem to hold any visual difference from the city last year, except for the fact that a second image resembling a natural disaster is superimposed on it. The viewer notices that this type of interference is used as a device throughout the video. How did the process of creating, filming, and editing the work happen?

Darks Miranda: For many years I’ve wanted to film an action involving people who consider that they “don’t know how to dance” – or who dance “strangely” – with their backs to the camera, moving to the sound of lambadas. It was a kind of nonsensical idea, but I knew I was interested in the movements of the bodies, a certain indiscernibility of the bodies, a mystery, a breaking of the protagonism of faces, an estrangement, some unpredictability too. There was a desire there to enable an experience that was both formal and formless at the same time, that had to do with bodies, movement, dance, an action that could be slightly weird without being grotesque. I was interested in a certain physical and disconcerting humor as well. Time went by and I ended up never doing this work, until the Abre Alas open call, from A Gentil Carioca, came up, and this idea was one of the proposals I sent. The curators were enthusiastic about the idea, I gathered friends and decided to do it. It was all a bit rushed because there was this exhibition deadline. I only managed to do it because Herbert de Paz, Lorran Dias, Maria Mareda, and Rafael Bqueer, very dear people, were up for this craziness and performed along. In addition, I called Vanessa Rodrigues, a lambada teacher, to help us with the proposition of some steps (which would be totally and wonderfully distorted by the dancers). The support of friends Tiago Rios, who lent the camera, and Sasha Lazarev, who photographed, was also essential. As well as Gabriel Tupinambá and Alex Barbosa who helped with the production.

I thought about carrying out the action in several places: at the Gentil crossroads, in Praça Tiradentes, in a studio, in the Fosso (a studio I shared with more artists), but I ended up deciding to film in the abandoned pool of the building where I live, in Santa Teresa, Rio de Janeiro. And that’s when, in my view, the film started taking on this other form and adding other issues to itself: landscape, city, horizon, cosmos, apocalypse… that’s when it started to become a bit of a film and stopped being a record of an action or performance. And the more fantastical aspect just kept increasing with each stage: from the clothes, to the effects, to the sound editing.

LA: A dance class takes place inside what appears to be a waterless swimming pool. Strange human beings dressed in different types of outfits try to follow a teacher’s instructions. The sound of her voice and the music is permeated by dissonant electronic noises and sounds resembling thunder, storms, and explosions. The beings seem, however, oblivious to the chaotic and surreal environment in which they are inserted. In what way is it possible to think of “Lambada estranha” as a metaphor for our relationship with the pandemic that established itself over the planet in the same year the video was produced?

DM: I think I have difficulty thinking with metaphors… it was not the intention of the work, at any moment, to be a metaphor. In my view, it is exactly what it shows, and it is not trying to say something else by substitution, approximation, or comparison. I filmed in January 2020, finished editing in February, and had no idea what was ahead, right around the corner: the pandemic. At the same time, it’s not just since last year that the state of things has been getting stranger and stranger: the country’s political situation involves, increasingly, serious environmental and health crises. At that moment, the water crisis broke out in Rio, which was already a serious health crisis before Covid – not as fatal and destructive, but still serious. The film was also made before the peak of the fires in the Pantanal, but, still, it’s not a recent thing that fires have been happening around the country: in the Amazon, at the National Museum, at MAM, at UFRJ. So, in that sense, the lack of water, the contamination of water, and the fires, the fire, are not metaphors; they are our reality. At the same time, the film is not a documentary, and it’s also not a realistic fiction, it doesn’t use expensive or well-made effects, because 1, I didn’t have a penny to do it and I don’t have the technique, and 2, because, despite being totally inspired by and mirrored in reality, the aesthetics of realism didn’t interest me there. On the contrary, I started from an understanding that given the real situation of the world, it is impossible not to be delirious. So the film is a kind of delirium based on the real, more than a metaphor.

LA: The “Lambada estranha” class seems to be divided into well-marked parts by different “lambadas”: “Adocica” gets the group moving inside the pool with the students’ backs turned, “Lambada (Chorando se foi)” marks the frontal focus on each student for a few seconds separately, still with the pool as a background, and finally, “Dançando lambada” marks the filming of the dancers from a low angle, in a setting where the pool gives way to a futuristic, kitschy techno background, typical of the “aparelhagens” [large, powerful sound systems] from the northern region of Brazil. Why the shift in focus from the group to the individual? In what way do issues involving bodies, their differences, and the establishment of supposed hierarchies between them permeate the work?

DM: The shift in scales was not planned before filming. My interest was always to film this group, these bodies, together: out of step, disjointed, strange, and inventive – possibly funny. The group shot, which is filmed frontally, at body level, was the shot I had always imagined for these images that would be the record of a weird dance. It was only in the middle of filming, after we had already done the wide shots, that we decided to film each person “soloing.” Even after that, I still had doubts about whether I would use those shots. But putting it all together in the edit, I thought it was worth having these closer images of the bodies, which is when it leaves the “real” landscape and the landscape becomes a cosmos, another delirium, which also resembles something more pop, almost like a music video, or scenes of superheroes. I thought it could be a sort of series of dancing portraits of cosmic, extraterrestrial, ghostly, fantastic beings.

LA: Lambada as a dance originated in the North region of Brazil and became popular in the late 1980s, especially due to the great success of the group Kaoma. After becoming a worldwide phenomenon, largely driven by foreign investment, it fell into general oblivion. Why the choice of lambada for the dance class presented in the work?

DM: What’s crazy is that the song Lambada (Chorando se foi), which supposedly started the musical genre, is a version of an older popular Bolivian song. And the Brazilian version, which was the one that blew up in the world, was recorded by the group Kaoma, which was formed from the idea of two French music producers. In other words, once again a cultural product that is launched to the world as something that is “the face of Brazil” is, deep down, a great mix of “Latino” culture and imaginary with a foreign touch that propels the phenomenon. But beyond these curiosities, which bring lambada closer to an imaginary of Brazilian identity construction that intrigues me, the fact is that I was born in a decade when lambada as we know it was being born, and my own upbringing in childhood and personal history were affected by lambada. So it’s not at all a mockery, an ironic and nostalgic appropriation of the 80s and early 90s. My father, who is a musician, supported the house as a gig musician [guigueiro] for a lambada singer who was successful at the time, and I even traveled with him as a child and saw some of those shows. At the time I had a small birthday celebration with a lambada theme. The rhythm was really something that permeated Brazilian culture very intensely at that moment.

LA: How do you see “Lambada estranha” within your artistic production?

DM: The film itself, the work Lambada Estranha, I think is different from the other things I’ve done, but it’s also a kind of mixture of them. I made my first “speculative fiction” in 2016, which was A Maldição Tropical [The Tropical Curse], an experimental journey about the museum and the ghost of Carmen Miranda. Despite being experimental, it was much more narrative than this lambada work. I don’t even know if I consider Lambada Estranha exactly a film. It’s not Cinema, with a capital C, definitely. It’s a trip that is interested in bodies and landscape, science fiction and delirium, catastrophe and invention. These relationships continue to interest me and I intend to do more things based on this research.

LA: How does your work open up possibilities for the imagination of other realities?

DM: It’s difficult for me to talk about how my work specifically opens up these possibilities. But I think that art in general, fiction, philosophy, the sciences, magics have a great capacity for experimentation, speculation… And I feel that people who are interested in these experimentations have been going after possible and impossible ways of imagining other realities. It’s something that can move and motivate us in the midst of this chaos we are living in, and which is the cause not only of the authoritarian and right-wing turn in world politics, but of a world project, of destruction, extraction, and death that is much older, that is a modern project of the world. I think it is extremely important, at this moment, the collective effort to imagine other realities, but perhaps even more important now is the collective and political effort to imagine creative possibilities for dealing with this exact reality, which is the present reality, it is the one we have now.

[Interview produced in the context of the Futuração exhibition, between March and April 2021]