'I’m not gonna let go’, is first and foremost an ode to memory, that fine weave of astronomical ratios, full of knots and wandering seams that populate our subjective, social, and political imagination. How is memory built? How is memory accessed? How do we retain memory? Is subjective memory different from the social one? What is its smell, color, brightness, substance? All these endless questions seem to take place in I’m not gonna let go’.

In an immersive, floating video installation, we are invited to experience a meditative state of surrender for a few minutes. Inside the pool, as we surrender our bodies to the sensation of zero gravity, our sky becomes a screen, receiving the projection of a video. For a few minutes, we are introduced to this encounter. Inside the water, the visitors hear voices which bring back personal feelings of the past which people have not been able to disassemble.

In this video projection, an object also immersed shines extraordinarily in a dance without gravity. Surrounded by water like us, the object shines and dances, its brilliance is such that it causes the screen to turn white for seconds. The strangeness the image arouses comes from the fact that our eyes are little or not accustomed to such brightness under normal circumstances. It is a natural image in a place as mundane as a lake, the sea, or any water landscape. If the object’s brightness has the sun as its source, our alien-leaf shines as strongly or even more than the star king.

How many encounters are planned but do not produced encounters?
In a world increasingly governed by bots and algorithms, the realm of chance takes on an almost mystical. Of all the encounters engineered by algorithmic parameters, this one of leaf, water, sun, camera, human, escaped all the increasingly refined predictions. There was no room for calculations, parameters, predictions, or monetarization. The chance of such an encounter ends in the grandeur of the concrete life of beings and not of numbers, the world still awaits the beauty of micro-miracles.


Encounters are the bricks of the wall of memory.
The inquiries that arise from the work seem to want to unravel the mystery of this seam that constructs our affections through the rearview mirror. The dimensions of such an encounter gain the outline of memory as they emotionally exceed the mundane. The incidence of the line of millions of leaves transformed into a single one, of millions of sunbeams transformed into a perfect angle, and of millions of people the incidence of reducing them to an artist. Any attempt to recreate the phenomenon was unsuccessful. The record is of an unavoidable precision, at a certain moment chance performed magic.

Text by Viviane Letayf

This project was executed at the Kaaysa Art Residency in Boiçucanga, Brazil in February of 2023.

Photography: Jessica Fertonani Cooke e Rodrigo Linhares