This piece is built with footage of an action performed by the artists in August 2000. Directed by Guimarães and featuring a performance by Rivane Neuenschwander, the action involved inserting world map cutouts into books at the Stockholm Public Library and return them to the shelves, and thus possibly surprise eventual readers. Drawing on the notion of circularity – both in the architecture of the institution’s building and in the image of the globe –, the video taps into the parallel, humanistic par excellence, between reading and travelling, shared by the modernizing imagery of the West and respectively signified by librarianship and cartography. In building equivalence between different places on Earth and various literary passages, the artists underscore the role played by chance in totalizing aspirations – the result of the drive to organize spaces and knowledge –revealing the arbitrary character of the parameters they employ. This work deconstructs geopolitical definitions by confronting, for instance, the private and the universal, the intimate and the public, and welcomes the unexpected that always inhabits the future. It also harks back to the writing of Júlio Cortázar and his “around the day in 80 worlds.” Shot in Super 8, the video features soundtrack by the group O Grivo, a key partner of Guimarães, Neuenschwander and other authors who emerged during the 1990s in Minas Gerais state.
