Marara Kelly Art Show: you've been coming to my parties, I've been appearing in your dreams

The Marara Kelly Art Show is a performance series that presents a self-mythology in epic narrative format, in which the artist Mayara Yamada seeks to meet Marara Kelly, her personal entity of party and pleasure, the guardian entity of her childhood dreams. The series tells the story of a night of partying, divided into five performances: each chapter is a part of the same story, each performance is a stage, a moment of a single night. In each performance, the artist seeks out Marara Kelly, and the two cohabit within the same body: the artist’s body sometimes serves Mayara, sometimes Marara, as a support for their different identities.

In its last episode, Marara Kelly Art Show: you’ve been coming to my parties I’ve been appearing in your dreams, Mayara and Marara take the audience on a dramaturgical journey through different historical and emotional “islands”. The journey takes place on a hammock - an object that the performer presents in terms of its historicity, functionality, ancestral cultural aspects and applicability in the contemporary context.

By evoking the hammock as a means of transport and trans-temporal passage, the performer blurs boundaries, creating for herself and the audience a kind of ephemeral map for navigating routes other than the usual ones. The hammock is the house, the cocoon, the swing and, above all, the boat that guides her navigation. Along the way, from the rivers of Pará in Brazil to the lakes of Switzerland, the hammock-boat becomes an enchanted being, reflecting its importance in the artist’s journey. Each island visited by the performer and captain of this voyage reveals to the public a facet of her performative and festive expressivity.

• Mayara Yamada born in Belém do Pará, in the Brazilian Amazon, is an artist, performer and DJ now based in Switzerland. Her research primarily focuses on performance art, while also engaging with photography, audiovisuals, theatre, and music. In her work, she mainly deals with subjects such as autobiography and the study of the body, landscape and memory, with an emphasis on the investigation of cultural codes and symbols of the Brazilian Amazon. As an artist in transit since 2010, Mayara investigates how to displace elements of her original culture into other contexts using tools of translation and transposition in a practice she defines as trans-situ. Currently, with the Marara Kelly Art Show series and its deployments, she crosses her stage-performative practice with her sound practice as a DJ, through research that mixes the world of pop and kitsch, the figure of the pop star, and sacred and profane elements in celebratory events in Brazil.