Amarelinha

HOPSCOTCH is a vídeo installation composed by 5 videos with a total of about 5 minutes made between 2018 and 2022, each with 1 child playing hopscotch drawn on the floor in a specific design format developed for this work. The sounds are natural from the places where the videos were produced, superimposed at a certain moment by the President Truman’s voice when he spoke to the U.N. delegates from Washington, D.C. at the UN founding event in 1945 superimposed on the videos.

The choice of this game is due to the fact that it is a popular and universal game that transcends borders, a recreational activity practiced by children from the most diverse types of societies in countries of all continents. The game may vary in name and format from country to country. This playful game was used as an instrument in an artistic program that I made to help social projects in refugee camps or places of extreme vulnerability and violence in different countries, such as Cuba, Syria, Venezuela, Angola and Brazil .

The locations chosen for the filming are from regions that live situations of extreme vulnerability and violence, such as the refugee camp in Syria, the old center of Havana-Cuba, Cracolândia, the center of the city of São Paulo-Brazil, a place of intense drug trafficking and use. heavy loads, support services for orphaned children in Angola, and Venezuelan refugees on the border between Venezuela and Brazil. The videos were produced between the years 2018 and 2022.

In this artistic action, hopscotch is presented as a political game, its design is scratched with chalk from a school blackboard on the floor in a circular format, and both the numbers and the words “heaven” and “hell” or “north” and “south” [found in formats practiced in some regions] are removed which nullifies the game’s sense of direction and progression. Children begin to jump in circles, without prior clockwise or counterclockwise guidance, or indication of a start and end. The whole game is produced in a way where it is impossible for children to access its central area, they move around the edges of this geometric shape.

In this sense, this work deals with urgent issues of our global society, which discusses issues related to violence, migration, peace and human rights.