@aevtarperform

Selection of Instagram augmented reality filters and story highlights 2017–ongoing

x Camp Fires

On Instagram, under the pseudonym “aevtarperform,” Cibelle Cavalli Bastos exhibits, documents, and comments on their experience as a queer, non-binary artist, signer, and performer. Through daily stories, live videos, and publications on their feed, they share their everyday life with their audience, and reflect on the struggle for recognition, for themselves and their community. These contents deal with themes such as the body in relation to a patriarchal, capitalist, ableist, and ageist society, the formatting of the gaze through a binary conception of gender, and the need to de-program and escape from our mental and cultural constructions of the notion of identity. As an expansion of their work on social media, Cavalli Bastos began to create AR filters for Instagram that encourage her audience to confront these issues. In one such filter, they propose a virtual face tattoo of “They/Them,” with one of these words under each eye, ironizing the incomprehensible difficulty that people have in respecting the use of pronouns chosen by non-binaries by putting it directly on the face. It could be said that their filters counteract the narcissistic resource of selfie to turn it into a dissident therapeutic tool; at the same time, it is through selfies that so much of our public identity is understood, absorbed, questioned, and exonerated. Cavalli Bastos’s Instagram stories’ archive is visible on a phone in the exhibition while QR codes scattered in and around the exhibition’s venues allow the audience and passersby to access a selection of face filters.

This artwork is presented at Shedhalle as part of the exhibition CAMP FIRES curated by Simon W Marin and Violeta Mansilla which is taking place at Last Tango, Zurich and co-hosted by Shedhalle and Tanzhaus Zürich.

Cibelle Cavalli Bastos (b. 1978 in São Paulo, lives in Berlin) is an artist, musician, performer, independent researcher, and activist. They graduated in 2015 from the Royal College of Art, London. Under the name “Cibelle,” Cavalli Bastos released four music albums with Crammed Discs. Among others, they have performed and presented work at Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin; Volksbühne, Berlin; ICA, London; MASP, São Paulo; Carnegie Hall, New York; LCCA, Riga; CAC Wilfredo Lam, Havanna; Steirischer Herbst, Graz; MdbK Leipzig; and collaborated with the 28th and the 31st São Paulo Biennial.