On the border between being a native and a foreigner

First of all, a confession: this is a very personal project. I am extremely excited about the group of professionals and students I'm going to spend the next month with, and very thankful for them wanting to be part of this journey with me, but I do admit that the original concept is deeply personal.

I was born in Santana do Livramento and grew up here before I moved on to Porto Alegre to study, and further away to Edinburgh. Those closer to me know that at the moment I am struggling with the new immigration rules to go back to the UK, where I have established my artistic career and have lived and worked for the past 6 years. Since I had to come back "home" to wait for their decision, it seemed like the right time to do this project that I've wanted to do for a while, exploring the unique cultural aspects of my Brazil-Uruguay border, and I happened to find myself in this bizarre situation of existing in two countries and not existing in either of them at the same time for an indefinite period. I have been living in the intersection of many lives for the past 6 months, and that feeds into my current work.

There's an infinitude of aspects to be observed, documented and analysed in this place. I am a native observing my home, this border, from an academic, artistic and anthropological perspective. Instead of turning to "the other", I have turned to myself, my own origins. My academic background and my performance practice background were mostly in English-speaking environments, hence why I am more comfortable blogging about this in English. This makes me a foreigner in my homeland. My point of view is at the same time local and stranger, and I feel as I walk the streets of Livramento and Rivera that I am no longer recognised as local by my fellow natives, despite fully understanding how the place works, the way people live and behave here, and why they do so, the daily rituals, the use of language, the sense of aesthetics and the cultural aspects of the two cities.

This makes me feel entitled to conduct this project but also makes me question my rights to expose and interfere with these ways. This is where the notion of transculturalism comes in. Instead of simply exhibiting the bordering towns, their people and culture as a museum piece or as an academic paper, I would like to give it a chance to expose itself, being both object and subject of this research. And I would love to see the meeting of the place where I grew up with the place where I chose to live, which also inundated me with feelings for its culture and people.

This is what Fronteiras Explorers is about - creating an environment where people can choose how to present themselves and their culture/art, choose what to give and what to take away and how to shape their own definitions and develop their own hybridism. Organically and intuitively, that's what happens on the daily life of a bordertown native. It's what allows me, Brazilian, to have a conversation with a Uruguayan friend in which I speak Portuguese and they speak Spanish and we understand each other without having to shed our own identity, and what identifies us as "the peaceful border".