Mapas elementares 3

[Elemental Maps 3] aka [Elementary Maps 3] 1977

Video. B&W
Sound : Music, folk bolero, female vocalist with accompaniment
Duration : 3’33”
Camera : Davi Geiger

Summary 
An inventive meditation on Brazilian cultural identity.

Overview
Anna Belle Geiger uses the shape of the continent as a departure point and proceeds to a series of pointed, illuminating text and image conjunctions reminiscent of concrete poetry and dada-esque puns and ponderances.

Anna Belle Geiger reflects
I circled back to my linguistic, phonetic questions* and anthropomorphized the silhouette of Latin America as an Amulet, as a Mulata (mulatto woman) and a Muleta (crutch). I associated them phonetically and drew them on paper. I also made a video about it, Elementary Maps III […]. Once, I visited a place where they sold vinyl records wrapped in plastic. I read the title of one of them, La Virgen Negra, a bolero, and I bought it. I listened to the song and the very next day I made the video Elementary Maps III, where all I had to do was combine sound and image. I believe in epiphanies. […] La Virgen Negra is a bolero sung by a woman, where she asks the Black Virgin for help. She speaks like the mythologies that signify a Latin America, asking for help, alms, assistance for all of us, always in a state of dependency, lack(ing) of self- esteem. I don’t think Brazil is like that.”
Hans Ulrich Obrist: entrevistas brasileiras. Vol. I. 2019. (p. 186).
*Linguistics was a focus of Geiger’s university studies (Federal University of Rio de Janeiro) as well as a lifelong fascination.  Her appropriation of cartography parallels her husband Pedro’s landmark studies on the socio-political and historical implications of geography and depictions of territoriality.