Guided by the question: “What a meaningful life is?”, Rita Ponce de León – in collaboration with Shinnosuke Niiro and Yaxkin Melchy – have given life to the project “The dreamed spirit”.

The simple but profound question prompted Niiro and Melchy to embark on a journey through Japan in search of answers from the people they met along the way, collecting phrases and words that subsequently provoked reflections between them. Indeed, over the course of their journey, they collected more than 400 words and small phrases, which, when placed side by side, would be strengthened and generate sentences that could sketch out a possible answer.

A version of this project was recently on display at the Aichi Triennale in Nagoya, Japan. Consisted of 14 xylophones made from keys of different sizes and qualities of wood, engraved with the words “found” on the journey. In this way, the xylophones functioned as a poetry-generating device, with which the audience could interact by repositioning the keys so that they took on the meaning they wanted to give them. These phrases were then activated when played, revealing the mystery of what this message would sound like.

The version of “The spirit is dreaming” that we can see in Comnoción total en mis células in Pivô Satélite is a video made by the artist Rita Ponce de León based on a selection of those phrases, originally compiled, that focus on different sensations and/or bodily experiences, on the possibilities and limits of language to express them and on the role of poetry. The importance of this version lies in the possibility of bringing these phrases to the south to adopt a new language: Portuguese. This translation of meanings gives a new breath to the project, which will continue to be enriched by the needs and challenges that arise when approaching the question of what a meaningful life is like.