Inhabiting the Crossroads

I happened to be in Vienna to participate in the gtf[1] symposium Dance Resonance – Artistic Attunement in Motion[2] at the University of Music and Performing Arts Vienna. There, I had already spent two days listening, studying and dancing on the theme of resonance in dance.[3]

Encountering WASTEland felt like a gift, a golden closure (as we say in Brazil) for many reasons. First, because I had a strong desire to experience the work of a Viennese artist, and second, because my own work resonates deeply with Claudia’s practice – especially her relation to landscape, the precariousness of so-called “non-conventional” art spaces, and above all, a porous and expanded state of presence that dialogues with the visible and invisible presences surrounding us. Finally, I highlight the pleasure of diving into a piece so powerful that it opened many questions about dance and ecology, which I believe are central to our time of catastrophes.

Anxious to find the location, I arrived at a crossroads right in front of Vienna’s central station.

Speaking of “crossroads”: In Portuguese, the beautiful word “encruzilhada” in itself conveys the idea of a place full of potency. More than a geographic point or a metaphor of choice, it is a cosmological principle that structures ways of living, thinking, and creating, rooted in Afro-diasporic traditions in Brazil. The “encruzilhadas” are governed by Exu, the entity who opens paths, creates connections, and establishes communication between worlds.[4]

To inhabit the crossroads is to embrace an epistemology that values movement, mixture, negotiation, and invention. It is not about choosing one path among others, but about recognizing that knowledge is constituted in crossings, entanglements, and tensions. Far from being disorder or confusion, the crossroads is understood as a principle of existence – where the world is made, where life is re-enchanted, where the common is experienced in its radical diversity.

That evening, under a gentle rain, I sat with a raincoat and umbrella as the performance began, light fading, night and rain disputing which was stronger. The rain won. The performance had to be interrupted due to its sheer force and determination.

As a spectator, I felt disappointed not to witness everything unfold within that wet presence. But as an artist, I know that safety always comes first, as do the technical conditions necessary to carry out the work. I left soaked, returned to the hotel, and – even after a hot shower – I couldn’t sleep.

When I finally closed my eyes, I dreamed.

I dreamed of a future where time was different – spiraled, circular and unique for each being. There was the time of trains, the time of birds gathering at sunset, the time of planes tracing their routes. In the dream, five women – Amazons – arrived galloping across a vast abandoned space: WASTEland. They wore heavy boots for rivers, swamps, or mangroves, boots that also protected them from snakes and fantastical animals. Dragons flew across the sky – or were they kites? These women carried their own time, their bodies, their chests. Gradually, they touched, felt, and sensed each other – also sensing me. With exposed chests, they eroticized everything, releasing milk across the space, nursing plants, stones, asphalt.

In this first part of the dream, they danced, occupying everything. I, seated in a kind of audience “in the middle of nowhere”, was enveloped by images forming around me. Their moving bodies, intertwined with the landscape, told stories of forgetting, right in the heart of a monumental city. The site was shaped like the tip of an arrow – a perfect triangle carved into the city’s core, filled with rubble, mud, and resilient vegetation. A sound responded to everything: to the earth, to the sky, building a porous nest of presence, open and in dialogue.

Around that arrow, in the dream, many people appeared: a boy carrying birthday balloons, a woman smoking from a balcony, tourists taking photos outside a hotel, bicycles and scooters passing by.

Amid this dreamlike confusion, I saw the Amazons that transformed themselves into other figures, into colors, textures, sounds, movements – crossing space, tracing lines, exploding bombs, flying among ruins, sinking deep into the earth.

One figure stood still at the back, observing every gesture. Doing something by doing nothing. A witness. There was pain, war, struggle.

But there was also resistance, brilliance, beauty, pause, rest, and breath. There was beauty! And there was love. Toxic love. This love is toxic because it emerges from an environment of ruin; but it is also love because it sustains possibilities of survival, creativity, and solidarity. To speak of toxic love[5] is to name the contradictory attachments that bind us to the Earth in the age of climate crisis. Love in this sense is not pure, innocent, or redemptive; it is entangled with histories of violence, contamination, and extraction. Yet, it remains a force of intimacy, desire and care.[6] To love ecologically in my dream was to accept that intimacy with the world is never untouched by toxicity: our bodies carry pesticides, heavy metals and microplastics, just as our landscapes are scarred by monocultures, mining and industrial waste.

In the second part of the dream, the women came and took my hand. I was called to walk through that space with others, to be with them, to traverse the crossroads itself. Spiraling through times between worlds, I rubbed my hand on earth and concrete. It was dirty, toxic and uncomfortable. I remembered in the dream that I thought of ecology as toxic love. I was there with these performers, embracing the paradoxes of our entanglement with the Earth in the Anthropocene. It was not pure, harmonious or innocent – it was messy, ambivalent and marked by histories of extraction, violence and colonial domination.[7] Yet it was also a force of attachment, desire and care.

Nothing was romanticized about the crossroads we were in. We are already implicated in these toxic relations: the landscape shaped us and our ways of moving, mining and wasting. WASTEland – inseparable beauty and contamination. Many elements gathered – glitter, bags, colors.
Does waste come from trash? From what has been discarded? From what no longer serves?

“The present is the future of the past.
The present is the future of the past.
The present is the future of the past.”

Everything went dark. I saw nothing. There was no negotiation with the sun going down and the night painting the shadows.
Then they poured a bucket of water over my head.
I woke up.

On the final day of the symposium, I attended Martina Ruhsam’s talk – precisely on WASTEland and landscape. She articulated many fascinating ideas about the work, but what resonated with me was her citation of Ailton Krenak[8], speaking about becoming the landscape. I had talked about Krenak in the seminar the day before too! He is a very important indigenous voice from Brazil. In another of his books, he writes of the ancestral future: a way of breaking with the linear time of colonial and capitalist imaginaries. For him, the future is not an abstract projection of progress or development, but the continuation of relations linking us to our ancestors and the more-than-human world. What ties us to a piece of land – like that crossroads of the performance – is precisely this. To think of the future through ancestry is to refuse the separation between past, present, and to-come, recognizing that what we are today carries the dreams, rituals, and struggles of those who came before us.

This ancestral future is also a practice of responsibility: each gesture in the present must consider not only its immediate effects but also its impact on future generations and the territories we inhabit. At the same time, it means recognizing that ancestors are not confined to the past, but remain as living presences in rivers, mountains, forests, songs, and rituals. Krenak insists on the importance of dreaming collectively, re-enchanting life and cultivating affective alliances that sustain us amid the climate crisis. In this horizon, the future is not to be conquered, but a territory to be cared for – because it already inhabits us.

After the symposium, I joined a conversation with Claudia Bosse and Isabel Lewis – at the same place where the rain had interrupted the performance. This time the sun was out, and I could look at the space differently. It was very nice to see the crossroads with other colors and temperatures. Isabel, in her talk, mentioned a series of references resonating with what I had felt and dreamed: queer time, hybrid landscapes, a toxic love for Earth and life.[9]

I had the opportunity to ask Claudia what the future of this work might be, since it would no longer inhabit that site. She replied: “We will continue experimenting with this site, in other spaces, with everything it has taught us about time. It is fundamental to think about ecology within the traditional spaces for art.”

Yes. I agree. And I dream about that too. There are many crossroads to inhabit – through movement, mixture, negotiation, and invention – together with the responsibility we carry for the time yet to come.

“The present is the future of the past.” And we continue in the spiraling.[10]

Marina Guzzo is an Artist and Associate Professor at the Federal University of São Paulo (UNIFESP), a researcher at the Corpo e Arte Laboratory of the Society and Health Institute. Current Fellow at the Collaborative Research Center “Affective Societies” of Freie Universität Berlin, which sponsored her trip to Vienna as part of her research funded by Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) Brazil, grant no. 201223/2024-4. More about her work at: cargocollective.com/marinaguzzo

[1] Gesellschaft für Tanzforschung (Society for Dance Research), gtf-tanzforschung.de.
[2] Tanz Resonanz – Künstlerische Weltbeziehungen in Bewegung, gtf-tanzforschung.de.
[3] Amongst them my own research in collaboration with Sophie Schultze-Allen: Exploring Dance and Ecosomatic Practice as Knowledge-Creation.
[4] Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino, Fogo no Mato: A ciência encantada das macumbas, Rio de Janeiro: Mórula Editorial 2018; R. Almeida, 2021.
[5] Donna Jeanne Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene, Durham: Duke University Press 2016.
[6] Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Princeton: Princeton University Press 2015.
[7] Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands and Bruce Erickson (eds.), Queer Ecologies: Sex, Nature, Politics, Desire. Bloomington: Indiana University Press 2001.
[8] Ailton Krenak, Futuro Ancestral, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras 2022, (not yet translated into English; title could be rendered as “Ancestral Future”). From Krenak, in English: Ideas to Postpone the End of the World,Toronto: House of Anansi 2020; Life is Not Useful, Cambridge: Polity Press 2020.
[9] Isabel Lewis mentioned two important references to WASTEland in her lecture and in dialogue with Claudia Bosse: Astrida Neimanis’ “bad ecosex” – to express the proximity to toxic love; and Carolyn Dinshaw’s “How soon is now” – to relate to the queerness of time.
[10] At this point, I find it important to cite the work of Leda Maria Martins not yet translated into English (my translation): “Spiral time is not organized in a linear manner, but in turns, comings and goings, returns and reinscriptions. In performance, the past is not a fixed point behind us: it is actualized in the present and projected into the future, so that each gesture carries within itself an ancestral memory and, at the same time, the invention of a future-to-come. This time is not chronological, but ritual and circular, in which remembrance and the now intertwine in layers, forming a spiral.” Leda Maria Martins, A cena em sombras: memória e performance nos congados. São Paulo: Perspectiva 1997.