Lenora de Barros (1953) participates in the virtual art exhibition Female Voices of Latin America, which takes place from March 8th to May 2, 2021. We feature the videoperformance "In the Country of the Big Tongue, Give Meat to those Who Want Meat" (2006).
Lenora de Barros produced several works in which her tongue is protagonist, such as "In the Country of the Big Tongue, Give Meat to those Who Want Meat", part of the installation The Multimillionaire Contribution of All Errors produced by LB, Walter Silveira and Arnaldo Antunes for the 24th Bienal de São Paulo, in 1998.
The work — which, in the "Bienal da Antropofagia" [Antropofagy Biennial] in 1998 was presented as a sound installation combined with enlarged photographs — unfolded itself, in 2006, into a videoperformance in which the artist eats her own tongue. Among the inspirations for this work were not only the artist’s reflections and interest in the tongue-tongues binomial, but also a conversation that the adolescent LB had had with the poet Décio Pignatari. In it, Lenora asks Décio: “what is metalanguage?”, to which he replies: “metalanguage is the mouth that eats the mouth that bites the tongue”.
