NINE LIVES CAT

Multimedia installation that tells stories from a hemisphere forged with blood, sweat and sacrifice.

Over the course of 10 years (2013 - 2023), documentary filmmaker Thiago Dezan crossed the Americas recording symptoms of a society in collapse that, despite being culturally different, suffers from the same scourges from north to south.

The installation consists of 10 screens (televisions or projections), simultaneously showing 10 videos in a loop. The first screen is an introduction, in which the title of the work is read and the words ‘This is not a film’, ‘everything you are about to see is real’, ‘nothing was staged’, followed by images recorded by the author during a tribute to his deceased friend and photographer, Valda Nogueira. 

The following 9 screens are named Life I to IX, each with a story of struggle, tragedy, resilience. As the viewer walks through the installation, the audio and languages ​​of the stories blend together, the experience is sensorial and immersive. Each video loop, each ‘Life’, has a different duration, each time the videos repeat the interaction between the ‘Lives’ is different. 

Each viewer experiences the installation in their own way. All the black and white videos were converted to VHS and later digitized, creating a visual uniformity between all the ‘Lives’. The installation is a capsule of memory, of homage, of honor, not of individual or temporal memory, but of the collective memory of what was, is and will be. 

The memory of time, unfortunately, is a continuous present. ‘Nine Lives of a Cat’ could be an altar, a candle, a tear, a flower, but it decides to be a creature that at first amazes us and then fascinates us. Against all odes, it travels through the eternal night, because through stubbornness or audacity it remains alive.