Giovana Sanchez – BESTA
creative process | two-week residency
14 november 10:50 am
As I fly toward Lake Studios, I find myself immersed in the work of Clarice Lispector and struck by how deeply it resonates with me.
I feel as though I’m speaking from the very center of the present moment, where everything trembles with possibility. I try to hold the instant in my hands, but it slips away like light on water. Still, I reach for it again and again. In every word I write, I sense the pulse of something alive, something beyond naming. I want to touch the world without control, without fear—only the raw vibration of being here, now.
Perhaps this is why Clarice feels so intimate to me, her writing is not a description of life but a direct contact with its trembling surface. She writes as someone who inhabits the threshold between thought and sensation, someone for whom the world is always slightly too large, too raw, too intense to be tamed by language. Her books are less narratives than states of consciousness—fragments of perception, flashes of inner movement, moments where identity dissolves and something more elemental emerges.What strikes me most is how her personhood seeps into her sentences. Clarice writes the way a nerve feels: exposed, electric, vibrating with the slightest shift in the world.
“And I walk on a tightrope up to the limit of my dream.
My viscera, tortured by voluptuousness, guide me, fury of impulses.
Before I can organize myself, I must first become completely disorganized…“I, who fabricate the future like a diligent spider.
And the best of me is when I know nothing and create I-don’t-know-what.”
15 november 9:00 am
sound recordings: frying onions, no air voice, water, voice…
16 november 3:00 pm
judgmental day. not liking anything.
17 november 2:00 pm
“eu sou puro it que pulsava ritmamente”
recording sounds.
a feeling hangover from the previous work
não se trepa em 15minutos lyrics from a song by Liniker
It is as if she were trying to express a consciousness so essential that it has not yet taken the shape of an identity.
It is the experience of being stripped bare, without a name.
An almost mystical, almost bodily state.
Letting go of the judgment that rises when I see myself doing “random, nonsense” things remains one of my greatest internal battles. I hold an image of what I think I want to create, and then the reality arrives, unfamiliar and imperfect. No matter how much I try to release this expectation, it follows me into the night and unsettles my sleep.
The undulations of my being shift constantly—second by second—like something alive beneath the surface. Giving myself small tasks, and actually completing them, becomes a way to steady the chaos, to return to myself for a moment.
Today, I tried to give form to feelings by turning them into words—specific words, anchored in childhood memories. The task was simple: create six to eight movements or images and name them.
Then I let myself improvise from those fragments. fun.
18 november 9:00 am
As of today, I’m starting to organize the work into clear sections. I’m dividing it into parts, giving each a name, and writing a short description of what it’s about. This helps me understand the overall structure, clarify the purpose of each section, and see how everything fits together. It’s the step where I move from simply collecting ideas to shaping them into a more defined and intentional form.Today, I also began working on the RASGO section. I gathered movements from the last improvisation inspired by one passage of the book, and I started creating new movements and images based on another passage.
“From my painting and from these jostling words of mine, a silence soars, like the very substrate of the eyes.
The muscles contracting and retracting.““The instant is this. The instant is one of an imminence that takes my breath away. The instant is, in itself, imminent.”
20 november 01:00 pm
I keep returning to this sensitivity to the present moment, to the place where thought and sensation blur. I’ve started building and playing with scores.
Make a score → record → watch → give feedback → begin again.
This loop has become a way to stay close to the instant, to see what actually happens instead of what I imagine should happen. Each new score holds a different pulse: a gesture, a memory, a fragment of sound. There’s always a tension between control and surrender. Part of me wants to refine the material, shape it, make it “make sense.” But another part wants to let it unfold in its wild, instinctive form, to trust the strangeness of what comes before thought organizes it. I’m learning to stay with that friction without shutting down.Each day, the practice is the same: stay open, stay receptive, stay with the pulse of what arrives before it becomes anything. The beast of the work, a besta, is in that moment, in the rawness that appears and disappears in the same breath.
21 november 02:00 pm
BESTA emerges from a heightened sensitivity to the present moment, moving in the space where thought and sensation blur. The piece unfolds through fragments, sounds, gestures, memories—each treated as a pulse that appears before it is understood, a trace of something instinctive and essential. At its center lies a tension between control and surrender: the impulse to shape and refine meets the desire to let things reveal themselves in their wild, unfiltered form. The work tries to catch what escapes even as it is lived—capta essa coisa que me escapa e no entanto vivo—operating in the charged zone where sensation arrives first and meaning follows later. Guided by the feeling that “the instant is one of an imminence that takes my breath away” .
22 november 10:30 am
As I start to decide what kind of light BESTA would desire, I return to the movements I had to let go of — the small acts of desapego that shaped the piece. It feels as if the lighting should carry the memory of those absences, of what the body released. I think, too, of the sounds I recorded on the site, sounds that now lie under a layer of ice. They belong to a place that has already shifted. Maybe the light also needs to acknowledge this: something once warm, now suspended, preserved.
This is the phase of practical decisions — the grounded part of the process.
What light?
What technical tools do I actually need?
How long does this piece want to be?
Then my eye glitches, that tiny electric flicker, and I remember I haven’t written about the decision to place the audience differently. Another shift, another desapego. They’re not in the usual setup anymore; they form a circle, a perimeter around the pulse of the work. At this moment, what I know is simple and precise:
1. there will be one blackout;
2. the audience will sit in a circle;
3. BESTA lasts 15 minutes.
27 november 06:00 pm
So, in summary, these past two weeks have allowed me to truly experiment and absorb a great deal, especially through the creation of this first besta. The entire process—composing, recording, and manipulating the soundscape was intense, demanding both precision and vulnerability. The same was true for shaping what I can loosely call a “choreography”.
It is a privilege to inhabit a space where I can create I-don’t-know-what, and yet feel compelled to share it. As I stand one day before the performance, I find myself oscillating between two states: the familiar self-critique of “I should have done this or that,” and the quiet recognition of “yes, this is what it has become.”
There is something quietly magical in accepting that tension, between what I imagined and what the work ultimately chose to be.
