Búzios (cosmic pussy)

Once, I heard that oysters taste like women. I was around eight years old, eating a few of them at a simple beach restaurant. That sentence glued in my mind. A name given to the combination of flavor and texture coming from the still-alive juicy mollusk I was swallowing with some drops of lime.
In the last text she wrote for a show of mine, the poet Julia de Souza mentions that,
“In her Short Talks, the poet Anne Carson tells an anecdote about the last days of the sculptor Camille Claudel, who died in an asylum: “She refused to sculpt. Although they gave her sleep stones — marble, granite, and porphyry — she broke them, then collect- ed the pieces and buried these outside the walls at night”.
After reading this, I collected two broken pieces taken from a sculpture, glued them together using a filament of yellow resin, and named it Búzio; this piece was made for Julia, a cosmic pussy for Julia, It was the work missing to complete “Long Night” the show I was about to open in São Paulo.
Cambomblé culture was something present in my family—especially while my father was still alive. We knew what food each of us should avoid, would comment on each other’s behavior according to their guiding entity, and so on.
Later, it became common for me to find guidance at a Candomblé oracle, an ancient divination system (language) in which the reader interprets the position of búzios (cow- rie shells) thrown on a circular surface.
Whenever an important decision has to be made or I face a challenging situation, I like to consult the Búzios.
In her essay “The Gender of Sound” Anne Carson (again) mention a group of ancient terracota statues depicting the female body consisting “of almost nothing but her two mounths. The two mouths are welded together into an inarticulate body mass which ex- cludes other anatomical function. Moreover the position of the two mouths is reversed. The upper mounth for talking is placed at the bottom of the statue’s belly. The lower or genital mounth gapes open on top of the head.”
I understand these sculptures as a unity consisting of fragments put together by an allusive river. Their physical aspect is something between a human female genitals and a shell used to foresee the future (a portal). At the same time a body and a passage, placed at a mouth level, like a microphone, made to amplify voices.

Paloma Bosquê Brussels, spring of 2024.