Name & NEAR Account ID: Baga Defente (bagadefente.near)
Location: Botucatu, Brazil
Social media: Instagram | Twitter
Links: nada.art.br | portfolio | lynkfire | writings (in PT)
Artist Statement
I’m a brazilian poet, publisher and artist-etc. who works with several languages, techniques and media to create experimental videos, images & texts, all of them connected by the poetics of chance — my main research theme over the last 15 years (and the subject of my bachelor’s degree on Visual Arts, obtained last year).
More than a theory or a group of techniques, I like to think the poetics of chance as an attitude, as an open-minded approach on art-making. In practical terms, this means the conscious & experimental use of the unexpected and the random on artistic creation.
On thematic level, I’m a romantic guy who reflects about life, love and other human relationships in the postmodern world, but living in a country ruled by far right art-hater bizarre (de)governators, it became impossible to avoid politics to affect and begin to appear in my works — especially after the political-legal-mediatic coup of 2016.
Last, but not least, the third element of my themes tripod is the “occulture”: things like ancestral wisdom, magickal systems and cosmic stuff, from old alchemical texts to latest quantum physics discoveries, used to connect and to make sense of all that together in an expressive, explorative and authentical artistic way.
Talking specifically about my writings, I’m an autofictional writer, with a truly processual nature. I usually write down phrases, thoughts and words coming from my own mind, heard on the streets, printed during chats or stolen from pop culture elements like songs, comics and movies.
To write, I mix all that with my feelings, perceptions and everything that is trespassing me at the moment, and translate that into poems and short stories where I try to look deep inside myself to achieve the essence of some shared human feelings, going from daily subjective perceptions to wider cosmical questions.
Planned Project
In June 2021, I published my first non-handcrafted poetry book, Pra estancar essa sangria (also minted as a full book NFT here on NEAR at Gambiarra store). But six months earlier, parallel to editing, I began to write his follow up, in which, nine months later, I’m still working on.
Being an independent artist, freelancer creative and father of two, the time I can dedicate to writing in my daily life is far from what I’d like (and need), so this grant would allow me to allocate some “workday time” to focus on my next book’s original.
If approved, I commit to finish at least five more poems (like 15 A4 sized-pages) from this book, but I’ll make use of those wonderful lines from the call that says “this grant will not require writers to publish or sell their work unless it makes sense for the moment of their careers and they want to do so” and probably won’t be minting anything — not right now: my plans are to translate these new poems to English, create an exclusive artwork for each and then start minting them as bilingual NFTs.
But at the grant’s end I can upload a copy of them on the cloud and share the link on my final report, so everyone’s interested can read and be sure that the goal was accomplished.
Previous samples of my work
A poem from this new batch
Cosmic Zeugma. quarto poema em uma série de três | by Baga Defente | Fazia Poesia
Videopoem from my latest book (w/ English subtitles):
Poema Cas’leluia & Final Brega (take dezessete) [videopoema, 2015]
First animated poem as NFT:
One of the only poems I originally wrote in English (unpublished):
