whose body? what poem?

whose body? what poem? / playing with nature, reinventing forms is a multimedia poetry and performance project that explores poetry as an embodied, natural, and unruly practice.

Between 2022 and 2024, while living in Europe and studying Flamenco in Spain, Coelho deepened her exploration of the body as a poetic instrument. During this period, she created the performance project The Body Becomes the Poem in Kerry, Ireland, supported by a Creative Europe Mobility Grant. This work builds on an earlier exploration begun in 2018 with her play The Good Manners of Colonized Subjects, which examined colonization as lived experience, in the body, emotions, history, and culture.

The project is informed by writers such as José María Arguedas, who rejected the label of “poetry” in favour of the Quechua term haylli taki, and Papusza, the Polish Romani poet who spoke and sang poetry in nature without naming it as such. These influences shape an approach to poetry understood as natural, free, and resistant to imposed forms.

The project includes poems presented in audio, text, and video formats, among them Why Did Europeans Kill Indians? and Mera Nam, My Name, alongside videos from The Body Becomes the Poem, where movement is recorded in natural environments. It also includes a 90-minute Zoom workshop inviting participants to respond through gesture, movement, and voice, and to create and rename poems in other languages or invented sounds.

At its core, the project proposes poetry as an antidote to oppression and rigid definitions, inviting participants and audiences to rediscover poetry as something close, physical, and already present under the skin.

The project is part of the subtheme Unruly Forms – Experiments in the Poetic Wild.