Imago Besta consists in the research of the sonorous, discursive and corporal possibilities of mythical beings created by the invaders to explain and conquer the unknown in their encounter with America. Our aim is to review these modes of colonial representation in order to propose new narratives from a decolonial perspective. 

For this, we base our work mainly on the work of Rojas Mix, who proposes in his book América imaginaria a series of iconographies that were part of the European imaginary from the 15th to the 17th centuries, and which were used to justify the cruelty with which otherness was subjected. 

How to inhabit these beast-bodies and twist their colonial mark? From this question we propose to generate an artistic creation, in which corporal-vocal-textual work is mixed with sound-musical experimentation, re-signifying these entities and making possible the construction of the voice of a kind of transoceanic “Frankenstein”.

The first stage of this project was developed in the context of the call for Transoceanic Residencies of the Circolando residency programme at Central Elétrica, in July 2023. It had its first opening process in the Ciclo Sonoro Watts, which brought together several Portuguese and international artists.