The Boy Who Collected Skins (O menino que colhia cascas)

Depending on the species of cicada the nymphs live between 1 and 17 years underground feeding on the sap of roots of trees. These insects, when the season of reproduction arrives, they leave the darkness of the underground and rise to the surface, the old skin is so abandoned to fulfill their ultimate mission in life: To produce the sound of their mating which is also a kind of collective requiem, a since suffering after the reproductive period.

Unlike cicadas, human children to live in society has to create masks adapting to their environment. In the contemporary world the artificiality and virtuality can be interpreted as a kind of plastic surface, a veil, a bulkhead that takes us away from the real world, thus it is the plastic bag the representation of a suffocating mask that acts as a filter that translates the common understanding of the reality of globalization.

"The boy who collected skins" emerges from the play I did with my nephew. At the age of 4 years (it currently has 7 years old) he loved collecting shells of cicadas in the trees surrounding the house of my mother .. In the few days that we spend together during the year, both of us suggest some ludic games, moments where I could see my nephew faced with surfaces which mask reality.

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