Erika Thomas

I have at least two ways of telling you my story. The first, prosaic one, highlights my personal journey: I'm a multimedia artist, a visual artist, a poet, a dancer, a writer. I was born in Brazil during the dictatorship. I mention this because it is the source of my absolute desire for freedom and my refusal to submit to anything that seems unfounded. As my father was a political exile, I spent my childhood and adolescence between Brazil and France. The dialogue of the arts (visual and poetic) was a constant in this journey. In Brazil, I attended art school in Rio; in France, where I settled for love, I obtained a master's degree in psychology and a doctorate in art and cinema (Sorbonne, Paris). I then took a course in documentary practice to become a filmmaker. Today, I'm a researcher in Art and Cinema at the Université Catholique de Lille. But here's another way of telling you about my story : and it was revealed to me by a Shaman in Lapland, few years ago. According to him, I'm a "very old soul who travels in time and dances around the fire". I love that phrase. That's how I visualize my background, as a sacred fire. The fire of the incessant desire to create. I'm an insomniac, and I must confess that my ideas often come to me in these sleepless nights. A heightened sense of life seems to emerge in this state of fatigue that cannot surrender to sleep. So, as if to defend myself from something that threatens the integrity of the ego, as if to chase away forms of anxiety, my ideas appear. Creation is a defense mechanism. And a never-ending search ! In his poem "I am an escapee", the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa evokes a soul in search of a body that has escaped and is hiding so as not to be found. I love this poem and see in it a metaphor for artistic creation: the soul is the artist in search of a work that escapes him as soon as it is born.