Catarina de Oliveira

Catarina de Oliveira works with performance, video, and textiles. Her practice deals with storytelling, using both existing and newly-written texts that often hint at being autobiographical. Her works assemble various portrayals of life and depict social or individual realities that oscillate between absurd or sometimes comical situations and more factual or historical elements.

The Chronicles of the Blue Crab focuses on the relationship between two woman - Sasa and Zamani - and on the life of the story's narrator—the Blue Crab. Depicting fragments and slices of lives it looks at their individual thoughts on certain discourses (historical narratives, myths, oral stories and so on) and how does their relation to these discourses affects the relationship between them. The Chronicles of The Blue Crab is both a performance and a short story. Although these two forms refer to the same story, none of them is per se an illustration of the other. Both have different entry points to the story that the Blue Crab tells, and they also arrive at different endings; they're two different paths inside the same story.