Mountain of Secrets (web version), 2023
Mountain of Secrets (web version, 2023) homes in on the contradiction between privacy and over-exposure on the internet. The artist recorded hundreds of TikTok users who dance choreographies of Brazilian baile funk, brega funk and pagodão baiano songs that talk about doing things out of people’s sight. The lyrics are mostly about cheating, and in the videos, the performers make a “shush” or “secrecy” sign with their hands and faces. In biarritzzz’s edit, the GIFs appear in quick succession on the beat of the songs.
Mountain of Secrets grapples with the simultaneous desire to show our lives on platforms like TikTok, the commodification of user-created content, and the necessity for places to hide, especially for those who are nonconforming or subject to policing, past and present.
An accompanying sound piece biarritzzz created in collaboration with Anti Ribeiro, is composed from five songs with textures that are designed to evoke the sensation of a subterraneous space, or an excavation of what the artist considers an archeology of the present. biarritzzz asks what cosmovisions were only passed on by creating structures of mystery and secret encodings in order to survive?