The New World Syrup & The Fever Hand is a performance lecture inspired by the return of yellow fever in South America. This old disease is deeply connected to the colonial sugar plantations in the Americas, and thrived in the Brazilian Northeast coast – its sugar production region – where plantations created the perfect environment for Aedes aegypti, the carrier mosquito imported from the African continent by European slave ships to the Americas. With at least thirty-six deaths between 2018 and 2019, Brazil has a seasonal period for yellow fever, which occurs from December to May. 

‘It’s ironic that yellow fever “chose” to come back during such political turmoil in Brazil. This is why the main form for the performance is that of a historical hallucination’, says Vivian Caccuri. She makes links between sugar cane, yellow fever, Catholicism, the way in which music reflected colonial interactions, and the consequences for South American bodies. The artist makes use of a music piece composed by herself on a large church-style pipe-organ, drawings, historical images, video, sounds and her own voice to tell this semi-fictional story.

Vivian Caccuri uses sound as a vehicle to cross experiments in sensory perception with issues related to history and social conditioning. Through objects, installations and performances, her pieces create situations that disorient everyday experience and, by extension, disrupt meanings and narratives seemingly as ingrained as the cognitive structure itself. Her first book Music is What I Make (2012), was published in Brazil and awarded the Funarte Prize for Critical Production in Music in 2013. Recently, Caccuri released her first vinyl record, composed and produced at the Studio Acusticum conservatorium in North Sweden, and her second book, a compilation of texts about sound in Brazilian Art.