The installation consists of 10 screens, simultaneously showing 10 videos in a loop. The first screen is an introduction, in which the title of the work is read and the words ‘This is not a film’, ‘everything you are about to see is real’, ‘nothing was staged’, followed by images recorded by Thiago Dezan during a tribute to his deceased friend and photographer, Valda Nogueira. The following 9 screens are named Life I to IX, each with a story of struggle, tragedy, resilience.
As the viewer walks through the installation, the audio and languages of the stories blend together, the experience is sensorial and immersive. Each video loop, each ‘Life’, has a different duration, each time the videos repeat the interaction between the ‘Lives’ is different. Each viewer experiences the installation in their own way. All theblack and white videos were converted to VHS and later digitized, creating a visual uniformity between all the ‘Lives’. The installation is a capsule of memory, of homage, of honor, not of individual or temporal memory, but of the collective memory of what was, is and will be. The memory of time, unfortunately, is a continuous present. ‘Nine Lives of a Cat’ could be an altar, a candle, a tear, a flower, but it decides to be a creature that at first shocks us and then fascinates us. Against all odes, it travels through the eternal night, because through stubbornness or audacity it remains alive.