Berlin was astonishing. “I exchange your pain for a massage” definitely needed such heterogeneous and effervescent atmosphere to come to fruition and finally leave the abstract plane of ideas.

The idea of an exchange device between pains and touches had already been thought since August 2016, when I was still living in Rio de Janeiro. The first test of how this experience would turn out took place in September of the same year, at the Benimaclet Confusión Arts Festival, in the city of Valencia, Spain.

There, listening to the requests, complaints, and vents of those who willingly participated in the performance, I realized the universality of pain, of how much radically different pains are similar, of how we make ourselves humans through suffering, and of how genuine was my desire to be there as a vector of touch, listening, and mutual learning.

My great enthusiasm for “I exchange your pain for a massage” comes from the fact that, in it, I can bring together territories of affinity that, until then, I could not clearly put in relation: the non-places, the body, massage, and performance.

The search for the contact through the affection and the exchange through the physical touch, the passion for inhabiting places of passage and circulation, and the desire to present myself as a vector of exchanges in such places took form in this city that gave life into “I exchange your pain for a massage”.

Materializing this idea was delicate due to its simplicity: where exactly should the performance take place when the Autumn was already bringing in the cold weather? How to find a cozy enough place so that people would stop and sit down? In what way, in what surface of visibility, should I materialize such invitation?

Little by little, conversation after conversation, the answers to each one of these questions were settling down and started to indicate the necessary materials in order for “I exchange your pain for a massage” to present itself as it was: the making of a sign, the chairs layout, the red carpet...

And what kind of exchanges came from that? The most incredible, multiple, and gratifying. The beauty of pain lies in the fact that, right next to it, really, really close, we can find the hope and the joy of its overcoming.