Born in 1965 in Belém do Pará, Berna Reale is a major figure in Brazilian performance and video art. Also a criminal expert and forensic pathologist, she draws on this experience to create incisive reflections on social and institutional violence. Representing Brazil at the Venice Biennale in 2015, she uses her own body as a tool of resistance, confronting the tensions and exclusions of public space.

In her video Mayday Mayday Mayday , Berna Reale transforms the body into a territory of emergency and a powerful political instrument. Through an aesthetic of shock, drawn from her filmed performances, she interrogates the mechanisms of domination, economic exploitation, inequality, and institutional violence. The work is part of a reflection on hospitality as a fundamental condition of existence: the hospitality that Gaia, the Earth, offers to all living beings.

But this original hospitality is now corrupted by extractive industries, ecological destruction, and power dynamics that transform the world into a space of exclusion. The body is no longer welcomed; it is coerced, exploited, or sacrificed. Rooted in Brazilian reality yet carrying a universal resonance, the work sounds like a distress signal addressed to a suffocating planet. Between visual fascination and the violence of its message, Berna Reale confronts the viewer with their own responsibility in the face of the collapse of life and the necessity of reinventing reciprocal hospitality.