Born in Curitiba in 1936, Jocy de Oliveira studied piano with Marguerite Long in Paris and graduated in composition from Washington University (St Louis, USA). As a pianist, she performed as a soloist under the baton of Igor Stravinsky and premiered works dedicated to her by Xenakis, Berio, Messiaen and John Cage. As a composer, she was a pioneer of electroacoustic music in Brazil: “Apague meu Spotlight” (1961) was the country’s first performance featuring electronic music. Over the course of a career spanning almost seven decades, Oliveira has developed a multimedia language that encompasses opera, film, installation art and writing.

A Brazilian filmmaker and producer based in Berlin and São Paulo, Dácio Pinheiro studied film and has been working in independent audiovisual production since 1996. His first feature film, “Meu Amigo Claudia” (2009), premiered at Frameline in San Francisco and won the Audience Award at LesGaiCineMad in Madrid, and at the Mix Brasil Festival. In 2019, he directed the influential “Electrónica:Mentes,” about the development of electronic music in Brazil, which was the starting point for his collaboration with Jocy de Oliveira and, later, the film “Universo Circular.”

Helena Pires studied piano at the Calouste Gulbenkian Conservatoire of Music in Braga and at ESMAE in Porto. She earned her PhD in Communication Sciences from the University of Minho, where she is currently an Associate Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences. Her research lies at the intersection of semiotics, visual culture, and contemporary art, with a particular focus on landscape as an aesthetic field and on the relationship between art and cyberculture. She is co-coordinator of Passeio, Platform for Arts and Urban Culture, a project she has been developing since 2015 through Minho University’s Communication and Society research Centre [CECS]. 

Commissioned by Semibreve under Re-Imagine Europe, a programme co-funded by the European Union