ALAS POOR YORICK

On January 1, 2020, two months after my return from Brazil, I received at my home in Berlin a package containing a human skull and a letter with a QR code along with the message "Alas, poor Yorick." A famous quote from Shakespeare's play Hamlet, it refers to the skulls of Yorick, the king's former court jester, whom Hamlet finds in a graveyard. The phrase is part of a longer monologue, in which Hamlet reflects on Yorick's death and the fleeting nature of life and humanity.

The QR code links to a series of videos that were released beginning in June 2019 during the Brazilian presidential elections. The videos were sent via WhatsApp through fake accounts to various people in Brazil.

A voice, altered in an affirmative tone, begins by exposing an alleged scheme to induce behavior in social relations within Brazilian society. False narratives, the disarray of ideas, and the weakening of innovative thinking were strategies used. Like an improvised theater that occupies the empty space between one individual and another. Making everyone dance to the same rhythm, with the same disorderly choreography, a twelve-tone ballet where one imitates the other so that no one truly exists.

This is a pseudonym created by Guilherme Peters and Roberto Winter, dubbed Yorick as a "whistleblower" in an alleged Steve Bannon operation in Brazil. Yorick's confessions and accusations were released in videos and disseminated via WhatsApp.