Henrique Cartaxo :: How to Smile

How to Smile and Be Perceived as Normal, 2025 - video still

Fakewhale returns to the ART MARKET Curated Program with a release that sharpens its focus on the unstable language of video art, explored through the singular vision of Brazilian artist Henrique Cartaxo. His practice cuts into the architecture of the moving image, exposing what lies beneath its surface. Glitch becomes both scalpel and archive, disrupting the illusion of seamlessness while preserving the sediment of each transfer. Through creative coding, AI-driven narration, and the charged materiality of degraded dance archives, Cartaxo stages a choreography where human gesture persists within technological erosion.

For this occasion, we invited the artist to navigate us through his process in a brief dialogue flow. Speaking on glitch, he reflects on its capacity to hold the memory of an image’s journey.

On the presence of AI, he frames it as a performer learning the grammar of human gestures under his direction, introducing shifts that disturb and reframe the choreography. In considering the moving body as a fragile archive, he emphasizes its power to anchor empathy, even when worn to the edge of abstraction.

A Smile Is, 2025 - Henrique Cartaxo

Fakewhale: In your work, glitch operates as a deliberate rupture in the dominant visual grammar. Within a landscape where digital images tend to erase every imperfection, what role does this fracture play in shaping new visual narratives?

Henrique Cartaxo: In the pursuit of visual perfection, images often become generic, flawless but without a past. When I work with dance archives, I am engaging with records of specific dancers performing specific gestures.
My glitch work draws attention to the journey those images have taken to reach me, passing through countless copies, uploads, downloads, and exports. Each transition leaves subtle marks, revealing the tension between the moment of capture and the many formats in which the image has lived.
By making these traces visible, I deepen their history rather than erase it.

How to Smile and Be Perceived as Normal, 2025 - video still

Fakewhale: Artificial intelligence in your projects emerges as a foreign voice questioning social choreography. How do you define the authorship dynamic with an entity operating outside human coordinates, and how does this interaction shape the conceptual tension of the work?

Henrique Cartaxo: In this series, AI plays a character learning to interpret the grammar of human interaction. I give it constraints and prompts that limit its perspective, shaping the exchange much like a director works with an actor. Its understanding is partial by design, producing interpretations that are sometimes literal, sometimes skewed, and often surprising. These moments are its creative contribution, the way an actor might bring an unexpected inflection to a scene. The work emerges from this shared authorship, where my direction sets the frame and the AI’s performed naivety adds an ironic and slightly dystopian tension to the choreography.

Fakewhale: The body and dance in your videos act as unstable archives of collective memory. When these memories are recoded through cycles of degradation, how does the act of watching a moving body itself become redefined?

Henrique Cartaxo: The videos in this series unfold like dystopian tutorials.
A robotic instructor directs our behavior yet remains disconnected from the fundamentals of human interaction and our visual culture. This disconnect is reflected in the degradation of the archive. Still, even when the archive has worn down to near-abstraction, the presence of a human body carries an innate relatability.
We recognize it as a sentient being like ourselves, an essential anchor of empathy that has long shaped contemporary dance. To relate to another human being, to express vulnerability and to acknowledge and embrace vulnerability in others, becomes a crucial act of resistance.