The Seed Award is a targeted package of support, including coaching sessions and a small bursary to enable artists to research and develop a particular project or take the next step in their creative journey.

In this Q&A, we speak to Seed Award 2025 winner Eliete Mejorado, a musician and performance artist who co-founded the duo Tetine with Bruno Verner in 1995. Her practice spans sound, video, film, and text, exploring themes of identity, feminisms, post-colonialism, fiction, and the body as a site of memory. Across albums, performances, and installations, she has brought together music, activism, and experimentation, carving out a distinctive voice within the avant-garde.

How did you first start making music, and what drew you to composition in particular?

I met Bruno Verner in 1995 in São Paulo. We met at Teatro Oficina. We began by improvising a Brechtian piece and after that we never stopped making things together, sound pieces, performances, videos, installations, radio shows etc.

I never thought of myself as a composer until I met him. I have always seen myself as a performer rooted in the experimental art scene that had a connection with the art punk and post punk universes. Bruno and I were both involved in performance art, physical theatre, and multimedia projects. Our collaboration began through shared interests in avant garde music, punk, spoken word, and performance.

Rather than approaching music from a traditional standpoint, we treated it as an extension of our performative and conceptual work. Mine through performance art, the body and the theatre, and Bruno through electronic music, poetry and post punk. From the very beginning we were interested in using sound and music to create unexpected pieces for audio visual performances that explored political issues, the body, domesticity, cultural critique, and artistic experimentation.

What’s your relationship with improvisation, and how does it shape your work?

My work is rooted in body and vocal improvisation, repetition and exhaustion. It has been like that since I began making music. As I come from a performance background, improvisation is like food, and always part of the process of composing.

I recently recorded an album called Berlin Improvisto with four other amazing artists in Berlin (Laura. aLL, Angelica Freitas, Bruno Verner and Yoko Afi). The session took place in a Kreuzberg studio and was captured entirely live, without preconceptions. Everything was invented, embodied, manipulated, and transformed in the moment, driven by a collective sense of wonder, joy, repetition, futurity, and melancholy.

Do you have any rituals or routines that help you get into a creative flow?

I love doing yoga. It helps me connect with my body and my voice. It also fuels my “personal dance”, a kind of ON mode that activates every muscle and cell in my body.