“FISH DOES NOT SURVIVE IN CLEAN WATERS”.  Mao Tse Tung’s maxim resembles the turbulent sailing of the Havana Biennial over 30 years, with financial and bureaucratic difficulties but not enough to wreck it.  The theme of the 13th edition, The Challenge of the Possible synthesizes the struggle that touches the imaginary and tries to face the impossible.  The event continues in the search of greater correspondences between the creation and the practices of life, or to converging points.  With a year of delay due to Hurricane Irma, the show coincides with the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of the founding of Havana and the almost 30th Biennial.  What is the transcendence of the island’s greatest cultural event?  There have been many overlapping mediations at the Havana Biennial since its founding in 1984: local architecture, historical burden, local financial crisis and that of the participating countries, mixed ideological frictions, criticism inside and outside Cuba, the fate of voracious gallerists and collectors  who come to the Island looking for quality art at prices well below the international market.  If compared to the previous editions the 13th Biennial is not among the best. 

The same happens to the last biennials of São Paulo, Venice and Documenta of Kassel.  In Havana, the curatorship is signed by seven Cuban curators led by critic and intellectual Nelson Herrera Ysla, in addition to the 21 invited foreigners.

The moment is for reflection, transition, discomfort and change, with some curators taking up positions in other cultural institutions or simply setting out on a solo career.  Biennials make history by unraveling previous accomplishments and meanings.  But what singularities can still provoke surprises amid the excessive accumulation of biennials, fairs, festivals, residences?  The works distributed throughout Havana, in addition to Matanzas, Sancti Spiritus, Cienfuegos and Camagüey are flattened by the international moment.

At the Bienal’s headquarters, Alexia Miranda’s Collective Fabric performance polarizes the attention and occupies the lobby of the Wifredo Lam Center. With the idea of ​​responding to the present, with possible notions of future, alert to the urgency of social transformations.  Collectively tran- scribed circles, in various patterns and rhythms, are tools in an attempt to restore moments of peace in violent El Salvador.  The gentrification of the great metropolis arrived in Dresden, a German city where Manaf Halbouni, a Syrian artist, lives 34 years. As his dream of living in a house never materialized, he turns the car into a residence-studio, “where I solve everything”, exhibited at the Havana Biennial as art.

The country is also on the agenda of Lais Myrrha with Cronografia dos Desmanches, a work in progress that has been developing since 2012. “The work comes when I see the boom in real estate speculation as I walk through the streets and find five houses destroyed  once “.  They are images of demolitions, abandoned sites, busts, ports, some unidentified. “

The Biennial of Havana bets on the young artists.  In this context is Ruy Cézar Campos, from Ceará who works different temporalities in three videos: Circunvizinhas, The Arrival of Monet and Tangled Terminals.  All members of the series Rede Vem do Mar, one year research between Brazil, Angola and Colombia.  “I try to establish a phenomenological link between the infra-structure of submarine cables and the platforms for landing them.  Fortaleza is the most important city in the South Atlantic network with which it is connected, Sangano, in Angola and Barranquila, in Colombia”.  Operating between technology and aesthetics, the artist expresses himself between performance, documentary and fiction, with social political bias.

In Matanzas, the new territory of the Biennial, Marilá Dardot asserts the utopia of the dilution of art in daily life.  “My job is a segment of the residency that I did in Mexico in 2015, at the time of the episode of the missing students.  He picked newspaper headlines and daily intervened with writings executed with water on a concrete wall.  As he wrote them, they went out. “  In Matanzas, he opted for the performance Volver, in which he repeatedly writes with water the phrase “La esperanza” I return to a wall in the street.  Marilá’s work has changed in recent years, “from an optimistic vision linked to literature, poetry, fiction and nature, to a more pessimistic view of Brazilian political facts.  “There was a political awakening in my generation, as well as in myself.”  Finally, three Cuban artists with established careers and identifiable poetics, gathered in the Interior Museums show, at the National Museum of Fine Arts.  Kcho (Alexys Leyva Machado), Carlos Garaicoa and Los Carpinteros.  Kcho’s international flight begins with Regata, a 1993 installment, made at age 23, a year before joining the collection of the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, MoMa and the cast of the Barbara Gladstone gallery in New York.  Barco, symbol of the collective imagination of Cubans, appears in gestures, sculptures or installations with objects that are nourished by various poetics.  As the geographer Milton Santos said, street art, naturally urban and public, carries a heavy political burden for occupying spaces outside the institutionalized fields of art and for touching the social realities closely.  Score, installation of Carlos Garaicoa, developed for ten years, synthesizes this thought.  The work has the participation of 70 musicians of street, of Madrid and Bilbao.  It is an orchestra with 35 videos of street musicians performing different pieces.  The final score, by Cuban musician Esteban Puela, fuses the varied sonorities and is transmitted to the large digital screen that assumes the direction of the orchestra.  Los Carpinteros, in one of his last acts as a duo, places in the Alacenas, in 2016, criticism about the devastation of the storms that invade the Caribbean.  The sounds emitted by the hurricanes are recorded, reproduced and placed in old kitchen cabinets that emit the terrifying noise of the phenomenon.

These artists form a logical and consensual core, but it is worth remembering that there are at least two dozen others, equally professionally respected, gravitating towards international shows.

THE TRADITIONAL International Paraty Literary Festival in the state of Rio de Janeiro, which this year takes place between July 10 and 14, has never stopped reinventing itself and exploring novelties to compose its structures.  This will be the 17th edition of the event and curated by the journalist and editor Fernanda Diamant, one of the creators of the magazine Quatro Cinco Um, specialized in literature.  The honoree of the time is Rio de Janeiro writer and journalist Euclides da Cunha (1866-1909), author of the acclaimed book Os Sertões, considered by many a work that initiates literary journalism in the country, long before the term exists.

Among the transitions and news, Flip’s organization, which has Mauro Munhoz’s general direction, has announced a desire to encourage the development of activities related to the visual arts in the itinerary of the event, in addition to what happens spontaneously through the city.  This is how the Terra Nova project was presented, a visual arts module that intends to carry out interventions that integrate Paraty in a way: “From the beginning, Flip has the intersection between the arts in their DNA.  Year after year, we were building an approximation between different artistic experiences, including the visual arts.  Now we feel the need to make this relationship manifest in a more visible way.  Terra Nova is an artistic device to illuminate issues that permeate the territory of the city, its residents and its visitors.  One of Flip’s missions is to investigate how art can help to qualify people’s look at human relations produced in public spaces, and Newfoundland will propose mechanisms of perception of this territory and its complexities through art”, Mauro said to ARTE!Brasileiros.

The project was launched in early June during an event at Casa do Parque, in São Paulo, where the patron program specially developed for this initiative was presented.  The patronage plan is aimed at individuals and is the main and exclusive way to make this idea viable.  Those who wish to contribute to the project will have some benefits such as tickets, preferential access to Flip’s main programming that takes place in the Matriz Auditorium, invitations to other events held by the organization of the fair and exclusive works of Laura Vinci, artist confirmed to participate in the first  intervention of Terra Nova.

Invited by the curator, Vinci will present its On Air installation, last presented in 2017, at MuBE, in São Paulo, and has already passed through several places, including some countries in Europe.  Other interventions are still being discussed for budgetary feasibility issues, and even so the presentation of the employers’ program was crucial to that everything began to be established.  The choice of No Air to integrate the debut of the project was discussed between the artist and the curator: “It’s a job that has this characteristic to adapt a lot, it reinvents itself in place.  It is a work that is mist, it is just steam.  So it sticks easy to the spatial situation.  It has works that require specific spatiality and the No Air does not, it only needs water”, says the artist.  The fluidity of the vapor in Laura’s work allows the public to discover different forms in the variations that the smoke creates in the space, besides the characteristic of the work itself transforming the place where it is.

About the interdisciplinarity that permeates Flip and the proposal to insert the arts more punctually, Laura has no doubt that the country is experiencing a time when collaboration between the areas is something necessary: ​​”This is a very important thing for us  , expand that and fortify those relationships”, she says.  For her, there are some areas that link more punctually and strongly with literature, such as cinema.  “In the visual arts this is not so clear, but I think we can start to find these encounters”, Laura commenta, citing as an example of this confluence her work, Machine of the World, which focuses on a poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

VISUAL ARTS AT THE MATRIZ AUDITORIUM

In Flip’s most disputed schedule, which takes place in an auditorium set up inside Paraty’s main church, the visual arts will also be present in various formats.  On Thursday, July 11, photographer Maureen Bissiliat will be interviewed by Miguel de Castillo and Rita Palmeira at table 6, titled Serra Grande.  The English photographer based in Brazil dedicated herself to the encounter between the word, the image and the geography along its trajectory, known especially for its work with the Xingu peoples.  At table 12, Mata de Corda, the artist Grada Kilomba is questioned by Kalaf Epalanga and Lilia Schwarcz on the questions that surround her book Memórias da Plantação, to be released during the event by the publisher Cobogó.  In it, the artist discusses themes such as race, class, gender and post-colonialism, already present in her work.  Then, at table 13, Ailton Krenak and José Celso Martinez Correa talk about the valorization of culture, fertile lands for art and diversity, mediated by Camila Mota.  The activities take place on July 12, and the next day, tables with Ismail Xavier, Miguel Gomes, Grace Passô, Marina Pessoa and José Miguel Wisnik will also bring the visual arts to the fair in their discussions around cinema, drama,  art and literature.

Whether in the recovery of “a religious memory and the mystical force of Afro-Bahian culture” made by Heraclitus, in the reconstruction of history and in reflection on it “from the record of what is necessary to keep within history and not forget” made by Pagatini or Centurión’s awareness of AIDS in a “personal chronicle of his way to death” Solo sector is bringing countries closer to the continent through common issues.

In the Masters sector, former Repertório, the new curator, Tiago Mesquita, did not seek a thematic or historical axis. The art critic says that the curatorial experience of an event like SP-Arte is still very new for him: “It’s very unusual in relation to other works that I’ve curated”.

Tiago chose to bring to the Masters works produced between the 50s and 80s, because they are works that “we can look at with a certain temporal distance” to understand them and also to understand the production of their respective authors. Carlos Fajardo (Marcelo Guarnieri), Ridyas (Central) and a project by Rubens Gerchman (Surface), among others.

The biggest surprise is perhaps in the Performance sector. Marcos Gallon, who also organizes the VERBO art performance show, chose not to allocate a space only for the works that will be presented. The performances took place in spaces destined to them scattered among the exhibitors. Gallon’s idea is to encourage the galleries to also take their performance artists, so the genre is incorporated as another possible medium of art, not marginalized in a closed corner. Also, according to Gallon, the vast majority of art galleries in the state of São Paulo represent artists who work with performance.

Gallon is also driven by the idea of encouraging collectors to buy performances, make them look at it as something that can be sold through the galleries: “So it’s brought to the trade show’s axis.” For this, SP-Arte will buy one of the works presented and donate to the collection of the São Paulo Pinacoteca. The work will be chosen by the staff of the institution, led by Jochen Volz. The artists Cadu (Vermelho), Cristiano Lenhardt (Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel), Jorge Soledar (Portas Vilaseca), Maria Noujaim (Jaqueline Martins Gallery) and Jaime Lauriano (Galeria Leme/AD) will be in the sector.

monteiro Lobato declares his love for Rio de Janeiro by stating that the city, during the creation of the world, was the storehouse of God in an article published in a book (“Luvas!” in Onda Verde, 1920). In the first six days he took all the beauties from his store and deposited them in the various places: fatigued, on the seventh day he rested, leaving the storehouse in the greatest mess with scattered beauties and mixed with all that is the corner of the city.

This was the sensation I had when I visited the rooms with works by the Marcos Amaro Foundation at the Fábrica de Arte Marcos Amaro (FAMA), housed in an old textile factory built in 1903 in Itu, São Paulo: generous spaces with works – some truly exceptional – arranged in a a kind of warehouse requesting a greater order of visibility for the exhibited works or that explains, for example, the reasons why a sculpture attributed to Aleijadinho is in the middle of others produced in the last decades. However, despite this impression of being in an undecided place between being a storage place or an exhibition space, the sensation was of fascination with that concept of art and culture factory still in the process of formulation.

How will the factory behave after the adaptations coming soon? How many workshops will it host, how many auditoriums will it have, what will its final appearance look like? And what about the collection, will that impression of blurring between storage and exhibition rooms continue? An important clue to the development of the collection seems to be evident when one visits the exhibition annexed to the rooms of the collection described here. This is the exhibition “Aproximações – A Brief Introduction to Brazilian Art of the Twentieth Century. With curatorship by Aracy Amaral, the exhibition presents a selection of works from the end of the 19th century until the middle of the last century. Starting with the first version of O descanso da Modelo, 1885, by Almeida Jr., belonging to the Marcos Amaro Foundation. In addition to this painting, other exhibits also belong to the same institution: two Eliseu Visconti, three Portinari and one more work by each of the following artists: Pedro Americo, Castagneto, Lasar Segall, Antonio Gomide, Victor Brecheret, Cicero Dias, Ismael Nery, Di Cavalcanti, Flávio de Carvalho, Guignard and Arcangelo Ianelli.

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In spite of the established vision of what would be the “art in Brazil” of that period, there seems to be no doubt that “Aproximações” (that was extended until September 1st) behaves as a link between the aforementioned sculpture attributed to Aleijadinho – half lost in the other exhibition – the great segment of contemporary local art – the fort of the collection. This linkage that the Amaral show explicitly signals to a becoming of the Collection of the Marcos Amaro Foundation, transforming it into a Brazilian art museum, from the passage from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century until the present time.

Even though this narrative about what may have been art in Brazil in recent centuries has been reviewed in recent years, there seems to be no doubt about how important a collection of this size in a city like Itu will be, so that new research can be developed in the sense of – who knows – to reconsider this vision about the Brazilian artistic phenomenon that has become hegemonic. After all, good works are not lacking in the collection. If in its contemporary segment – under the responsibility of Ricardo Resende – stand out works of Tunga, Fábio Miguez and Beto Shwafaty, among others, the modern segment is not behind. After all, there are some works that will certainly remain as paradigms of the art produced in Brazil, whatever the focus given, such as Almeida Jr., Segall and Guignard paintings present.

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After the visit, I was thinking: despite all the problems inherent in an undertaking still in the process of settlement, which gift to Itu is the presence of FAMA! Which gift for the country, in these dark times, is the presence of Marcos Amaro, acting with all the enthusiasm of his youth for the sake of art and culture. He and his collection of public vocation – within a factory that has everything to become a powerhouse of art and knowledge – give rise to the hope that not everything is lost, or being lost, in Brazil.

The opening of SESC new buildings, such as the newly opened space in Guarulhos, not only increases the network of people served, offering the local population a wide range of assistance, sports and cultural services, as it makes possible something unfortunately still scarce in the country: existence of a generous and ample space that gives shelter to the artistic production, so that it is realized in direct contact with a more diversified public and often distant of the traditional circuit of museums, galleries and fairs.

Just enter the new building, which on its first weekend received 24 thousand visitors, makes people realize the importance of art in the overall context of the project. They punctuate the space, subtly or with an undisguised impact, works made especially for the place or selected by hand in the technical reserve of the institution. Signed by a very varied range of artists, the works are authored and diverse, ranging from anonymous craftsmen, such as the authors of ex-votos who compose a panel installed in the lobby, to important names of the contemporary scene. Altogether more than 15 authors, some with several creations (like Leonilson and Sidney Amaral), sign the works.

On the façade of Sesc, still outside, a large sculpture of Sérvulo Esmeraldo welcomes visitors. It is a piece of great simplicity that contrasts with its colossal dimensions, more than ten meters high: two squares, one white and one blue, which partially touch and activate the space around them, like drawings that are strive to acquire a three-dimensional force.

At the entrance, establishing a fine tuning with the aerated architecture by Renato and Lilian Dal Pian, was installed a monumental sculpture in plaster by Carlito Carvalhosa. With a shape similar to that of the hill of Sugar Loaf in Rio, and hung in the emptiness upside down, with the help of an iron structure and thick tie rods that connect it to the walls of the building, the piece attracts the perplexed glances, who wonder about the permanent and at the same time unstable and precarious character of a heavy and inverted mountain that floats in the air.

Although probably the most striking of the new building, Carvalhosa’s piece, Já estava assim quando cheguei, is not the only great work especially designed for space. In the same hall, occupying a long wall on the second floor of the building, is the panel created by Adriana Varejão. Composed of seven large circles with geometric and organic shapes, mural painting is part of a project already developed by the artist, which investigates the wide range of skin colors of Brazilians, the problematic issue of self-identification in a society marked by a strong , even if disguised, racism.

It is interesting to note that the choices of permanent works for the new space are not intended to reinvent poetics. On the contrary, the proposal enhances the reach of works of art – in large part by the prominence and generosity of space granted to them – without sacrificing their connection with the particular poetics of each of the authors. The grandeur and specificities of a cultural center of wide circulation do not lead to a dropping of the researches of the invited artists. On the contrary, it opens up to them a possibility of making feasible something that, in practice, is almost impossible in our dense and fragmented urban centers. This is the case, for example, of the giant painting Paisagem Desaguando, created by Janaina Tschäpe for the gymnasium and establishing an interesting visual parallel with the contiguous nucleus of the pools. Or the work of Eduardo Frota, composed of two enormous pieces that belong to his already known series of reels, located in the garden. The difference is that in this case it was decided to change the already traditional wood profiles by the steel, more resistant material for a long-term exposure.

It is curious to note how the artist achieves, despite the massive character of iron, a paradoxical aspect of lightness. In addition to the precision with which it is built, with a perfect fit of hundreds of overlapping steel slides, the sculpture is hollow inside, making it possible to see the sky through it and giving some transparency to the brutality of the metal.

With works by 33 artists from different generations, the exhibition reveals how the art of recording on wood is part of an already consolidated tradition to reinvent itself, by talking with other forms of artistic expression and proposing a very attentive look at reality and production contemporary art.

The choice of Claudio Mubarac as curator gives the group an unusual density in collective exhibitions, especially when marked by a great diversity like this. Artist and teacher, he closely follows this production, functioning as a kind of link between the generation that began to implement the teaching of woodcut in the art schools of the country in the 1950s and 1960s and the engravers who, from the years 1990, continued this work with a strong community character, creating collective workshops and exchanging technical, formal and conceptual data on their productions.

Artists who managed, through exchange and dialogue, to overcome the barriers in the national market to art on paper and, in particular, woodcutting, a technique marked by a strong popular bias.

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The reference to nature and the human figure – quite present in the works -, rather than a reference to the academic genres of portraits and landscapes, seeks to emphasize the active and intense relationship established by these new generations with the contemporary scene, defining their own identity for this urban wandering. “These people grew up in a very different political climate, formed in a democratic environment. Walking around the city is a way of giving corporeity to themselves. Do not separate more urban and rural, nature and culture”, summarizes Mubarac.

It is interesting to note how, from this common temporal floor, there is a great spreading of poetics, diverse ways of exploring the relationship with wood (often using the veins as a compositional element) and the creation of rich dialogues with other techniques. The presence of color is striking, as well as the use of large formats. This is the case, for example, of the work of Fabricio Lopez, the first to idealize this panoramic exhibition and who invited Mubarac to take over the curatorship. Lopez displays a wide panel, a landscape that seems invented, with marine and mountainous references, in a seductive game of colors and shapes. The color is also the protagonist of the playful mural A Banda Amarela chega na Etiópia Sagrada, by Eduardo Ver and scores the whole exhibition.

It is Ana Calzavara who seems to approach the woodcut of the painting more intensely, as if it were merging the two languages, abolishing their differences in a series of yellowish landscapes that succeed and complement each other as comics. Sculpture and photography are also part of this process, with dense works such as the overlapping scenes of the rough city with its greyish and massive buildings, made by Fernando Vilela. Or the army created by Luisa Almeida of women combatants, armed, who organize themselves in the form of totems, ready for the fight. The imagery references found in the works are the most varied. There is an evident dialogue with the artistic tradition and the classic references like Expressionism. The option to display the engraved without framing reinforces this popular, marginal (in the sense of marginalized), fluid, and extremely communicative character of woodcut. And it refers to its use as a revolutionary weapon of communication through lick-licks.

Virtuosísticas (such as Francisco Maringelli and Ernesto Bonato), experimental (Otavio Zani) or collective works (Xiloceasa), the dozens of works assembled until September at Sesc Guarulhos attest to the vigor of contemporary production and the infinite possibilities of simple technique, which explains Mubarac, requires “only a piece of wood and something cutting”, but that is in permanent reinvention.

Until six or seven years ago,  very few people in Sao Paulo – including those working with culture – could tell what Casa do Povo was. Cultural center founded in 1946 by progressive Jews in the district of Bom Retiro, the space was bitter about 30 years of crisis, with the closure of almost all its activities, and was more present in the memory of some generations than in the daily life of residents of the city. The fact is that in a very short time the house experienced an intense and vigorous recovery, consolidating itself as a prolific cultural center and one of the most open spaces for experimentation, political debate and multidisciplinary artistic practices in the town. Aimed at both contemporary production and the preservation of memory, Casa do Povo was inspired in its own history to gain fresh breath and life.

Nowadays, going to this space means to be faced with activities of the most varied and, at first glance, disparate. Depending on the season, one can witness a contemporary dance workshop to a journalism class for young people from the periphery; of a theatrical play made by secondary students to a Latin American publications fair; from an artistic performance to boxing offered to the neighborhood community; from discussions on health and female self-knowledge to production of workshops for graphic materials; from weaving workshops to free psychoanalytic services; from discussions on the integration of immigrants in the neighborhood to the rehearsal of a traditional choir sung in Yiddish; from a meeting about conscious eating to the distribution of meals. You can also consult a library and a vast documentary archive, purchase a copy of the newspaper Nossa Voz, edited by the institution, or leave from there with an audioguide to walk through the neighborhood of Bom Retiro and know its history.

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If the practices are so many and diverse – and the list above could go on – they do not happen by chance, nor are they inconsistent with the proposal of a contemporary space of culture and art, as explained by the curator and cultural manager Benjamin Seroussi, director of the institution and one of those responsible for the resumption. “On the one hand, artists ask to broaden the notion of art, they do not want to limit themselves to traditional practices. They do not understand art as separate from other spheres of production and other life activities. On the other hand, culture is not limited to the arts. Casa do Povo is culture, culture is culture, sport is culture”, he says. “So here is creation, activism, people in situations of social vulnerability. But we never fail to understand it as a place of art. But a place of art that is trying to experience, in real scale, other possible worlds”.

Experiencing other possible worlds was certainly what the progressive Jews who founded the space in Bom Retiro shortly after World War II and the Holocaust wanted in the 1940s. And it is only through an understanding of this long history of the House, strongly intertwined with the political and cultural events of the 20th century, that one can understand the performance of the institution today. “Because all the resumption was made from a rereading of history. But not with the look of the historian, say, but more with the techniques of the healer. The idea is not necessarily to look for factual veracity – not that this is not important – but much more to think about how to use, and perhaps abuse, this story in the present”, says Seroussi.

Desfile/Performance de Vicente Perrota realizado em 2018

THE ANCIENT HISTORY

The history that the curator talks about referes to the 1930s and 1940s, when thousands of Jewish immigrants fleeing poverty and persecution in Europe began to inhabit Bom Retiro, in São Paulo’s downtown, and when two narratives come together. On the one hand, the emergence of anti-fascist associations – as in various parts of the world – created during the war to combat anti-Semitism, support the Allied countries’ struggle and, at the same time, a secular Jewish culture. Also, the desire to pay homage to the millions of dead in the Nazi concentration camps. “It could be made a memorial, a sculpture, with the names, where they would put flowers once a year. A gesture of remembrance is ready”, comments Benjamin. What was done, however, was a “living monument”, a space that brought together anti-fascist associations – such as the newspaper Nossa Voz and the Youth Club – and at the same time honored the dead. “The two narratives meet: the cultural center and the memorial. So it’s a memory space, but a place to remember is to act. A place where history is not written on the wall, but it is inscribed in bodies and architecture, and it is up to us to activate it”.

With a project by Ernest Mange – architect who worked with Rino Levi and Le Corbusier – Casa do Povo gained its headquarters in 1953. With three large decks with almost no partitions and a terrace, the modernist building on Rua Três Rios became a cultural center and space for political action. “It makes a lot of sense for Mange to have designed a building with these free plants, which allows you to adapt the spaces. I imagine he must have thought that the best building to remember is one in which each generation invents their ways of remembering. Because we never know how, tomorrow, we’ll remember yesterday”, says Seroussi. The space also housed the Brazilian Israeli Gymnasium Scholem Aleichem, a children’s school of renewed education (a humanist pedagogical line similar to Constructivism), and in 1960, it inaugurated in its subsoil the Brazilian Israelite Art Theater (TAIB), designed by the architect Jorge Wilheim .

With the coup in 1964 and the establishment of the military regime, Casa do Povo enters a troubled period of its history. While the newspaper Nossa Voz was closed by the government, the school increasingly housed children of persecuted politicians (including many non-Jews), who won scholarships and, if necessary, false names. Teachers came to be arrested and tortured and the institution became a pole of resistance to dictatorship, especially through the activities of TAIB. In it were staged pieces of the Arena Theater – by authors like Plínio Marcos and Augusto Boal – and the Sesi Popular Theater, among others. At the same time as the presentations filled the theater and the school continued to function, many members of the Jewish community moved away, out of fear of persecution or ideological disagreement, and financial difficulties increased.

“From the 1980s the Casa do Povo loses the enemy – the Dictatorship – the friend – the socialist bloc – and the social base – the Jews who lelf the neighborhood and often move away from the left-wing”, sums up Seroussi. In 1981 the college closed its activities, emptying even more space, in a period that the center of the city also lives a growing abandonment by the elites and the public power. If Casa do Povo did not completely close its doors, being maintained by the almost heroic performance of some associates, it entered a long period of crisis that only ended in the current decade.

RECENT HISTORY

It was more or less the story told to Seroussi in 2011 – certainly with more details and emotion – by the women who continued to go to Casa do Povo every week to sing in Yiddish in the Coral Tradition. It was in this period that the curator, after years of work at the Center for Jewish Culture, began to approach the building, located in a now mostly Korean and Bolivian neighborhood and with its rather dilapidated building. “Casa was not closed. These women have kept it heroically alive, but working as much as possible”, says Seroussi, referring to figures such as Hugueta Sendacz, now 92 years old and still a master of the choir. At the same time, as a result of the launch of the book Vanguarda Pedagógica (2008) and a mobilization through social networks, a group of Scholem alumni also became involved with the House and discussed the future of space.

It was from 2012, with a new board – which already included Seroussi – and an embryonic team that things began to change. “I had no money or employees, but I remember thinking: with this place, this history, this architecture and without paying rent, or I make things happen or I change my profession”, he jokes. “And we decided to do the same way it was done there in 1953. That is, put groups to use space. There came a fashion group, one of graphic design, one of urban activism. And today we have 25 groups or collectives using the house”. This time, no more people linked to the Jewish community, but from the most varied origins, transforming the institution into a space for meeting and socializing among different people. “If the Jew is the other, par excellence, a Jewish house must be open to all others. It has to be a space of radical alterity, open to the trans people, the black population, the indigenous people and the immigrants in the neighborhood”.

From a questioning on what should be a cultural center of the 21st century, and more specifically in that space, three major axes of work were defined. The first, gedenk (“remember” in Yiddish), guides the performance of the house as a living memory space, which tells the story of resistance of the groups that have gone through it, but seeks to bring this history to the practices of the present and future ideas. The second axis, tsukunft (“future”) emphasizes the experimental role of the house and the desire to make it a space to think about new artistic and multidisciplinary practices. The third axis, Farain (“association”), refers to how the first two axes could be worked, that is, through the action of collectives, autonomous movements and neighborhood associations that started to inhabit the place, living together and using the spaces so flexibly.

he three axes relate directly to an unavoidable question, according to Seroussi: “Here were groups of a political vanguard. It was built a modernist architecture building, had an experimental school and a Brechtian theater. Then the place condemns us to dare. It asks us to do differently”.  Different even from what was done there in the 1940s and 1950s, in a radically different context. “When the Casa do Povo opened there were two or three cultural centers in the city. Today only that neighborhood places Pinacoteca, the Oswald de Andrade Cultural Center, the Sesc Bom Retiro, the Sala São Paulo, the Porto Seguro Theater, the Sacred Art Museum and the Container Theater. So we were going to make another place with exhibitions, theater season and shows? No, we wanted to do something else”, he explains. “Even because these spaces are fundamental, but I think they do not account for a series of contemporary artistic practices. Because I think they often separate culture from the other spheres of life”.

Today, with the groups and a schedule divided between what the institution organizes and what it hosts, the annual budget went from R$ 60 thousand in 2011 to R $ 1.2 million, captured between incentive laws, edicts, contributions from groups and associates, locations and an annual collection event – such as Caetano Veloso’s show in 2018. The institution’s library, after 40 years closed, was reactivated last May, representing another big step for the place in the sense of resuming its history and, at the same time, opening itself to society. “There have been several generations here, including many people who have died, but we have this collection, this archive, which is the hard core of the institution, which tells its story”, says Marilia Loureiro, curator and programmer at the institution. The next step is the restoration of TAIB, now quite degraded, in a planning that is already at an advanced stage.

The newspaper Nossa Voz, symbol of the institution, was relaunched in 2014 and is published annually with texts on current topics and collaborations of artists and intellectuals. In the last issue of 2018, the cover stamps the Herzog Vive! Manifesto published by the Jewish group for Democracy in the election period in reaction to the conservative rise and the possibility of the Bolsonaro election. On the following page, the transcript of the speech by the Israeli writer Amos Oz in June 2017, when he was on the house, shows a little of the spirit – past and present – of the Casa do Povo: “I really feel at home. Here is the right place to start a revolution, or at least, as my friend Lilia Schwarcz said, the right place to plan the revolution. Because it’s always nicer to plan it than to execute it”, he joked. If it will not be the epicenter of the revolution, the House is, returning to Seroussi’s statement, a place to rehearse other possible futures. “And everything that happens here confirms that our wishes were not crazy”, he concludes.