Still de "Tomo", de Bakary Diallo. Cortesia Videobrasil
Há uma expressão em Bambara, língua nigero-congolesa falada no Mali, que se refere a um território abandonado por causa da guerra ou conflito. Essa palavra, “Tomo”, também dá nome à última obra em vídeo realizada pelo artista malinense Bakary Diallo que lhe rendeu, como prêmio, a residência pelo 18º Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc_Videobrasil, em 2013.
Em Tomo (clique aqui para assistir), o conflito ao qual Bakary se refere no título pode ser o bélico ou entre espíritos. Na obra, seguimos o curso de um personagem subjetivo perturbado psicologicamente por sua experiência real da guerra. Ele caminha por um vilarejo abandonado que foi tomado pelas almas daqueles que um dia ali viveram. Eles são representados por fantasmas, ectoplasmas, personagens em chamas e em fumaça. Ainda agarradas à vida terrena, elas continuam a desempenhar suas atividades diárias, realizam tais gestos cotidianos o mais próximo possível da realidade.
A escritora e curadora Renée Akitelek Mboya [1] – em um episódio da série Acervo Comentado Videobrasil – pondera ser interessante, de uma perspectiva linguística, “imaginarmos o ambiente que levou à necessidade da criação de tal expressão, que por si própria é surpreendentemente inclusiva e independente”. Ela lembra ainda que quando a obra foi apresentada, o país já estava inserido na Guerra Civil na qual vive até os dias atuais, cujo início se deu em 16 de janeiro de 2012.
As circunstância que observamos hoje no Mali são parecidas com aquelas que víamos antes da Guerra e com as geradas pelo conflito: uma intensificação dos protestos em um norte conturbado, e problemas que causaram fome generalizada e deslocamentos internos. Foi sobre essas circunstâncias que Bakary fez seu filme. Tem que haver uma forma de usar mídias diferentes, especialmente o vídeo, para recuperar um sentimento de humanidade às pessoas ou figuras que só são consideradas em termos de estatísticas.
Mboya destaca que na obra, o personagem é visto rasgando a terra, no que ela se refere como uma tentativa de arrancar o trauma da guerra de forma física, talvez uma forma encontrada por Bakary para ilustrar a violência que essa mesma terra conheceu.
Indo além da análise do conteúdo visual da obra, a curadora indaga “se Bakary, com este trabalho, estava fazendo algum tipo de ritual de memória, ou um ritual para honrar os conterrâneos que perdeu”. Infelizmente, o autor nunca pode responder à dúvida de sua colega cineasta, o malinense faleceu em um acidente aéreo em julho de 2014, quando viajava com destino à França, de onde partiria para o Brasil para fazer sua residência artística no Instituto Sacatar, na Ilha de Itaparica, na Bahia. Antes disso, em 2010 ganhou uma bolsa da Fundação Lagardère pelo trabalho “Les Feuilles d’un Temps”, pouco tempo depois de ter iniciado seus estudos, em 2007, no Conservatório de Artes e Multimédia de Bamako.
Trabalhando sobretudo com vídeo, usou elementos da vida cotidiana para construir narrativas sintéticas, que frequentemente questionam os efeitos da violência. Apresentou seus filmes em mostras como a Bienal de Arte Africana Contemporânea, Dak’Art, Dacar (2012), l’Afrique en mouvement, Montreal (2012), 9ª Bienal Africana de Fotografia, Bamaco (2011), e 20ª Semana de Cinema Experimental de Madri (2010). Frequentou o Le Fresnoy – Estúdio Nacional de Artes Contemporâneas (2010).
A ideia dos meus trabalhos é deixar uma grande abertura porque em torno de um trabalho, existe o imaginário do artista, o imaginário coletivo, depois disso temos a interpretação que um ou outro podem ter sobre esse trabalho. Por isso sempre procuro a maior abertura possível, para que as pessoas possam viajar e sonhar.
Ainda não conhece o Acervo Comentado?
Acervo Comentado Videobrasil é uma parceria entre arte!brasileiros e a Associação Cultural Videobrasil. A cada 15 dias publicamos, em nossa plataforma e em nossas redes sociais, uma parte de seu importante acervo de obras, reunido em mais de 30 anos de trajetória. Confira os outros episódios neste link.
Sobre Videobrasil
A instituição foi criada em 1991, por Solange Farkas, fruto do desejo de acolher um acervo crescente de obras e publicações, que vem sendo reunido a partir da primeira edição do Festival de Arte Contemporânea Sesc_Videobrasil (ainda Festival Videobrasil, em 1983). Desde sua criação, a associação trabalha sistematicamente no sentido de ativar essa coleção, que reúne obras do chamado Sul geopolítico do mundo – América Latina, África, Leste Europeu, Ásia e Oriente Médio –, especialmente clássicos da videoarte, produções próprias e uma vasta coleção de publicações sobre arte.
Este projeto contribui para “redescobrir e relacionar obras do acervo Videobrasil, e vertentes temáticas, na voz de críticos, curadores e pensadores iluminando questões contemporâneas urgentes”, afirma Farkas.
[1] Renée Akitelek Mboya (Nairobi, 1986) é escritora, curadora e cineasta. Seu costume é aquele que se baseia na biografia e na narração de histórias como forma de pesquisa e produção. Renée está atualmente preocupada em ol har e falar sobre as imagens e as maneiras pelas quais elas são produzidas, mas especialmente como elas passaram a desempenhar um papel crítico como evidência da paranóia branca e como expressões estéticas da violência racial. Renée busca entender melhor as maneiras como as imagens são utilizadas para reforçar a narrativa institucionalmente fabricada do corpo racializado como um perigo constante para o direito. Renée trabalha em Dakar e é editora colaborativa do Wali Chafu Collective.
Beatriz Lemos, Thiago de Paula Souza e Diane Lima são os curadores da 3a edição da Frestas - Trienal de Artes, organizada pelo Sesc Sorocaba. Foto: Indiara Duarte
The second day of the ARTE!Brasileiros International Seminar, on October 9, started with a conversation with the curatorial team of the 3rd edition of Frestas – Triennial of Arts. Organized by Sesc-SP, based on the Sorocaba unit, the continuous program brings together local artists from regional and international productions, establishing a dialogue between social issues specific to the Brazilian context and reflections from the global sphere.
In this edition, the curatorial team is formed by Beatriz Lemos, Diane Lima and Thiago de Paula Souza, who participated in the seminar. Early in her speech, Diane pointed out that, as a collective curator, two key points are triggered: the negotiations and the contradictions that constitute the curatorial process. As three non-white curators, they realized the gap in representation and chose to think about the negotiations and contradictions within these representative and identity policies. “We have a scenario in Brazil where seeing us here today would be in the category not of the art of the possible, as proposed by the theme of the seminar, but of the art of the impossible, and that goes through our curatorship”, said Diane.
With the title The river is a serpent, this edition of the Triennial brings together cosmologies and worldviews “that do not pass only through economic and social spheres, that sustain a collection of knowledge and Afro-indigenous, native and ancestral thoughts”, says the curator. For the trio, “The river is a serpent is not a theme, but a worldview interested in gathering and presenting the lessons we have learned so far”, explains Diane.
Between negotiations and contradictions
Beatriz Lemos points out that the apprenticeships started with the understanding of which is the Sorocaba floor, where Frestas would be installed. For this, they held listening meetings in the city and created a dialogue with artists, producers, managers and educators. “It was from there that we realized that our starting points would be the territory and the educational”, she explains.
Durante a viagem curatorial, o trio visitou o Parque Nacional da Serra da Capivara, no Piauí. Foto: Arquivo pessoal
In order to expand these negotiations and understand other Brazilian narratives, in addition to their own knowledge and repertoires, the trio embarked on a trip around the country. “The most important thing for us was to build a collective trip, so that from this body in movement and in conflict with other territories we could create this curatorial body”, says Beatriz.
They made an initial two-month route through locations in the North and Northeast. Thus they came into contact with the local logic of the art circuits and the sociability of these specific regions. “We seek to understand in different ways the grandeur of these natures and how environmental crime strategies operated”, she says. For Beatriz, this would be the way to understand how large private initiatives affect traditional, quilombola and indigenous communities in the regions, through environmental racism. This, in turn, consists of “practices, historically legitimized, which cancel out a fruition of pleasure and contact of environmental means to black, indigenous, non-white and migrant communities”, explains Beatriz. To which Diane complements: “In fact, artistic practices and their expressions are tools to overcome these natural collapses that we have been experiencing”.
For Thiago, understanding this scenario was essential, as a way of building a curatorial practice that “seeks collaboration as an ethical way of imagining the world in another way; to ask how contemporary art can help us develop a slightly less brutal horizon in which violence does not shape our existence ”.
To maintain this idea, they sought “curatorial experiments in dialogue with artists who have life and practice directly connected with colonial violence, without contributing to the assimilation of these practices”, explains the curator.
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Alcântara (MA) foi um dos destinos dos curadores durante o período de pesquisa, no qual buscaram descobrir outras narrativas de Brasil. Foto: Arquivo pessoal
Alcântara (MA) foi um dos destinos dos curadores durante o período de pesquisa, no qual buscaram descobrir outras narrativas de Brasil. Foto: Arquivo pessoal
Durante a viagem curatorial, o trio visitou localidades do Norte e Nordeste, dentre elas, Manaus. Foto: Arquivo pessoal.
Trio curatorial de Frestas na Igreja do Desterro, em Alcântara, no MA. Foto: Arquivo pessoal
When the river takes the shape of a serpent
In his speech, Thiago explained that, in this second half of 2020, the trio develops a program of studies, based on meetings with a group of 15 artists. Composed of training activities, it aims to promote radical educational practices and, at the same time, encourage policies for redistribution and access to art. In addition to this program, free and open online actions are planned, such as courses, seminars, lectures, editorial releases, film and video shows and a teacher training program.
The result of Frestas is different from what was thought at the beginning, because the edition was prepared in a pre-pandemic world. However, the situation seemed to intensify the message that the curatorship intended to convey. “The pandemic not only reveals the obscenity of the country’s racial and class structures, but also the obscenity in the sense of what the art system has always tried to hide,” explains Diane. For her, the global situation did not prevent it, but at certain points it even reinforced an important question of this thought: What does it mean to be a dissident and racialized body within the contemporary art circuit, which has always made our knowledge invisible and subordinate? And it is this issue that The river is a serpent intends to reflect.
Se interessou? Assista à conversa completa com os curadores de Frestas no VI Seminário Internacional: em defesa da natureza e da cultura – a arte do possível clicando aqui.
O líder indígena e ambientalista Ailton Krenak. Foto: Reprodução
Rained. And the rain brought joy to Ailton Krenak in a moment that synthesized the speeches of the first table of the VI ARTE!Brasileiros International Seminar, which also included Naiara Tukano and Antonio Donato Nobre.
Naiara opened the event with a song by her people Yepá Mahsã, from the top of Rio Negro, in the Amazon, and a brief and blunt manifesto. “We, indigenous peoples, are the living memory of thousands of years, our visions and worldviews are our science, where we learn to communicate and live together with the land. That is why we defend life and diversity, ”he said in an excerpt from the initial message.
O líder indígena e ambientalista Ailton Krenak. Foto: Reprodução
After the speeches of institutional opening by Patricia Rousseaux, for arte!brasileiros, and Julian Fuchs, by the Goethe-Institut, Krenak would be the first to speak, but a connection problem postponed his testimony, luckily for those who attended the seminar.
Thanks to the connection problem, we ended up witnessing the first rain after months of drought at Aldeia Krenak, on the banks of the Rio Doce, in Minas Gerais, which was greeted by the joy and singing of the indigenous leader and former constituent deputy. As soon as the rain started, he turned his computer over to share the scene with those attending the seminar. “The most beautiful art is this rain that falls from the sky now, on top of these hills, making the earth breathe, falling on dry land, making a lump rise from the ground,” he said excitedly.
Nothing is more in tune with this moment than the reasoning he developed about “this scandal of affirming that there is nature and culture, separating something indivisible”.
The paths of the heart
This inclusive view had already been defended by Antonio Donato Nobre in his opening speech: “Indigenous people are the true sages of nature, they have a direct connection with nature and have preserved that connection, which global society has lost. I want to come here to give a message as a scientist, but from a scientist who is discovering the ways of the heart ”.
Something in common in these three opening speeches was the need for affection and respect for the planet, which Nobre pointed out in a parallel between the philosopher Socrates and the astronauts. “2500 years ago, Socrates would have said that when the human being looks at the outside world, he will recognize his greatness. People who live in contact with nature are aware of what it means to be on Earth, ”he said.
Then he reported how astronauts gain the same perception after returning from space: “When they see the Earth from outside, they are instantly transformed, they have the overview effect, which is the panorama effect suggested by Socrates.”
Thus, astronauts and indigenous people do not suffer from distancing from the planet, or a division that replicates in the separation between mind and body. For the scientist, “there is a cognitive disaster in Western society, which occurred mainly in Europe, of the divorce between the so-called rational mind, where the intellect resides, and the broad, intuitive, holistic, integrative cognition”.
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A animação apresentada por Nobre, feita com imagens de satélite, mostra o tamanho dos pixels proporcional à importância que cada ecossistema tem em relação à produtividade biológica total do planeta em cada momento
A animação apresentada por Nobre, feita com imagens de satélite, mostra o tamanho dos pixels proporcional à importância que cada ecossistema tem em relação à produtividade biológica total do planeta em cada momento
A animação apresentada por Nobre, feita com imagens de satélite, mostra o tamanho dos pixels proporcional à importância que cada ecossistema tem em relação à produtividade biológica total do planeta em cada momento
So, according to Nobre, it is necessary to stop thinking just with reason: “It is the heart that unites the whole body and it thinks too, because neuroscience has discovered that it has neurological tissues. So, when we have an open heart, we capture things. Without a heart, the intellect is cold, it can do aberrant things ”. In his speech, he cited the scientists who contributed to Nazism as an example, but there is no shortage of government cases in Brazil that confirm the theory.
Be sure to watch the full speech to see the short video shared by Donato, developed over a decade, which points out how the Amazon is the heart of the planet.
Transformation
Naiara Tukano, on the other hand, began her speech by telling about the cosmology of her people, which came from the great transformation canoe, the Cobra-Canoa. It was in the womb of a Cobra-Canoa that the first ancestors of the Tukano peoples set out on an underwater journey through the Amazon, Negro and Uaupés rivers, in the northwest of the Amazon, and thus arrived in the region where they currently live, in the Upper Rio Negro. The canoe stopped along this route and, at each stop, these ancestors acquired powers and knowledge that are still part of the cultural heritage of the ethnic groups of the Tukano family.
Naiara told how, thousands of years before this trip, “we were fish people, until we became animals that live in the forests, like otters, monkeys; then the breeder came and cut the animals’ tails and brought man to earth, this being the third time of humanity, when man appeared”.
The significance of this animal ancestry and of this transformation process over time has an important reflection in Tukano thought: “We must understand that other visible and invisible beings that live on Earth are our relatives, they tell us how we should act without causing harm or even receive evil. So, we never forget our place”, said Naiara.
A ativista indígena e artista Naiara Tukano. Foto: Reprodução
Hence, then, the perception of the importance of caring for the planet in a global way, as she states: “When we disrupt Earth’s flows, we harm it, because it is a whole, it has its own conscience and we you cannot cut it out like a mosaic, as we are doing. For hundreds of years our shamans have warned us to take care of nature, we are nature. ”
And she concludes on the importance of reviewing attitudes in times of pandemic: “We need to reconnect with our essence, and through art, spirituality, songs, that we connect again with the earth. Plant, reduce waste, seek a simpler way of life, seek other forms of exchange based on other wisdoms. It is by reconnecting with the earth that we can seek a path of healing. The breath of life exists in each one of us”.
Dead nature
Shortly after what had been programmed, Ailton Krenak entered the seminar problematizing one of the genres of painting. “All the great masters of painting in the West have left a trail of still life behind them”, he said. And he continued: “Could it be that they were foreshadowing a time when nature was going to rise up, leave those screens and invade our lives in the form of viruses, in the form of affection, in the sense of turning us inside out, of questioning us , and denounce that there is no boundary between culture and nature, except in our mentalities, calling for a change in mentality ”.
Later, he would explain that “as poets, these artists were foreshadowing what is happening in the 21st century; it is not a complaint, an accusation, but a revelation of what we were going to live a long time later”.
But he warned the art world: “It is as if the idea of our art biennials, of our galleries, were all in the past, overcome by time, by the urgency of a new mentality, of us humans learning to step with careful, stepping gently on Earth, deeply marked by our footprints, which put us on the threshold of this Anthropocene”.
It was around that time that the rain and the most poetic moment of the seminar began. While he affirmed that “the sky will always give us the art of the possible”, a water truck passes by, as if to remember the destruction of the Rio Doce by Samarco, five years ago, and which made it necessary to supply it with vehicles that cover 200 years. km to 300 km to supply the village with 130 families.
And Krenak concluded with Naiara: “When I questioned the division we make between nature and culture, it is a call for people to live more immersed in nature and in our own experience of the body being nature”.
O documentarista irlandês Bob Quinn em cena de "One Hundred Steps", filme de Bárbara Wagner e Benjamin de Burca. Foto: Divulgação
After a first table focused on looking at environmental issues, indigenous knowledge, the possibility of a “less cold” science, in addition to questioning the false dichotomy between nature and culture, the second presentation brought the debate closer to issues more directly linked to artistic production. In the presentations by Andrea Giunta, curator of the 12th Mercosul Biennial, and the artist duo Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca (currently participating in MANIFESTA 13), questions about the responsibility of art in the contemporary world, the search for a collective action, the visibility of marginalized knowledge and the need to escape the logic of the “self-centered body” in the arts reinforced a conductive line between the different speeches.
First to present, Giunta gave an overview of this year’s edition of the Mercosul Biennial (Online Bienal 12), which would take place in person in Porto Alegre and ended up migrating to the virtual environment due to the pandemic. Highlighting the plurality involved in the themes and in the show’s title, Female(s). Visuality, actions and affections, the Argentine emphasized the importance of this diversity being present in the constitution of the biennial curatorial team. In this sense, she emphasized the fundamental role of Fabiana Lopez, Dorota Biczel and Igor Simões, who brought attentive looks to artistic production, especially in Latin America, and also from other countries around the globe. A total of 25 countries were represented by more than 70 artists and collectives.
The term “feminine(s)” – not “feminine”, nor “feminisms” – represented for Giunta this choice for a plurality of points of view, not always only from women, believing in the “idea of difference as multiplicity and not as separation”. In this sense, the word “affection” also took place for curatorship, especially at a time of such fragility with the pandemic. “And when we were all isolated, it was very important to ask: how are the artists who were about to travel to Porto Alegre and could not go? So, we asked them to record short videos with their cell phones for our website, which was very important. This created an archive of affections, a type of presence of artists at the biennial that we had not previously planned. These are some good things that have happened.”
“Sobre La Familia en el alegre verdor”, obra de Chiachia & Giannone exposta na Bienal do Mercosul. Foto: Divulgação
Affection, as Giunta stated in a recent interview with arte!brasileiros, is not disconnected from struggles, protests and an art that calls for social change. “With affection, powerful revolts were created,” she said. In this sense, Giunta presented at the seminar a series of works that she considers representative of the themes treated at the biennial, starting with a tapestry by Chiachio & Giannone that presents a scene of integration between man and nature, where people and animals are part of a same family – “not man as owner, controlling nature, but man in nature”. Then, the curator presented a photograph of the Argentine feminist collective Nosotras Proponemos: “We take into account activism, women’s rights, and also feminines and feminisms as the need to think again about all relations between the human and the world”, said.
Emphasizing that “the feminist struggle is for the rights over one’s own body”, she also presented works that deal with feminicide, such as Fatima Pecci Carou, and the various ways of experiencing the body, as in the works of Jota Mombaça, Liuska Astete, Janaina Barros, Lorraine O’Grady or Priscila Resende. The possibility of restructuring the language in the field of gender discussion arose in the production of Mujeres Públicas, while crucial questions about memory – and specifically colonial and Afro-Brazilian memory – were discussed in the work of Aline Motta. At this point in her speech, Giunta recalled a phrase by Rosana Paulino, “that told me something very important related to the theme of this seminar: in Christian and Catholic traditions, based on the Bible, God gave nature for men, in Afro-Brazilian religions, man and nature are together ”.
Psicanálise do cafuné catinga de mulata, de Janaína Barros, obra exposta na Bienal do Mercosul. Foto: Divulgação
Ireland, France, and North Africa in dialogue
Continuing a fruitful and diverse series of audiovisual productions filmed in different parts of the globe, the duo Bárbara Wagner (Brazil) and Benjamin de Burca (Ireland / Germany) has just debuted, at MANIFESTA 13, in Marseille, the work One Hundred Steps. The 30-minute film was the subject of the duo’s presentation at the seminar, which also featured a firsthand view of the work. At the virtual seminar, while Benjamin showed up with his cell phone at the Marseille Music School, exposing the end of the work’s montage, Bárbara spoke from her home about the film’s production process, which started in late 2019. Few days after the seminar, arte!brasileiros also talked on the phone with Benjamin.
After works about frevo or brega in Recife, on the Maloya genres in Réunion Island (French department close to Africa), schlager in Munster (Germany) and rap in Toronto (Canada), the duo enters the universes of Irish popular music (with its harmonicas, chants and taps) and North African music with Arab roots in Marseille, in the south of France. If, on the one hand, the film deepens the research of the duo in marginalized musical universes, in a constant dialogue between documentary and fiction, between what is pop culture or traditional manifestation, on the other hand the film seems to bring new elements to the work of Bárbara and Benjamin. One Hundred Steps is, for example, the first film that takes place in two different countries and bluntly enters European and African colonial history.
According to Bárbara, the research started with the approval of a publicly funded project by the Irish Arts Council. Therefore, the first opportunity arose for the duo to develop work in Benjamin’s home country. It was in their search for the Irish region of Connemara that they came across the work of Irish documentary filmmaker Bob Quinn. “In the 1980s he developed a quartet of documentaries that spoke of the origin of Irish culture in a very sophisticated way, questioning the European hegemony in shaping the culture there and suggesting that the contact with countries in North Africa was essential,” said the artist. In the series, entitled Atlantean, “he asks: what if our Irish culture is much closer to Africa than Europe?”
Cena de One Hundred Steps filmada em Marselha; trabalho de Bárbara Wagner e Benjamin de Burca integra a MAMIFESTA 13. Foto: Divulgação
Based on this hypothesis and living with Quinn, now 87 years old, Bárbara and Benjamin had an initial project in mind until the moment when the MANIFESTA invitation came to “give a formal tie to the work”, according to Bárbara. In the end, the film became “kind of a visual and editing experiment between Ireland and southern France, in dialogue with North Africa”. For this, the duo invited popular artists to perform in two emblematic spaces for colonial history in these places – palaces that have become museums -, creating ambiguities, frictions, and moments of beauty with various layers of meaning.
In Ireland, musicians and dancers were filmed in spaces at Bantry House, a palace from the end of the 17th century directly related to British imperialism in the country and which, in addition to a sumptuous garden, has a 100-step staircase – the “hundred steps” of the title – built between 1840 and 1850, the decade of the great Irish hunger. “In every corner of Ireland there is a huge mansion built by the dying people. And if we think about it, this great hunger, which created a diaspora of almost 2 million people, is still very recent in the country’s history ”, says Benjamin. The artists who enter the house, therefore – and Bob Quinn appears there with his camera – “become that other voice, which is the voice of Irish culture”, according to Bárbara.
In Marseille, on the other hand, a museum house in an old bourgeois residence, “with a similar history, despite the quite different context”, served as a stage for the performance of North African musicians living in the city. “So, we created a way to get closer, without necessarily being comparing. It is speculation, again, but above all rhythmic and musical”, explains Bárbara. If Arab culture in North Africa appears explicitly at home in Marseille, it may also be diffused in Irish music, which, according to Quinn, drank from these roots. “And suddenly we look at these artists, as if they were visitors, the Irish and the Arabs, and the film creates this fantastic device in which we can realize the occupation of these spaces with another story”, concludes the artist. Because, according to Benjamin, “colonialism continues to exist in another way, more mental, more immaterial”.
In the speeches at the end of the table, Andrea Giunta emphasized, in line with the presentation by Bárbara and Benjamin, that “art has the capacity to be an archive, an archive of experiences that were created at different times. And with this file we can ask the questions of the present”. Thus, for her it is necessary to rethink the relationship of the body with the world, in the sense of moving away from the idea of the self-centered subject so common in art – “to understand, experience and feel that we are in the world”. Bárbara agreed: “In the sense of the body that experiences another form of knowledge, which is shared. Our work is an audiovisual work that is supported by collaboration. It is not possible to work alone, you can’t do it without friction, without difference”.
Minerais exportados pelo Brasil integram a obra
"A cruz do sul", em que Aline Baiana faz crítica ao extrativismo. Foto: Mathias Voelzke Völzke
For Lisette Lagnado, one of the four curators at the 11th Berlin Biennial, the new coronavirus highlighted even more issues that the event itself, whose official opening took place on September 5, three months late, had set out to discuss in 2020 “We were talking about necropolitics, fanaticism, capitalist patriarchy, extraction and ecological devastation. The pandemic only came to deepen the gap that separates the countries of the global south from the place where we are,” pondered Lisette in her opening speech at the VI International Virtual Seminar ARTE! Brasileiros.
The conversation was mediated by the journalist Fabio Cypriano, with the participation of the Spanish Agustín Pérez Rubio (from the curatorial team of the Berlin Biennial, alongside Lisette, the Chilean María Berríos and the Argentine Renata Cervetto) and two of the artists selected for the exhibition , the Brazilian Aline Baiana and the Guatemalan Edgar Calel.
Still at the opening, Lisette expressed some discomfort with the seminar’s subtitle, The Art of Possible. “Our job as producers and cultural agents is always to deal with the impossible,” she said. “It is very difficult to put the concept of solidarity when an international, European biennial announces its dates, despite the fact that the artists are still in lockdown in the countries of the global south. I wanted to draw attention to the violence intrinsic to the initial decision to make the biennial happen in 2020 “.
For the curator, the “most substantial chapter of the biennial” – whose epilogue, entitled The crack begins within, will be shown until November 1 in the German capital – had been opened in September 2019, with workshops, small exhibitions and performances, in the Berlin Wedding neighborhood, in a space that proposed listening and exchanging with local residents, mostly immigrants.
“There was a whole dynamic of being together and suddenly we were interrupted in this way of working”. It was necessary, continued the curator, to create what she calls an ethical protocol: “To say that we would not give an inch in our position and, in this sense, the word possible is dangerous because it may seem opportunistic. Rosa Luxemburg said that opportunism is the art of the possible. And I want to insist that, when doing a biennial in these conditions, we have to worry about our own principles. And don’t bend to those dictated by an exceptional situation.”
Activist artist
In the virtual seminar, Lisette exemplified the political weight of the show, initially presenting the American Marwa Arsanios and her trilogy Who’s afraid of ideology?. The work reflects, said the curator, an ecological feminism that since 2017 marks the work of Marwa, together with women who participate in movements for the fight for land, in places like northern Syria and Colombia.
“[It is something that] recontextualizes a feminism of the 1990s, which concealed the ideological analysis by stating that gender equality was already a step over,” she said. “With this criticism, Marwa went looking for a feminism beyond a kind of liberal middle class life, which she found in ecological activism. In this film, the rural area is the territory where the fight for land takes place and where these women are also guardians of seeds, water sources and biodiversity. We see here an example of the figure of a caring and activist artist.”
Cena da obra “Quem tem medo de ideologia?”, de Marwa Arsanios. Foto: Reprodução
Marwa’s activism ends up finding echoes in the sphere of contemporary art, also regulated by the logic of extraction, said the curator. “I bring, like her, the concern to avoid transforming these precarious lives into commodities worshiped at international biennials. How to prevent the appropriation of these genuine knowledges from turning into something else through the exploitation of others’ sores”.
The cross of colonialism
Aline Baiana began her participation by questioning the difficulty, on the part of science, of perceiving Afro-Brazilian or indigenous knowledge as such, relegating to these perspectives a fabulous character, often in children’s books.
“What I try to do with my work is to share these understandings of the world and to tension them with the Western understanding, hegemonic […] a way to collaborate for the anti-colonial struggle”, explains Aline, who presents in Berlin the installation The southern cross.
“This work started, as an idea, when the environmental crime took place in Mariana [the Brumadinho dam burst in January 2019]. I was shocked and disturbed seeing those images of the river dead by a company that has already taken its name [Vale do Rio Doce], which made me think of this place of infinite exploration that Brazil and other southern countries occupy. And as the mining risks are obliterated from the final product, they are left to the populations. ”
The choice of the work’ name also contained a criticism: the constellation, symbol of Mercosur and present in flags of many countries in the hemisphere, represented as a cross, from a Christian perspective, in a colonizing act.
Aline also explained why the idea of “art of the possible” bothered her, remembering two phrases: “It is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism”, by the British Mark Fisher, in the book Capitalist Realism. “We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable – but until then, the divine right of kings also seemed. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art”, by American Ursula K. Le Guin. “What I think as an artist is that the role of art is perhaps to provoke reconnections, to imagine other possibilities”, concluded Aline.
Ancestrality and resistance
In his speech, Edgar Calel initially considered that we are the product of nature and the ancient cultures of the world, such as the one he was born and raised in Guatemala. The artist then read an excerpt from an account of the creation of the universe according to Popol Vuh, a Mayan documentary record from the 16th century.
“Under this panorama of ancestral indigenous literature, it seems interesting to me how, through art, people are able to cross different physical and time spaces, and with that we unite ancient and contemporary situations, with the need to listen to the past for project the future. Part of my job is to do these physical and temporal journeys as well”, said Edgar.
Acima, a performance decolonizadora de Edgar Calel, que veste pele de onça em ritual ancestral no prédio da Bienal (SP).
The artist took the video Sueño de obsidiana to the Berlin exhibition, made in collaboration with São Paulo native Fernando Pereira Santos. In it, Edgar represents an indigenous ritual linked to the land, having as scenario one of the icons of Brazilian modernist architecture, the Bienal building, in São Paulo. With the skin of a jaguar, his animal spirit according to the Guatemalan tradition, or a blue sweater, which is displayed in the daadgalerie, and in which he sewed the names of the indigenous languages of his country, the artist speaks of anti-colonial resistance through reconnection with ancestry.
“Taking this walk in that concrete building, being an indigenous person of Mayan descent, is a statement about the destruction of the limits, the borders imposed between countries like Brazil, Paraguay, Bolivia, etc. We are all one. This, for me, is something fundamental, that we must contribute to this other possible world”, he argued.
God and Devil
“This is a biennial of sensitive capital, of relationship capital,” said Agustín Pérez Rubio, when he began his participation. “And also, what perhaps the pandemic has made us value it more, an idea of cure, of a healer, not only of healing anything, but of accompanying, caring,” he said.
Agustín used the image of Edgar dressed in jaguar skin, in the Bienal building, to talk about another section of the Berlin exhibition: fanaticism and the god of capitalism, of the internet and, in the case of the Guatemalan artist’s work, an idea of contemporary art church, incorporated by the modernist construction. According to him, it is important to open cracks in institutions such as the biennial and museums, for these questions: “For artists like Edgar to show us how, in an icon of Brazilian modernity, the denial of knowledge, which has been segregated for years, is implicit”, argues Agustín.
The curator then mentioned the work of Antonio Pichillá, also from Guatemala, presented at the Berlin exhibition: the video Action of a tree character, shown at the Gropius Bau, which houses the segment The inverted museum of the biennial, an attempt to “counter-narrative” to the Eurocentric perspective on art. “To understand how this colonial vision is perpetuated by the institutions,” said Agustín, citing the Humboldt Forum, a museum space that will open later this year in Berlin.
Agustín also criticized the reception of the works by German journalists: “They can only see the ethnography of these works and fail to consider them from a philosophical, aesthetic and artistic root as contemporary works. Or, for them, they are works with something esoteric. It is very interesting to see that all these critics and German culture have allowed this racism and this way of seeing otherness to be perpetuated, based on their Eurocentric ethnography”, he said. “And since esotericism in Germany is very close to the extreme right, they prefer not to talk about these works”.
Demolition, retribution
How, then, to avoid the extraction of biennials and other cultural events? How did the curatorial quartet at the Berlin exhibition deal with the issue? “Patriarchy, colonial sores, are suffocating us, and we have to react even with violence. On the other hand, there is a question of care. So, how to be violent and, at the same time, welcome other voices, and these more vulnerable lives? What always guides me is a mixture of intuition and ethics. And in that sense, listening has been our compass”. For Agustín, in addition to listening, a non-extractive way would be to understand that you take something, but also return it. “The idea of restitution, with artists, communities, vulnerable museums”, he concluded.
Strategies of the possible
In a video conference of the Goethe-Institut, the Argentine Osías Yanov and the Brazilian Castiel Vitorino talked about the works they exhibited in Berlin
To complement the open seminar, the Goethe-Institut Rio also held a specially organized videoconference for a group of guests who were unable to travel when the 11th Berlin Biennial opened in September. Among them, curators, artists, and managers from different museums and from different units of the Goethe-Institut in Latin America. On this day, in addition to the curators, the artists Osías Yanov (Argentina) and Castiel Vitorino (Brazil) participated.
In Berlin, Osías participated in the space dedicated to the show’s experiments, the ExRotaprint. Part of his project was compromised by the sanitary restrictions of the pandemic, including his group exercises, which he had already done in Argentina, in a reflection on the repression of bodies, among other issues.
Trabalho de Osías Yanov apresentado no seminário. Foto: Divulgação
The artist sought to maintain the necessary distance contact with his group of performers, who drew drawings and read short stories. The results were presented at the biennial, along with elements dear to his artistic research: spoons – cucharitas – that refer to the act of sleeping embraced with someone, and appeared in sculptural forms, and salt – a substance linked to the notion of purification and healing. Through loudspeakers, the sound recording of the readings made acrylic tables vibrate on the floor, creating drawings in the salt in contact with them.
Lisette Lagnado stressed the importance of listening in Osías’ work and mentioned another experiment carried out on ExRotaprint with the feminist collective FCNN, which discussed the institutional space that art leaves for young mother artists, who have nowhere to leave their children. The presence of women at the biennial, in the fight against patriarchy, is also one of the important themes of the exhibition. In Berlin, the curator had the opportunity to read a book on motherhood, by the Egyptian Iman Mersal, which brought up the idea of a child destroying the possible future of the mother, in a hurry to reach the new world. “It was something we were feeling about the biennial, facing the pandemic, and we borrowed this notion of crack, fissure, for the title.”
Trabalho de Castiel Vitorino apresentado no seminário. Foto: Divulgação
Castiel took a series of photographs to Berlin in which he appears wearing masks bought at an antiques store in Santos (SP), sold as African, but actually made by a friend of the store owner. With the work, the artist exposes the exoticization of the colonizing discourse about the cultures of the continent. “With photography, I try to create images to remind me of the possibility of living outside circumscribed and ordered by racial mythology,” he said.
Palestrantes do VI Seminário Internacional Virtual: em defesa da natureza e da cultura - a arte do possível
Held in different cities and institutions, international seminars and debates organized by arte!brasileiros are considered important spaces for reflection, diffusion and diffusion of contemporary critical thinking, related not only to the world of art, but to society as a whole. From “Collecting in Brazil in the 21st century”, in 2012, to “Cultural Management: Contemporary Challenges”, in 2019, a large number of thinkers from different countries and areas were able to dialogue among themselves and with the public about a wide variety of themes.
Continuing this journey, on October 8 and 9, 2020, arte!brasileiros held, in partnership with the Goethe-Institut, the “VI Virtual International Seminar ARTE!Brasileiros: In defense of nature and culture – the art of possible”. This time, not at the Ibirapuera Auditorium, Itaú Cultural, MAM-SP or CCBB Rio – places that have hosted these events -, but on the web, on the YouTube platform.
The impossibility of the face-to-face meeting, resulting from the Covid-19 pandemic and the need for social isolation, brought several new challenges and some difficulties, but it also resulted in a great “collateral advantage” – so to speak -, a much higher audience seen in previous events. There were about 5,000 accesses during the two days of the event, with numbers that continue to rise on the platforms, since the event is still available on our channel.
The theme of the pandemic, which does not appear disconnected from the destruction of nature and attacks on culture experienced in the world – and especially in Brazil -, permeated the speeches of environmentalists, philosophers, scientists, artists and curators who participated in the seminar. In the next pages, in five texts, the reader will have full coverage of the presentations that brought together, on the 8th, the indigenous artist and militant Naiara Tukano, the indigenous leader and environmentalist Ailton Krenak, the scientist Antônio Donato Nobre, the curator Andrea Giunta (12th Mercosul Biennial), artists Bárbara Wagner and Benjamin de Burca and philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi; and, on the 9th, curators Beatriz Lemos, Diane Lima and Thiago de Paula Souza (3rd edition of Frestas – Triennial of Arts), artists Edgar Calel and Aline Baiana and curators Agustín Pérez Rubio and Lisette Lagnado (11th Berlin Biennial).
A few days after the event, we received, with great joy, the news that our publisher Patricia Rousseaux and arte!brasileiros were winners of the ABCA Award – Brazilian Association of Art Critics – 2019, in the category “Antônio Bento Award – diffusion of visual arts in the media”. This recognition validates our work and gives us the strength to continue.
Since March 2020, while we isolated ourselves as a form of security in the face of an epidemic unprecedented in our generation, we accompanied the closure of our daily meeting spaces: bakeries, bars, restaurants, cinemas, theaters, museums, galleries, bookstores, hairdressers. Thus, each of us organized our activities seeking solutions to a completely unexpected reality.
At the same time, in the world and in Brazil specifically, crimes of omission and attacks on life were intensified: against rivers, mangroves, forests, animals, women, blacks, immigrants, cultural institutions, in short, attacks on everything that did not represent an immediate socioeconomic retribution or did not generate some kind of immediate profit. Solutions for health and science began to be questioned at the expense of supposed fiscal and financial gains.
We had the feeling that the floodgates of a dam filled with backwardness and hatred were opened and, almost like in a sci-fi movie, monsters of all kinds were in a stampede capable of updating the atrocities that once formed part of our colonial history.
The cover of this edition, a detail of the work Trópicos malditos, gozosos e devotos 7, 2020, by the artist Rivane Neuenschwander, is almost a synthesis of what the unconscious and art can come to express, against fear and violence.
When we began discussions on the holding of our 6th International Seminar in May of this year, together with the directors of the Goethe-Institut, our partners in the project, the urgency of defending man and nature were urgent. We feel the need for art to be part of the reflection on the notion of the world we want to inhabit.
In this sense we managed to enable a virtual meeting, where the cast of guests – artists, philosophers, scientists, environmental leaders and curators – who have been working in this complex scenario for a long time, had the opportunity to talk about their activities in their different countries and places of activity.
“When we break the flows of the Earth, we harm it, because it is a whole, it has a consciousness of its own and we cannot cut it as a mosaic, as we are doing. For hundreds of years our shamans have been warning to take care of nature, we are nature,” said young indigenous activist and artist Naiara Tukano wisely.
So we made the meeting a place from where we could feel less alone, as a method of defense. Word and art have been fundamental weapons for reflection, comfort and attack.
Andrea Giunta, researcher and curator of the Mercosur Biennial 12, who had to dive into the adaptation of the event with the project curators, said at the Seminar: “Art has the ability to be an archive, an archive of experiences that were created at different times. And with this file we can ask the questions of the present.”
This edition is populated with articles that show ideas and productions of artists and curators who work in dialogue with their surroundings; works that reflect an attitude of immersion in his time; works that express the need to abandon the self-centered subject, to think about the importance of learning with the other, and from the other.
PS: We were very happy to know, at the end of this edition that arte!brasileiros had been recognized by ABCA, with the Antônio Bento Award 2019, as the best vehicle of diffusion in the media of art and culture. We will remain committed to the quality and coherence of our work.
The diagnosis of the philosopher Franco Berardi on the present is acid and accurate: we are living the death of the capitalist system, we inhabit a putrefied corpse, but that still stands and dictates the rules of the game. Even defining society so skeptically in the terminal phase of capitalism, the thinker proposes an encouraging image of struggle and transformation of this gloomy scenario, calling youth, poets and artists as strategic agents of transformation, seeing surviving in the chaos, the fighting forces necessary for overcoming the serious problems that plague humanity and put it at serious risk of extinction. Against the feeling that we live inexorable moments, despair at the rise of fascist movements around the world and the serious environmental imbalances facing the planet, Bifo – as he has been known since childhood – clearly stands beside those who do not conform with the limits of oppressive daily life and dare to fight for a fairer society , supportive and egalitarian.
It thus responds boldly to the reference to the “art of the possible”, a term adopted as a subtitle of the seminar “In Defense of Nature and Culture”, in which he participated on October 8. And it emphasizes that we should not consider the “possible” as a limit imposed on us by a naturalization of the barbarism committed by capitalism, but rather the search for a new path, the strengthening of our capacity to challenge the march that, if not contained, leads us to extinction. “Against social misery, geopolitical chaos, economic debacle, we have a way out: solidarity and frugality as well. We need to develop the ability to focus on what is useful for our life, for our pleasure, and forget about money, competition, monetary abstraction”, defends the philosopher.
Bifo introduces a fundamental element of his reflection by beginning his speech citing the protests that shook Chile last year and hailing the holding (on October 25) of the referendum to overthrow the constitution that has been in force since Pinochet’s military regime, which he said perpetuates the dictatorship – military and neoliberal – imposed by the authoritarian regime inaugurated with the coup of 1973. Thus, it reinforces the importance of spontaneous, supportive, combative movements, such as that in defense of the environment led by the resistance of Gretta Thunberg, the various manifestations that broke out in 2019 throughout the planet and the explosion of the anti-racism movement in the United States.
The theme adopted by the American protests, “I can’t breathe” (in reference to the murders of Eric Garder and George Floyd by the police), became a strategic piece in Berardi’s reflection, including serving as a title for Asphyxia: Financial Capitalism and Language Insurrection, one of three works of his own published in Brazil by UBU, book publisher. If the work already pointed out and reflected on the suffocation, literal and metaphorical, of contemporary society, the issue ended up acquiring new developments with the outbreak of the pandemic of the new coronavirus, a disease that deeply weakens the respiratory system. We live, according to Bifo, “the convulsion of a suffocated body.”
The effects of the pandemic, compared by him to an overwhelming storm, which has been killing thousands and makes more close the idea that human survival is at risk, have somehow contained the transformative power of social movements, making solidarity difficult or almost impossible. “It is necessary to reactivate the erotic body of society,” says the philosopher, who is extremely concerned about the devastating effects of this disease, not only on the physical level but on the psychic level. “The proximity of the skin has become a kind of metaphysical danger,” he diagnoses, saying he fears the effects of this phobic sensitization in relation to the body, to kissing. But he warns that we must be aware that, despite the danger posed by the virus, it is not the cause of our evils. The philosopher, who since his youth aligns himself with libertarian movements such as May 1968 and the Italian autonomist movement, deed to say that we live in an apocalyptic moment. After all, in its etymological sense, “apocalypse means revelation, a sudden understanding that something has gone horribly wrong.”
“The real origin of the current disaster is capitalist aggression against people’s freedom, the environment, the acceleration of the pace of exploitation, extractivism. All this has left democracy empty. We are powerless.” And there is no point in thinking nationally anymore, since the effects of this emptying of politics spread, like the virus, all over the world. The epidemic in a way highlights the impasse before which we are. It makes the collapse more intense and palpable.
“Covid-19 is not the catastrophe itself,” says Berardi, who in the heat of the hour, during the quarantine confinement, wrote a kind of diary. Extreme – Chronicles of Psychodeflation plunges into the meaning of this pandemic, seeks to analyze its effects on the collective unconscious and revived the hopes of a profound change, led by pleasure and not by the destructive politics of “people who hate the world, because they hate their own lives”. “Political reason cannot deal with this kind of contraction, of suffering. Psychoanalysis, music, poetry, those are the political languages of the future.”
Eduardo Simões é jornalista de cultura, tendo atuado como repórter de cinema em O Globo e de literatura na Folha de S.Paulo, além de ter sido editor da arte!brasileiros. Tem também passagens por publicações de lifestyle, como Wish Casa e MADE. Nesta edição, assina matéria sobre o encontro com curadores e artistas da Bienal de Berlim que aconteceu no VI Seminário Internacional Virtual promovido pela revista e pelo Goethe-Institut.
Rafael Cardoso é escritor e historiador da arte, PhD pelo Courtauld Institute of Art. É membro do Programa de Pós-Graduação em História da Arte da UERJ e atua como pesquisador associado junto ao Lateinamerika-Institut da Freie Universität Berlin (Alemanha). É autor de diversos livros sobre história da arte e do design, além de quatro obras de ficção. O mais recente, Modernity in Black and White: Art and Image, Race and Identity in Brazil, 1890-1945, será lançado em breve pela Cambridge University Press.
Giulia Garcia é jornalista graduada pela Faculdade Cásper Líbero e atriz, com formação técnica pelo Senac-SP. Pesquisadora de Arte e Comunicação, é membro do Grupo de Pesquisa CNPq Comunicação e Sociedade do Espetáculo. Já atuou como repórter nas revistas Trip e Tpm e, desde agosto de 2020, integra o time da arte!brasileiros. Nesta edição escreve sobre arte asiático-brasileira para além dos estereótipos e preconceitos.
Miguel Groisman é jornalista formado pela Faculdade Cásper Líbero e graduando em Cinema pela FAAP. Já escreveu sobre cinema e fotografia para a Revista Esquinas e foi pesquisador discente sob orientação da Profa. Dra. Simonetta Persichetti, desenvolvendo uma pesquisa sobre a representação das pessoas que vivem com HIV/AIDS no fotojornalismo. Atualmente é repórter da arte!brasileiros e assina, nesta edição, reportagem sobre o fotógrafo sul-africano Gideon Mendel.
Marcos Grinspum Ferraz é jornalista. Formado em Ciências Sociais pela USP, trabalhou entre 2009 e 2012 no jornal Folha de S.Paulo e entre 2012 e 2017 na Editora Brasileiros, sempre cobrindo a área de cultura. Estudou Antropologia Visual na Universidade Nova de Lisboa, em 2017, e no ano seguinte voltou ao time da arte!brasileiros. É coorganizador do livro Brasil Arquitetura: Projetos 2005-2020 e nesta edição da revista escreve sobre o artista Isael Maxakalí.
Keyna Eleison e Pablo Lafuente em frente ao MAM Rio. Foto: Fábio Souza
Desde o dia 1º de setembro passado, o Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio (MAM Rio) tem à frente uma nova direção artística, escolhida a partir de um edital público, em um exercício de transparência raro no cenário nacional. A proposta veio do diretor executivo do museu, Fabio Szwarcwald, que assumiu o posto no início do ano.
Essa nova direção artística carrega ainda outra novidade: a gestão exercida por uma dupla, a brasileira Keyna Eleison e o espanhol Pablo Lafuente, que vive no Brasil há sete anos, desde que fez parte da equipe curatorial da 31ª Bienal de São Paulo, intitulada Como (…) coisas que não existem. Em comum, ambos passaram “pelas várias posições que envolvem a prática da arte: escrita, curadoria, gestão, educação”, como definiu Lafuente durante entrevista virtual concedida à arte!brasileiros no início de outubro. Entusiasmados na nova função, respondiam com humor e se revezando, em uma sintonia característica de casal novo.
Durante a ditadura militar, o MAM carioca protagonizou alguns dos momentos mais marcantes da história da arte no Brasil, como na mostra Nova Objetividade, em 1967, onde Hélio Oiticica apresentou seu penetrável Tropicália, e nos Domingos da Criação, encontros promovidos por Frederico Morais com artistas experimentais na área externas do museu, em 1971. Desde então, contudo, a instituição foi se fechando e há muito deixou de ser referência, desafio que se impõe à dupla. “Nós compartilhamos essa leitura sobre a potência histórica e, em nosso projeto, discutimos o que pode ser um processo de abertura do MAM”, conta Eleison.
“O MAM, mesmo antes do Frederico Morais, começa em um prédio que era o Bloco Escola (inaugurado em 1958) e só depois vem o Bloco de Exposições (1967). Então, ele já começa com práticas outras como a pedagogia, que faz parte da criação, e resulta em processos de exposição, que por sua vez resultam em projetos pedagógicos, tudo isso acompanhado da Cinemateca, um arquivo que se conserva e se exibe. Essa conjunção de práticas é fundamental para a história do MAM”, explica Lafuente. Para ele, isso representa “uma complexidade orgânica, onde todos os processos se alimentam uns aos outros, sem que nenhum deles seja o centro”.
Levando em conta essa contextualização, a nova gestão chega cumprindo a agenda deixada pelos antecessores. “A gente tem um legado institucional para celebrar. E a palavra é mesmo essa, porque é comum que, quando entra uma nova direção, a antiga seja demonizada. Não é nesse sentido que queremos trabalhar. Então será a partir de julho do próximo ano que teremos uma contundência maior”, conta Eleison. Fernando Cocchiarale e Fernanda Lopes deixam a curadoria em outubro e uma nova vaga se abre e será preenchida por concurso.
Mas, se do ponto de vista da programação a proposta da dupla só será mesmo mais visível em 2021, há um componente de gestão distinto, como afirma Lafuente, que já será exercido agora: “O MAM não tinha direção artística. Tinha curadoria, curadoria da cinemateca. Entramos com a responsabilidade de criar uma identidade de projeto artístico para essa diversidade de ações.”
Assim, para além da própria programação, há uma nova atitude a ser revista no museu criada a partir da gestão compartilhada. “A dupla é importante para nós porque cria uma diversidade obrigatoriamente. Não tem como duas pessoas terem um olhar idêntico. A gente coincide em muitas perspectivas, mas também diverge em apreciações e histórias. A diversidade é constitutiva e a negociação também”, segue Lafuente.
No projeto vencedor apresentado à comissão de seleção para a diretoria artística do museu, com 38 páginas, o trabalho em dupla é colocado em uma contextualização histórica: “Diretorias duplas não são novidade em contextos artísticos ou em cenários não artísticos. Um dos princípios operativos do Partido Verde alemão é o Doppelspitze, que determina que todas as diretorias devem estar formadas por duas pessoas, uma de gênero feminino e outra masculino”.
Propor novas formas de gerir instituições de arte é essencial no contexto brasileiro, marcado em geral por uma grande centralização e personalização, já a partir de suas presidências, como ocorreu no MAM paulista durante a gestão de Milú Villela, que permaneceu no poder por nada menos que 24 anos, de 1995 a 2019, com poderes absolutos.
Nova ordem
“Queremos entender o MAM como uma estrutura só, o que é o nosso maior jogo dentro da instituição”, conta Eleison, que é completada por Lafuente: “A gente está criando corpos de decisão mais extensos; não é apenas a pessoa que está na gerência de educação e participação que vai decidir isoladamente qual será o programa público, mas ela vai ativar outras áreas de dentro e mesmo de fora do museu.”
Com isso, para se pensar como um museu deve atuar agora, a nova gestão busca exercitar isso na administração da própria instituição, criando relações mais horizontais? “Estamos tentando trabalhar desverticalizando o museu. Acho melhor a expressão desverticalizar do que horizontalizar, porque o próprio termo horizontal não procede no dia a dia. Afinal, nós continuamos sendo os diretores artísticos, há gerentes, têm nomeações que são importantes para serem dadas e responsabilizadas, e tem salários também”, define Eleison.
“A gente tem que negociar nossas propostas com diferentes equipes, somos responsáveis por um grupo grande, e têm outras gerências que não são nossas. Então temos uma proposta que tem que ser negociada por quem está aqui”, conta Lafuente.
A fachada do MAM Rio. Foto: Fabio Souza/Divulgação
Com isso, eles esperam socializar, com públicos internos e externos, as decisões, tanto artísticas como de gestão. E ao dar visibilidade esses processos podem ser monitorados e avaliados. “Queremos forçar a estrutura para ver até onde ela pode chegar, repetir por repetir não faz sentido”, diz Lafuente. No projeto apresentado há um cronograma detalhado de como se dará o processo de tomada de decisões no museu, que inclui reuniões semanais e quinzenais das equipes.
Entre as ações que devem marcar a gestão está a própria utilização do edifício icônico projetado por Affonso Eduardo Reidy (1909-1964). “Recuperar a visão do prédio é fundamental, já que é um museu que se pensa estruturalmente aberto. O Reidy tem um texto muito bonito sobre a luz que entra pelas janelas, de como ela cria uma experiência sensorial que enriquece qualquer experiência das obras de arte. Isso na história da arte é polêmico, pois escapa do cubo branco. E ao longo dos anos foram sendo dispostas paredes na frente das janelas para que a luz, o sol, as árvores e as pedras gigantes da Baía de Guanabara não entrassem. A gente quer recuperar isso física e simbolicamente, que o externo influencie o interno”, conta Lafuente.
Outro eixo que a dupla pretende implementar é abrir a instituição para aquilo que não está lá – objetos, saberes, pessoas – poder entrar, como diz Eleison: “É uma gestão de questionamento institucional muito forte. Uma das grandes questões é não só olhar para a inexistência de corpos, inteligências e objetos dentro das coleções, mas quando elas entram, como elas o fazem. Enquanto mulher preta me interessa um tipo de pesquisa sobre as pessoas que não foram colocadas aqui, o porquê elas não foram colocadas aqui e o que elas estavam fazendo”.
Com isso, o MAM Rio pode exercer uma relação mais autêntica com a produção que agora vem ocupando outras instituições, como a feminina, a negra, a indígena ou a queer – mas de forma um tanto estatística, como para cumprir uma agenda, sem, contudo, criar vínculos efetivos. “Nós não queremos trabalhar com a ideia de convite, porque quando há convite, está claro que o convidado não é daquele lugar. E nós queremos muito questionar a ideia do exótico, porque o que se chama de exótico é formativo da nossa estrutura”, conclui a diretora.
