Synchronarium - Memory of an ephemeral event

SYNCHRONARIUM

MEMORY OF AN EPHEMERAL EVENT 2022

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A few words before starting

Linha de Fuga 2022 took place between September 16 and October 8, 2022, proposing the Ethics of Care as the theme of discussion. The international festival brought 9 dance performances, a documentary, several conversations about artistic practices to Coimbra, developed a program of Restless Talks about Care, curated by scholars and activists, and a seminar on The Ethics of Care.

Linha de Fuga International Creation Laboratory developed in parallel with the festival, allowing the exchange between artistic proposals in process and performances and a dialogue among the laboratory artists who lived in Coimbra during this initiative. In 2022, the laboratory came with the joy of the post-pandemic encounter. For many of the 15 participating artists who experienced it, this was the first moment of meeting and exchanging since the pandemic, generating a vitality and several questions about care. What does it mean to care, and whom do we care for was a constant question throughout the period. Identities were the most present value in this laboratory: where we come from, who we are, what we identify with, before anything else, before being able to advance on the feeling of empathy necessary for the exercise of care. In a world that con-

nects more through sympathies than empathy and defines itself more and more by belongings and non-belongings, the exercise of putting empathy and care into practice is complex.

In all Linha de Fuga International Laboratories, we select one to two artists who propose to archive this initiative from their subjective point of view. We assume since the beginning that archiving and documenting is an act devoid of impartiality, where the archivist’s subjectivity is present and, because of that, it is also a creative act.

Among the archive concepts we received, we selected the vision of Paulina Oña and Tika Michel, two Bolivian artists who presented archiving the encounter using expanded writing as their main practice. Taking their Andean origins and references from that territory as a starting point, they proposed the seed to the participating artists, along with some practices/scores, as the starting point for constructing a memory of the future based on oracles. During the laboratory, they used the space of Rádio Baixa as their archive space and of all the provocations made to the participants. It was a space for listening, exhibiting materials, meeting, and conspiring. Both asked everyone

to bring a seed from their country to initiate a traffic-smuggling of identities from the different origins present in this edition. This was the motto that allowed the development of an archive based on their curation and care practice they developed in the Germinal project and in Coimbra. They acknowledged from the beginning that they would come with a perspective from another non-European culture and with all the weight of being part of a country that was colonized, embracing the doubts, fears, and strengths of this position.

Linha de Fuga always provides a generous period post-laboratory for the artist-archivists to understand the best format and content they want to be represented in each edition. What you find in the following pages is the result of this subjective vision, full of

escape lines and questioning about the experience in Coimbra, with thoughts from their origins and conditions, testimonies from some participants and inhabitants of the city, considerations about the city - university - and its desire to talk about capitalist colonialism around the concept of care. This archive is a testimony to the creative freedom we encourage in the artist-archivists of the laboratory.

Catarina Saraiva

General and Artistic Coordination

Linha de Fuga

preface to the written memory of an ephemeral event that occurred in Portugal.

...writing oracles with words stolen from Silvia Rivera/Clarice Lispector/Marie Bardet, leaving practices for each participant on small pieces of paper before dinner, inviting them to drink green wine in the afternoons and chat while sitting in a circle recording an improvised podcast, singing loudly in open spaces and also to close them, sharing medicines we brought from our territories for stomach-aches, coughs, or the flu, provoking gatherings through food, creating moments of listening: our proposal to document Linha de Fuga 2022 came hand in hand with reflections and actions generated in a sphere of thought called GERMINAL, Seedbed of Research for the living arts, a joint effort that we have been carrying out since 2020 in Bolivian territory (both physically and virtually).

The curatorship (curanderism, as we call it) proposed in GERMINAL has allowed us to envision the creation processes we drive from an expanded perspective as curator-healers of artistic making, considering this operation as a process of healing and deep listening alongside the artists. We also imagine the figure of the artist beyond a technical and virtuoso vision, preferring to focus our

attention on the powers of the artist-poet, the artist-astrologer, and the artist-farmer, much like this craft would be considered within Andean world-views.

Cura[ting][tor]ship as a care device: an unfolding from and for contemporary curator, a transformation of the established relationships regarding the work of the other, within the art world.

Seed thought is the way we name one of the cross-cutting axes of our research in GERMINAL: it is the vital intuition that reads the seed as a potency, imagining its germination from its temporal and performative action as an image and figure with which to become one, and thus provoke the transformation of our artistic practices into sensitive ways of investigating.

Being two undisciplined Bolivian performing arts/research artists, we decided to collectively apply for the Linha de Fuga 2022 call for proposals to document this encounter. Although the creation of an archive was not, until then, a common field of action for us (except for the recording activities we had to do for our own research), we chose to apply to the call driven by the pure desire

to experiment and imagine tools and devices that reveal these moments, gestures, words, events, in other words, the infinite pillars of memory possible for a collective ephemeral event that would take place over 3 weeks (from September 16 to October 9) in Coimbra, Portugal.

Our documentation proposal focused on the act of writing as a formula to provoke babbling (as if it were to utter omens, counter-spells to re-enchant the world we inhabit). This way, we proposed, as the engine for the documentation work at Linha de Fuga 2022 International Laboratory, writing in its expanded dimension: to create a chronicle, to write with the tongue, from the guts, as if originating a mutant ecosystem. Through a series of carefully crafted witchcraft and sorcery1 provocations, we pro-

posed to the participants archival and memory machinery, devices of fiction and autofiction, to collectively build a memory of the future. We decided to make the transatlantic journey, crossing the big pond with seeds in our pockets, like unexpected trafficking, eager to meet the seeds we had requested via email weeks before starting the journey, to the participants of the encounter. In our suitcase, we also carried a reference of our desire for writing: the picturesque Bristol2 calendar, and to our surprise, before finishing our journey, we were gifted with the Portuguese version of it, called “O verdadeiro Almanaque Borda D’água.” Coincidence/ omen/prophecy/prediction or whatever you want to call it.

The writing of this memory has taken us quite some time (time among various times).

1 TN:In the original text, “gualicheras”and mentioned as “hechiceras” in the footnote. In Andean culture, “hechiceras” refers to women who practice magic, witchcraft, or enchantments. The term is associated with the figure of witches or sorceresses, playing various roles in Andean traditions and beliefs. These women may be seen as holders of spiritual knowledge and magical abilities, playing a significant role in the cosmology and spiritual practices of Andean communities. “Gualicheras” is a term originating in some regions of Latin America, especially in Argentina and parts of Chile. This term is used to refer to women who practice divination, magical rituals, or witchcraft. Similar to the term “hechiceras,” “gualicheras” is related to spiritual practices, magical knowledge, and, in some cases, is associated with elements of local folklore. In Andean culture, concepts and terms can vary, and it is always important to consider the specific context and beliefs of the community in question for a more accurate understanding.

2 Popular calendar that contains astronomical data for each month, including eclipse dates, start dates of seasons, fishing recommendations, and climate and tide forecasts, specially calculated for each country. It also includes religious information, astrology, and horoscope, holidays, and the saint’s feast for each day of the year. Additionally, it features a graphic tragicomedy in 8 frames, poems and epigrams, jokes, famous quotes, and curiosities. TN: It is an almanac created in 1832 that practically continues with the same structure, sold in various countries in Latin America, with the highest number of buyers being in Colombia.

We decided to let our memories ferment for about a year, listen meticulously to the audio that make up our archive (interviews about the personal projects with each participating artist, raw audio from the laboratories and workshops of the event’s program, recordings of the conversations we convened, verbal outbursts we recorded at once at every event/incident/epiphany which occurred to us that we didn’t want to forget, descriptions of places, etc., were some of the strategies to collect the audio recordings), in order to practice extended and unfolded listening over months. Astonishingly, every time we returned to this archive, we encountered something new, something we had forgotten, and new reflections emerged as starting points for the narrative structure of this text.

Extended time that offers possibilities of memory and forgetting.

Because taking that diluted time also caused us to forget things, invent facts, and many memories distilled sensations that provoked theory, that we strengthened intuitions we had in 2022 but couldn’t articulate in words at that time. So, this is a fiction-

alized memory of a time that no longer exists, a narrative out of time/in time/without times. A forgetful chronicle.

“Sometimes, where you sow is not the place, sometimes, you have to perceive the world from the other side to sow with trust, to connect with whatever may arise.” “Sowing always in various spaces, multi-crop sowing, intuitive sowing that moves with its own rhythm and bounces back: someone affects you, and vice versa... everything happens again.”

We wrote this several years ago, words that were precursors to this moment, an omen perhaps.

This archive contains visions and apparitions that we were fortunate to witness in the city of Coimbra, macerations, germinations and distillates of projects from some of the participating artists in the Laboratory, scarce images, sensitive narratives and an abundance of words laden with jet lag.

Paulina y tik

Seedbeds of GERMINAL

PRACTICE 1

Stand still for a minute in a public place without moving.

Seed found on the ground of the Botanical Garden of Coimbra.

Inquisition Square 

Juanqui:

La Paz, 29 octobre 2023

“Hello, my germinalas,

Here I send you a small text in response to your invocation.

what distilled, what macerated, what germinated and what needed to be turned into compost.

No. 1

Everything rotted. but in the middle there was life. Since our multiple encounters in Coimbra, I returned to La Paz where I shared practices from project at residency MATERIAL Oct 22

what distilled everything more especially coffee, juniper, litsea under foundations

a nomadic instinct awoke I flew fed without a kitchen of my own I was fed

what germinated

I was invited as a resident choreographer to Santa Cruz de la Sierra by the company Zero to direct the new work of the company developing oral practices with the tongue and the language the senses premiered meaning to all of this

in the off of the international theatre festival of Santa Cruz April 23 photos exist

what needed to be turned into compost

D for detained, between bars defendant, among stars discriminated disallowed, they say evicted, that’s it dispossessed saying they deport for sport

D for displacement Everything rotted but in the midst there was life what macerated I am paying attention digesting slowly organizing re organizing myself

today, September 28, 2022, we ask for permission to burn with the permission of this land, Lugar no Meio, with the blessing of the horse Benjamin, we request permission from the Sicó mountains. We have come to set fire.

Oracle 1

The reciprocity.

To take charge of the confusing, heterogeneous, and multi-temporal forms of life, we will need to close the past to inaugurate the future.

From the here and now, we could exorcise the binary and thus dismantle the usual scheme, unleashing both its life-giving energies and its abyssal dangers.

Today, we bring something for you, not with the expectation of reciprocation, but for you to know that it will be so until the end of your times: reciprocity helps navigate between worlds.

Negative photo of the bonfire Bibi Dória

PRACTICE 2

Initiate a conversation with an unknown person

before any care... the wound

Yesterday I was looking for some images of Cerro Rico in Potosí for a project. Then I found myself once again with the landscape of my most cherished childhood. That mountain, gnawed like cheese, rising beautifully in a winter blue sky, with trucks traversing it all the time and tourists wishing to understand something about this place.

My sister and I were talking about our memories in Potosí, the profound and nostalgic feeling the huayño1 evokes, the desire to drink and dance that its rhythm inspires. We spoke about the scent of the aguayo2 and the weight of the phullu3, how we felt it warming us up when we were in the ruthless Andean winter cold.

Lineages are inheritances of kings that blur in this place, kings who savoured from afar the great fortunes they took away, at the cost of the deaths of thousands of people. In Bolivia, one grows up experiencing blatant rac-

1 The huayno or trote is a pre-Columbian dance of Quechua-Aymara origin. It is danced collectively in a circle, although over time, the mixed couples form, either loose or held, has become more prevalent

2 Woven with alpaca, llama, or sheep fibre.

3 Blanket, cover, woven with sheep or llama fibre with significant weight.

Chestnut seed, protected by a prickly shell.

ism and endless classism, even in the innocence of childhood, almost without malice, in an apparently harmless guise. That information ingrained by history (stories), I would dare say especially in Bolivia, turns into a violent blow at a tender age, simply because everything is there, in plain sight, in the flesh: you can’t be naive for long, you can’t pretend not to see, not to feel, and if you do, it’s because the colonial wound hurts so much that you ignore it while it festers.

As a child, you don’t fully understand injustices, yet you make them a part of you, on the street, after school, with every trip to the market, at every moment. This is an unjust place forged in the history of humanity and the actions that were taken. I am a part of this; I am the bastard daughter of history, a macabre game of religious guilt ingrained in my marrow, which, when I think removed, reappears, an absurd inferiority based on sad parameters imposed by capitalism and colonialism that, fortunately, has never quite fully been formed/ completed on this side of the world where survival itself is already a success.

In Abya Yala there exists an extraordinary tenacious will for life, for that desire to walk, to live, for the very sense of being here, alive. It’s a feeling beyond privileges and of how comfortable you may be. There’s a desire for life that I can’t explain. That basic instinct is pres-

ent and felt within oneself and in others. Perhaps little is understood about what I want to share, but at the same time, it’s so simple that those who experience it know it.

So the colonial wound becomes evident and has no cure. The wound is us, bodies, histories, and territories. Everything mixed up and battered but at the end of the day, that body gazes at a sunset and smiles while its nose bleeds.

This is the wound that, over time, spreads to the perpetrator’s body; only apparently unscathed is the one who refuses to look at it, causing a calamitous and even contagious infection. What are the reparative actions for this colonial wound in micro-political instances? How do we take responsibility for this heavy inheritance? The encounter in Coimbra was, unintentionally, among many other things, a probing into that wound with clumsy and confusing intentions of understanding and caring for something that we know is broken and that bothers us to hold all the time... because it’s tiring, because it hurts. After a year from this encounter and from these bastardized bodies, we turn into written words those pains, those uncomfortable legacies of hundreds of years, fuelled by inevitable presents.

Great are the lessons from deep wounds; applying alcohol to the sore will make us scream, and perhaps, with a lot of patience, a healthy scab will eventually appear.

Oracle 2

The strength of the storm.

Imagine the sound of a storm when you inhabit it from within, from the eye where it is formed. Can you hear the sound? Nothing sounds.

From where do I observe the catastrophe when I am furthest from it?

When various elements come together, a recipe is ready to be prepared. Where do I contain it?

Several bodies crawling over the sea because the sea is feminine. Pay particular attention to notice when the moon might disturb the contemplation of the dawn. This way, you can enhance your dialogue with subjects and non-human entities, to be able to understand without necessarily understanding.

Now: the calm, now the dawn, now a silence. And then an explosion.

PRACTICE 3

To plant a seed in a public place.

Possible fiction

It’s the year 2550 on a beach in the Middle East, where two children are tired from playing in the fuchsia sand1. The two children sit, looking at the horizon; one is darker than the other, copper skin and cocoa skin are catching their breath.

‘I have a treasure I found among the old ruins,’ says one. The eyes of the darker-skinned child open wide, and he quickly looks around to make sure no one is watching them. There is no one, no one goes to that beach any more due to the illnesses caused by the fuchsia sand. The children have grown up there, the sand is a part of them.

1 The sand took on that colour after hundreds of years of contamination and a subsequent chemical cleaning, through which the evolution of a type of mite whose excrement is fuchsia occurred.

Kulli corn seeds or Bolivian purple corn seeds

The copper-skinned child extends his hand, and the other, with incredible amazement, looks.

No one can know that we have this; they would take it away from us immediately. If they suspect us, they will surely detain and search us. Let’s hide it in the ear; maybe it will whisper things to us.

It happened that, while we were admiring a beautiful small street in the centre of Coimbra, two policemen forcibly took a guy; he was Black, clearly had smoked marijuana, just like us, but we were not suspects of anything, he was; and by the way he confronted the police, it also didn’t seem to be the first time, a mix of anger with fear, a weariness. They demanded something from him that we couldn’t understand; people from nearby shops watched from a distance with fear. We left the shop as by a reflex. They made him take off the jacket he was wearing, and from his pocket, he pulled out something like a wallet and showed his ID; he was visibly upset. A few months ago, I saw exactly the

same scene in Brazil. The same policemen, the same guy, the same situation. Here it’s not like where we come from... I thought, better not get involved, better not get involved, better not get involved. It hurts to say that.

Late 2023, on social media, there’s talk of genocide and dehumanization to justify the unjustifiable: Palestine burns, disappears, colonization and extermination are unfolding before our eyes. Micro-politics seems ridiculous, insufficient. In 500 years, if humanity still stands, there might be a group of people gathering to discuss the wounds they’ve inherited from that moment of extermination. A temporal extrapolation. Two children run to hide in a kitchen; it’s the kitchen of one of their mothers. There are many people eating in the restaurant where the mother works. They are people from other places, from other times, they don’t speak the same way as they do.

We’ll be safe here for a while; these people have no idea what we have.

Bibi:

Hello dear friends,

What a lovely email and what a beautiful approach from you!

It came at a great time for you to receive news about my project because just last week I had the opportunity to present it again in Brazil and Portugal.

Orality as an offering

As above, so below.

I spent a long time digesting, reflecting, and imagining possible relationships with fire, which I believe was exactly my biggest question during the development of the project at Linha de Fuga, stemming from the interview with you.

Oracle 3

When you swim into an estuary at night, which part of your body first accommodates the water’s temperature? Which part of your body will sink first? The way you choose to submerge in the estuary, speaks transversely about the modes of subjectivity production you manage in this time, welcome to the crisis. A small boat is approaching, bringing with it a light; you can hear its vibrations. It’s time to ask the water in your ears to synchronize with the estuary water, so that the dance of the otoliths* can slowly begin.

*The otoliths are part of the vestibular system, which is housed in our inner ear. This network is responsible for our sensory balance and is equipped with vertical cilia, on which rests a layer of calcium carbonate crystals, which are the otoliths.

PRACTICE 4

To hug someone you’ve never hugged before.

umbrella pine seed or durian seed?

Burning palo santo and rosemary: a sensation of the hidden, the forbidden in complicity.

Some nights we practised everyday rituals to sustain the seismic movements that were happening while the residency took place. It is a destabilizing decision for me to write from those sensations, which linger after more than a year, repeating and replaying in my dreams:

Some nights, coming back from dinner, we would burn little twigs of rosemary on the streets with less wind and run, twirling the incense from one corner to another, sometimes holding hands, sometimes screaming. We weren’t doing anything wrong, but the feeling of an illicit act made our feet burn to escape faster as soon as the smoke from our improvised incense appeared. We also practised the incendiary art of lighting matches in motion, using only 4 fingers, as a practice of domestic rebellion, who knows if someday this knowledge will save our lives.

One such dawn, as we fuelled our pyromania through random games, some ancestral figures appeared to us. We looked at each other in fear, and no words could come out of our mouths. We thought our actions had angered them and caused their sudden appearance, but nothing could be further from the truth. I managed to say “oh, my daughters” with a voice lodged in my throat that didn’t belong to me, and the image of a fountain gushing blood in front of the church of the Monastery of Santa Cruz appeared as we opened the windows of the house. It was about to dawn.

We received a message, we were granted these words:

Do you need skills to take care?

You have to know where to put your tongue, you have to take care of the dance(s), try to do it, to taste, fumbling, like the Moirai, to update the rituals.

what art is.

Aline: Paulina e Tika!

It is a joy to share with you some of the developments of the research that took place in Coimbra. Everything is still in progress, along with the ashes, but here is a part of what was done there.

Oracle 4

In the pre-Hispanic Andean world, the warrior and weaver couple was considered as a pair of artists. The memory circuits of the planet are also inscribed in our bodies. A new graft must be made: give back to work the sense of celebration, provide tasks with a sensitive vision, also talk, acullicar1, sow. Transhuman weaver: remember and pay attention to the names, footprints, toponyms, and cosmic coordinates of the garments. Where you did not weave, your hands wove on the body of the grandmother: those who are young now were not in the past.

1 chew coca leaves

PRACTICE 5

When you’re out on the street walking, slow down, walk as slowly as possible.

seeds covered in chestnut, the chestnut is still not revealed...

The girls with a serious or not-so-serious look (grounded)

The moment of the meal, the moment to look at ourselves beyond artistic tasks. Behind the counter of Bar da Liga, two women attend to customers and work in the kitchen interchangeably. One of them is an African migrant, she has two daughters.

Deep gazes from curious, undisturbed, serious childhoods, strong looks.

- No, to earn a smile, you have to deserve it.

There is no docility, there is tenderness in the undisturbed. After a few days, when a certain routine becomes evident, they reappear. Huge smiles and laughter, secrets, and still curious looks but less alert. Timeless gazes, narrating the history of the world in less than a second. I can see the future in the eyes of these girls.

Oracle 5

the market.

The encounter with another person finally makes us find ourselves: we’ll have to sit down and chat. I will only die when I stop learning, then an image appears:

I am in the middle of a market in a village, apparently no one is looking at me, although I have a body, it seems like I’m invisible, this feeling is pleasant, I walk among people looking for fruit, touching them a little, some squeeze the fruit too much, but without damaging it. Some just look at it, and here’s the revelation: I look into the eyes of the smiling saleswoman - she looks so much like someone I know, who is she? Good fortune to you, good fortune. So that we never lose the pleasure of getting lost in the middle of something, of something else. Something is playing: it’s time to exercise the joints of the hand, of the heart, to write with half-closed eyes, like in a dream.

PRACTICE 6

Go to a square or a park, find a place to sit and close your eyes for a minute.

Concrete care practices

the road to hell is paved with good intentions

(popular saying)

I heard someone say, ‘It’s crazy that something that should arise for some from basic empathy, for others it has to be theorized.’

There is a lot of theorizing around “care,” but when it comes to the moment of doing, of establishing those spaces where thought becomes flesh, all theories and ideas about enabling spaces of care often prove unstable, unsustainable. “Care” measures are relative and disorganized, varying according to the structural information each person has, their personal burden, so it is almost impossible to temper oneself in an ephemeral time with intentions of deepening work, encounters, relationships. The conflict is evident, as was the case at some moments within our meeting at Linha de Fuga 2022.

a tomato seed from the dinner salad

The first times I heard about these issues were when Donald Trump was on his way to becoming the president of the United States (2017). I saw that at the University of Berkeley, California, the famous “safe spaces” were being established. Feminist waves were active in debates and confrontations, and this university created places where students could take refuge, express themselves, and feel “cared for” in the face of the upheaval taking place in the country.

Several years have passed since then, and I have inhabited a variety of these safe spaces in their sudaca forms. There are several questions about their operation and the care they theoretically provide. Who cares for whom becomes increasingly unclear, and the reasons range from coherence to madness. What seemed safe is no longer so. What are we caring for? What care systems are we supporting?

So, I try to look closer, try to narrow the focus, and think that there is no way to care for someone or something if I have no minimum interest in its existence. And I must confess that very few things interest me. That I should get more involved and show more interest, maybe... and it might not happen simply because it’s an overwhelming task.

So I try to remember the small

things, the possible, and a few images and memories remain:

Cucumbers on the eyes. We’ve cried a lot. Today I can’t move, I’ll stay still so the sun reaches me, and that will be the exercise. Silence. Silence / listening / silence. Is it always important what I have to say?

Right to opacity, accepting the unintelligible. I may have nothing of interest to you, and vice versa, but here we are, let’s make life kinder.

Truths are painful, sometimes the pain is greater than the real importance of that truth. Look

at the proportions.

The how will determine.

The cold epidemic has begun, the shake/quake/earthquake is among us all. On the way, a pepper tree. What is a pepper tree doing here? We take some branches to boil and inhale the steam. Everything gets worse, more colds, more complaints. We hope that the pepper tree on the path could provide us relief.

Not assuming care.

Care is also painful, it also hits and also lets go.

Psychological and psychoanalytic therapies are approved and well-regarded as forms of care. At what point does this become a commercial crutch, a systemic dependency? Why is it so challenging to envision making other forms of therapy a habit?

In small things, some lights appear, manifestations of being arise, originating from genuine empathy,

and I feel that unsettling sensation of not knowing anything, of maintaining silence and just listening, hoping to understand something, to see if something reveals itself. There are things I cannot care for, there are things I do not want to care for because I wish for their disappearance, and there are many others about which I have no idea how to handle; all that remains is to put the body in it, to see if this new experience allows us to learn more. The practice of conscious care was not, and is not, a joyful path where we hold hands and dance, as is often the case in these “artistic encounters”; it is full of frustration, and suddenly everyone feels neglected, the “self” prevails, and the ego grows as a defence mechanism.

It is evident that the agency of the capitalist colonial system in which we live does not share this quest, quite the opposite. We are educated and raised under this system, and that chip is ingrained in us. Just as capitalism seizes struggles and makes them functional to its system, care is a place that can be capitalized, easily manipulated by moralism, and exercised by “good people.” So, in this diffuse and uncomfortable path, nothing should calm down. When good intentions appear, it’s time to be suspicious. When things start to have a name and are used to praise those who

know how to name them, it’s time to be suspicious and perhaps put cucumber slices on our eyes after a long moment of crying.

To name the reality.

Life in communities, life on the streets, life in neighbourhoods, networks of mutual aid and organization can illuminate your way of feeling - thinking about your ways of doing: like a worm producing fertilizing humus, helping to bring forth the still unspeakable. Trusting in the magic of living reality to escape the often treacherous magic of words. We cannot afford to make the private a private sphere realm of thought. To increase the potency, the word must arise from an unveiling gesture, emerge from itself as a covering code and dare to name the painful aspects of reality, which is certainly not easy, as this must be a collective task.

Oracle 6

Peruvian pepper tree 

PRACTICE 7

When you consider that staying silent is possible, stand firm until the end.

We open the booklet of residence participants, there we are with photos, names, and origins. The activities have started, a person is missing, a photo with a name and face doesn’t appear in the meetings. He couldn’t make it. - I would have loved to be there, I couldn’t get the money for the flight tickets - he told us.

He was present in our thoughts at various moments during the meeting. I wondered: Why, of all people, him, the black artist, the Kilombo activist from Brazil, why couldn’t he secure the funding? So many answers.

Soap plant, this seed serves as soap.

The boy with Cocoa-colored skin says to the other:

What if we put a bit of our treasure in the food, do you think these people, by eating it, might see what we saw? Maybe if they see everything that happened in that time, something could change.

Let’s try, we have nothing to lose.

Design disruptions.

There is a lot of exhaustion in being the only possible agency when measuring the necessary intensity for accompaniment. We can ask for help to accompany each other, among all. Practice every day moving in the darkness, to advance in the revolution against oculocentrism. We have very few experiences in the midst of ‘I don’t know,’ maybe it’s also possible to exercise in that terrain.

How to design disturbances to support life?

Pay attention to nuances, attention to the game and seriousness of engaging in playing. Perhaps to look at the textures of people’s clothes walking down the street, to pay attention to the synergies of materialities presented to you, so that when you play with your eyes closed, you can touch infinite worlds.

Oracle 7

Wellington

PRACTICE 8

Walk from one place to another with a seed in your hand.

Some seeds from Margarida’s familiar lemon tree.

Harry Potter and the Republics

What are the narratives of this territory? Which fictions become real, and which realities become fiction? Stories leave symbols as a basis for certain narratives.

Our foreign gazes quickly reveal the fictions of this journey, or rather... they highlight the reality of these fictions. We arrived in Coimbra with students in capes and gowns, a moment of initiation into the university world, a marked ritual built since forever; everyone seems to have stepped out of a new volume of Harry Potter. Coimbra accompanies with its magic of narrow, cobbled streets and the medieval inquisitorial history that happened in those places.

In each group of students, some leaders stand out providing punishments and hardships to the new students. The great macabre game of acceptance, belonging, hierarchical rehearsals to fit in the best way into the oppressive and oppressed system of capitalism, the chief, the employee, the boss, the lackey. A highlighted binary. We were surprised by this particular style of power rehearsals.

It is then that Yuri appears, a Brazilian friend living in Coimbra for several years. She tells us that there is another Coimbra outside the university and its network, the Coimbra that does not have access to the university, with a different functioning, that of people who do not see

the university as an opportunity. We saw very little of this real world; the magicians immersed us in this fiction/reality at every step.

The Republics1

After the coup d’état in Bolivia in 2019, where the conservative wing of the country claimed that Bolivia was a Republic as it was born and not a plurinational state, encountering these republics was initially a shock, then a rethinking, a new look at this word. At some point in Latin America, it was a synonym for freedom, but currently, it is clear that it meant freedom only for some; the oppressors merely changed names and marked their differences with the majority of people who had lived there for hundreds of generations, internal colonialism had begun under the banner of the Republic.

We visited the Marias, a republic. We talked to the young people, and

I thought what a beautiful utopia would be if the republics/states had something of what this republic had.

We sat at their table; a couple of the girls were on kitchen duty, preparing dinner for everyone, while others were getting supplies ready for the night’s party. They invited us to eat with them, we sat at their table, laughed, chatted, talked about the people who had been there, and saw the walls with messages for the new members. A transitory republic for most, a place to feel the belonging that the young people in gowns long for from their oppressors. The Marias don’t perform initiation rituals, at least they don’t agree with that. We talked about the meaning of that place and its importance in the lives of the people there, far from the idea of a republic that we know from this side. Where do we belong? Where do we choose to belong? Belonging based on a territory, a place, has not lost its validity.

1 University accommodation houses that are self-managed by their residents in a communal logic. In the 1960s, when student protests and democratic reforms were taking place throughout Europe, the Coimbra Republics played a leading role in national politics, advocating for democracy and freedom. Today, they uphold the values that define their exceptional character in the university environment: communal living and the defense of democracy.

Iuri

Balconies of the rooms at Marias Do Loureiro

The copper-skinned boy had fallen asleep at the table; people had already left. He woke up sweating, he had dreamed... it could have been a nightmare, but he wasn’t afraid.

- I saw... there was a witch in the yard, followed by a procession, they lifted her, she just gestured. A circle formed around her, this time no

one dared to burn her, this time she was in charge, setting the pace, the rhythm, she made the people move. Lying on the ground, she looked through her hair. She opened her mouth, her gums were bleeding.

- I think you ate from the enchanted pot.

Oracle 8

Embryo of desire.

The embryo of Desire in action operates in its connection with personal and collective mythologies. The potential space stretches between your time and the time of history, and in particular of the present. This demands a refined level of listening, a probing, an opening of the ears, a keen awareness of the moral and ideological plugs that deafen us all to the unheard, and an attention to the densities and complexities of the present. This becoming is transgressive desire, not possible without anthropophagy, from the particular adventure that involves a journey seeking the heterogeneity of bodies, voices, perspectives, and ways of doing.

PRACTICE 9

When you meet with several people, focus on the smells of each one.

speach seed covered with a paper napkin mantle

To dance in a block until activating the pineal gland.

How to activate the party device in three weeks?

The first week of activities at Linha de Fuga, several dances unfold, dinners and conversations as preparation for the first party with the group of residents. A familiar place already, A Fábrica, where 7 days before, some fluids were already released.

At first, we didn’t find our rightful place in the night, so we decided to walk from one party to another, looking for the right atmosphere to dance. Most of the time, expectations surpass what happens, and

it’s necessary to lower the mental flight. Encountering others is not an easy task. We exchanged slang as we walked the illuminated streets of Coimbra, climbing avenues and crossing streets with our feet focused on dance steps. Meeting the other to dance is sometimes not so easy. I don’t remember how that night ended; I think we returned to what had been our home for these three weeks, singing, shouting, bundled up to the ears as we crossed the smog of the city in the early morning.

During the second week, there was a desire for a party in the air, so many nights, upon returning home after dinner the mobile speaker would light up, and the dance would begin on the street, from the Baixa, crossing the bridge.

Descontroladas

Entering the game became a premise; sometimes, I wish that what I experienced on this journey to the future has also been experienced by the others. I know that’s impossible; all I have left is to tell it in such a detailed way that, when reading, it provokes powerful games of imagination, generators of invented memories.

Party at the Marias do Loureiro house. I feel at home. I’ve been in this house before, just as I’ve been in the Inquisition Square, many years ago.

[where do you come from today? day 1 with Chrissa.

I come from Valparaíso. This is the future, and I come from a bonfire 2 floors below.]

On one of those nights, after dinner, we set out to climb uphill through the narrow streets of the city centre, which on weekends are filled with students looking for parties and beers. Arriving at the Largo de Sao Salvador open square, we encountered anxious presences ly-

ing on mattresses in the middle of the street, drinking beer, watching images projected by a video beam. We were waiting for the results of an election on the other side of the world, with a 6-hour time difference. Waiting for the results of an election in the past was the undulating transition towards finally achieving a collective, dignified, and joyful intensity. The improvised party, the street celebration, celebrating the victory, telling them to their faces that they shall not pass.

The exercise of remembering parties that took place at least a year ago, invented parties, seems to have no complication, as they are moments of extreme impulse, one imagines that grasping the sensations caused in that event is an easy task. However, I believe it is the ephemeral, fleeting, vigorous nature of the party device that makes its fading persistence in memory much more elusive, impossible to describe with firmness: only glimpses, only déjà vu on the skin. Writings glimpses of events from the future-past.

I will now recount my experience activating glands through acts of imagination while listening to techno and many other sounds:

I began by placing myself at a point no more than two metres in front of a bass speaker in a darkened black room with at least 20 more people. We stood on what would be the stage. The stand in front of me was just a vague memory, along with the memory of the illuminated room I had been inhabiting less than 5 hours ago. There I was, immobile at first, despite the induced darkness, listening to my breathing and wondering where my pineal gland is located. Where is it situated?

He says: you’ll need to close your eyes to begin seeing. Invocation to the trance.

I start producing more saliva; my body hydrates from the inside. The bass of the music hits me in the hip. From there, it rises. To the legs. I feel dishevelled, and my head is trying to record each of the sensations that pass through me.

It’s been over a year since this, and I still remember:

I open my eyes into the darkness.

I recall a snake sitting on top of the speaker; surely, one of its chakras requested it. Behind me, a mountain in motion, almost like a volcano, almost an earthquake in the seeds. However, his dance was temporally eternal. The slow violence of the

Image taken from the Technosomatics workshop given by Frederic Gies.

stone. Then, in the background to the left, a black hole, blacker than the rest of the room. I approached in one way or another and danced wildly in that corner, almost like torture, almost like pleasure, like the beginning of a cleanse, like an invitation to trance. Later, someone asked me, “Where is the pineal gland located?” and immediately, I looked at him: in his eyes this image.

Suddenly, in front of me, there are some flighty hens escaping with long red party-like claws, inviting anyone who crosses their path to use all the glitter that is now forbidden in Europe, to take a stroll through the streets of Coimbra. It’s a vibrant fuchsia glitter, a new biomaterial.

Next to a mobile speaker, the hens dance, becoming the centre of attention for residents and tourists in small, narrow streets, such as the once-called whores’ street where each of them contributed with several litres of sweat.

They advanced on their path and after long hours in front of some zinc construction sheets, to unleash the bonfire we had lit a few days earlier, with shouts and frenzied jumps, they threw themselves vigorously against the sharp edges of the rusty zinc roofs. I say to myself, you have activated your pineal gland. Startled, I wake up, cocoa skin shakes my arm to finally pull me out of lethargy, it’s almost 6 in the evening here on the sandy beach.

Oracle 9

whisper from another time.

When the music enters your ear, it doesn’t ask for permission: you want that force for yourself, to traverse the environment with your body, as a way to stimulate life in your practices. The party sounds in the distance, boom boom boom boom, but your feet are immobilized. How much is too much? Today, the moon is closer to the earth, ask her for what you dreamed yesterday, what you desired at dinner yesterday, at the bonfire yesterday. Take care of your skin, it’s asking for something only you can give her. Take your time and receive, even when you don’t want to, there’s a good chance you’ll be surprised by the gifts waiting for you. I want to die in good health, as if bursting with life.

PRACTICE 10

Speak to someone through telepathy.

the seeds of the fig that started the invoked compost

Lady on the balcony looking at the horizon with a sleep mask over her eyes

It is what happened.

It’s 6 in the afternoon, on September 26, 2022. Coimbra, Portugal, 24 degrees Celsius. Two comrades head in the opposite direction of the way back to their homes, sensing that changing the route contrarily will reveal something on the journey. During their walk, they find small alleys that lead to nothing but a house of one or two floors. One of them enters to sniff around and comes back. They continue wandering for several minutes. The weather is pleasant, the light at this hour is the best according to them, the mag-

ic hour, the orange and pink hues in the sky announce that nightfall is approaching; suddenly, turning a corner to the left, they encounter a herd of trees that mimic the gradients of light in all their splendour. A little distant still, they can’t believe their eyes and approach to understand this landscape, to be lucky enough to touch them. It’s from that distance that they achieve the ideal perspective and only then visualize it. At first, they couldn’t believe their eyes and decide to approach slowly, a woman on the second floor, facing the park with the tree herd, is bathed in the sunset sun di-

No. 10

rectly on her face. Fortunately, her eyes are covered with black silk, a blindfold partially conceals the face of the lady in nightgowns, contemplating with us and the trees this piece of the baixa that I can’t erase from my memory.

I have even thought about making a thorough and shamelessly detailed description to put it in one of those image-generating applications that use artificial intelligence to shape and give meaning to the words of

the description, adding a pinch of concreteness to this increasingly blurry memory. The truth is that I would give anything to relive that moment, perhaps trying to take a booring photo of that woman, whom I no longer know if she was real or, rather, an apparition. But the image fades away every day, and my attempts to find a way to capture/retain the colours, tones, and nuances of that scene are sabotaged by my irreverent and persistent forgetfulness: yes, it’s okay to forget.

Cristina:

My dears, It seems like a lifetime ago, although just a year has passed …

Could You Hold My Heart While I Go On

Back to the fuchsia beach.

- Did you enjoy the trip? Did you like the food?

- The witch didn’t scare me, and I think we did well to add some of it to the food, but I still have one left. Do you want it?

- I think I’ve had enough; I got lost in the streets, danced to the rhythm of 3, 2, 1, 3, 2, 2, and so on.

- Maybe it’s better to leave what’s left for the hens. After all, they eat all the seeds, and there won’t be anyone rummaging inside them.

- So be it then.

cyclic time.

I’ve had a dream: a leap has been triggered and that leap turns into flight, escape. This plunge has taken me to the bottom of the sea where all I can think of is to gypsify the world.

How can I carry with me the migrations I’ve made and those made by my ancestors and future grandchildren?

To position oneself is to know oneself there. Turn off the GPS and understand that what touches us is touching us in unsuspected places. Today is the last Friday of the month, there are 93 days left in the year, but none of this makes sense if we think about the cyclical time that occurs in the universe of dreams.

The beauty of the leap is to think that it is more enjoyable to imagine only the gesture of jumping and not necessarily focus on the landing, on the final blow. That, for now, doesn’t exist.

Oracle10 fictions

of the future portals to the past Cristian

LINHA DE FUGA 2022 CALENDAR

Festival

El esfuerzo constante de ganarse la vida (performance)

Vicente Arlandis es

16 Sep | Teatrão - Oficina Municipal de Teatro

Ó - um dispositivo de dança (dance)

Cristian Duarte br

17 Sep | Convento São Francisco

Presentation of Coreia #7 + Performance Submission Submission (unplugged)

Bryana Fritz us & João dos Santos

Martins pt

21 Sep | Atelier A Fábrica

L’Après-Midi d’une Faune (dance)

Dinis Machado pt/se

22 Sep | Teatrão - Oficina Municipal de Teatro

Queer Quê? Conference

Dinis Machado pt/se

24 Sep | CAPC Sereia

Linha de Fuga – ensayo fílmico (documentary)

Marta Blanco es

24 Sep | Auditório do Instituto Português do Desporto e da Juventude

Dis/orienting Front (performance)

Chrysa Parkinson us/se

24 Sep | Auditório do Instituto

Português do Desporto e da Juventude

Mina (performance)

Carlota Lagido pt

28 Sep | Lugar do Meio - Alfafar

Aqui enquanto caminhamos (performance)

Andrea Sonnberger at & Gustavo Ciríaco br

30 Sep, 1 e 2 de Oct | street

Dança Sem Vergonha (dance)

David Marques pt

7 Oct | Teatro Académico de Gil Vicente

Good Girls Go To Heaven, Bad Girls Go Everywhere (dance)

Frédéric Gies fr/se

8 Oct | Atelier A Fábrica

Laboratory

Seminar on the Ethics of Care

João Maria André pt

19-20 Sep | Salão Brazil

Workshop Dis/orienting Front

Chrysa Parkinson us/se

19 - 23 Sep | Sala Brincante - Cena Lusófona

Workshop Z0NA

Cristian Duarte br

26 - 30 Set | Sala Brincante - Cena Lusófona

Techno-Somatic Workshop

Frédéric Gies fr/se

7 Oct | TEUC - Teatro dos

Estudantes da Universidade de Coimbra

Lab In Fest

Presentation of the Processes of Laboratory Artists

1 October

CAPC Sereia

Rafaela Santos pt | Meu corpoMeu produto +

Vinicius Couto br/pt | Procura-se

Rádio Baixa

Personaje Personaje ec/es | Cabayo

2 October

CAPC Sereia

Margarida Cabral pt | Moira

TEUC

Solveig Rocher ca/fr | Béton: La conférence des oiseaux

Centro Cultural Penedo da Saudade Gustavo Monteiro pt | Pesquisa

Percurso pela Praça da República

Paula Pachón es | Partituras corporais no espaço doméstico

Rádio Baixa

Juanqui Arévalo bo | O dispositivo da constelação

5 October

TEUC

Rita Pinheiro pt | Camaleoa +

Cristina Lilienfeld ro \ Pesquisa

Pátio do CAV - Centro de Artes

Visuais

Bibi Dória br/pt | Nome de Filme

Percurso pela Baixa da cidade

Vinicius Couto br/pt |Procura-se +

Bloco Galinhas em Fuga | Artistas Laboratório

Program Restless Talks: Can Care Be Subversive?

1- Care, Pandemic, and Academia

Rita Alcaire (mod), with Catarina

Saraiva, Cristina C. Vieira, João

Maria André, Pedro Cosme

30 june

2- Take care of the memory

Catarina Silva (mod), with João Santos, Bruno Sena Martins, Cátia Soares, Catarina Pires

28 july

3- Ecology as Care

Patrícia Ferreira (mod), with António Carvalho, Guida Marques, Irina Castro, Ivan Barbeira, Renata Almeida

31 august

4- Art as Care?

Catarina Silva & Pedro Cosme (mod), with Patrícia Portela,

Vicente Arlandis, Inês Capelo, Thiago Granato

15 september

5- Caring for the Caregivers: The Invisible Ones

Linda Cerveira (mod), cwithon

Danielle Araújo, Raquel Maricato e Rita Maia

27 september

6- The Care in the Night

Pedro Cosme (mod), with António Manuel, Elizama Almeida, Vinicius

Couto

4 october

7- Can Care Be Subversive? with Catarina Saraiva, Catarina

Silva, Pedro Cosme and Tatiana Moura

11 october

Edition funded by: República Portuguesa – Cultura | Direção-Geral das Artes, Iberescena. Co-producers: Teatrão, Citemor. Partners: Convento São Francisco/ CMC, TAGV, Centro Cultural Penedo da Saudade, CES. International funding: Acción Cultural Espanhola. Media Partners: Antena 2, RTP2, RUC

Suppot: A Camponeza, APBC, Atelier A Fábrica, CAPC, Cena Lusófona, Col.Eco, Cooperativa Bonifrates, Fundação Inatel, GEFAC, IPDJ, JACC, Rádio Baixa, TEUC, Turismo Centro

LINHA DE FUGA 2022 CREDITS

General and Artistic Direction

Catarina Saraiva

Curartorship

Catarina Saraiva y Thiago Granato

Critical Follow-up of the Laboratory Processes

Thiago Granato

Curartorship Restless Talks

Linda Cerdeira, Tatiana Moura (CES), Catarina Silva, Pedro Cosme (Coletivo Mundus)

Production Coordination

Marta Rodrigues

Production

Ana Sousa, Raquel Pedro

Laboratory

Production

Vasco Neves/Citemor

Technical Direction

Jan Fedinger

Technical Team

Diogo Figueiredo, Guilherme Pompeu

Communication

Isabel Campante, BEWARE

Graphic Design Studio And Paul

Website

Joana Daniela Oliveira

Photography

Paulo Abrantes

Video Recording

Marta Blanco

Translations and Revisions

Inês Le Gué

Selection Jury for Laboratory Participants

Catarina Saraiva, Paloma Calle, Saeed

Pezeshki, Thiago Granato

Collective Meal

Space

Bar da Liga

Artists’ Meeting Point

Atelier A Fábrica

Artists’ Accommodation

Cinco em 5, Quarto&Pasta

Temporary Office for Linha de Fuga

Col.Eco

Acknowledgments

Ana Faria, Assunção

Ataíde, Conceição

Saraiva, Fátima

Guedes

Laboratory artists

Aline Bonamin

Bibi Dória

Cristina Lilienfeld

Gustavo Monteiro

Juanqui Arévalo

Margarida Cabral

Paula Pachón

Paulina Oña

Personaje Personaje

Rafaela Santos

Rita Pinheiro

Corps Pourri a.k.a

Solveig Phyllis Rocher

Tika Michel

Vinicius Couto

Festival Artists

Andrea Sonnberger

Bryana Fritz

Carlota Lagido

Chrysa Parkinson

Cristian Duarte

David Marques

Dinis Machado

Frédéric Gies

Gustavo Ciríaco

João Maria André

João dos Santos

Martins

Marta Blanco

Vicente Arlandis

CREDITS LINHA DE FUGA ARCHIVE 2022

Artist-Archivists

Paulina Oña & Tika Michel | Germinal

Audio, Video, and Visual Testimonies

Tika Michel

Janqui Arévalo

Bibi Dória

Aline Bonamin

Iuri Lopes

Wellington Gadelha

Cristina Lilienfeld

Cristian Duarte

Vinicius Couto

Graphic Design

La Tribu / @la.tribu.rrss

Translation

Linha de Fuga

English Review

Dave Cosby