Pivô Magazine #2 by Pivô

P I V Ô M A G A Z I N E # 2

Bonding at another level

To tear ourselves away from the everyday, from habit, from mental laziness which hides from us the strangeness of reality, we must receive something like a real bludgeon blow. eugene ionesco

he year 2020 contains in itself at least another two years. Just like a sedimentary rock, whose multiple layers reveal a complex juxtaposition of distinct temporalities, that year unfolded into the next and most probably will continue to spill on the following ones due to the tragic effects of the global pandemic of the Sars-Cov-2 virus, cause of Covid-19. Since its outbreak, the mechanics of the public sphere and our private lives radically shifted into yet unpredictable outcomes.

In the field of art, this was not different. Adjusting budgets and programs and undoing and redoing timeframes were some of the palpable circumstances that impacted the socalled “global art circuit”’s operation. At Pivô, this revision process not only resulted in managerial adjustments, but also prompted fertile reflections regarding the way we build narratives and implicate ourselves in them. Just like a freeze-frame—an expression borrowed from cinema vocabulary in which a frame is isolated from the timeline, usually to create a point of inflection in the plot—, 2020 altered our perception of space-time, shuffling and suspending any sense of linearity. The contingencies brought by this unprecedented situation have given our program a sort of ‘tentacular structure’, which this publication aims to transversally address. Its previous thematic-temporal divisions were abolished, giving room to new approaches to exhibition-making, critical thinking, and, overall, to ways of being together, sometimes unsuspected or complementary to our former activities mostly premised on physical presence. The articles, interviews, and essays gathered in this publication depart precisely from this break and its authors were invited to take part on this joint effort to broaden the scope of our program and speculate about what comes next, an ominous question, it seems, as we continue to assess the damage and changes wrought by the pandemic, almost two years since it began.

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All the invited collaborators seem to know that the best approach to search for ways of better understanding art, and its politics, is through the questions we pose, rather than the certainty we seek. In this sense, República, a solo show by artist Luiz Roque, prompted a series of speculations.

The show was ready to welcome visitors when we had to close the space for the first time, and, in a time-interval that revealed itself to be quite a bit longer than the initial forecasts, the pandemic experience brought our notions of reality and fiction so close that they seem to fuse. Within this context, Roque’s audiovisual production, widely informed by science fiction, assumed even more verisimilar outlines. His film incursion through the República District around the Copan Building loosely informed free exercises of fabulation by curator Bernardo José de Souza and author abigail Campos Leal, in which they speculate about near futures— the year of 2074 for Souza and 2077 for Leal. Dealing with the impossibility of physical encounters, Pivô Research, the institution’s residency program, immediately underwent radical changes. The cycles of 2020, for instance, were entirely restructured within the possibilities and restrictions of virtual environments. In the section What Happens to an Artistic Residency When It Is in the Residency Itself?, we gathered testimonies of artists and curators who took part in the program, with different ponderations regarding the specificities of the processes of which they were part. Through a similar path, On Choreography summoned artists involved in different Pivô programs to share their views, through personal testimonies, seeking to expand the boundaries of a notion of choreography, questioning hegemonic understandings that still restrict it to the field of dance, proposing new reading keys that are traversed by political, aesthetic or even institutional dimensions. Postponed to this year and in part to the next, the schedule of exhibitions planned for 2020 is challenged here by collaborations that cross it obliquely, intending to reverberate their presence at Pivô’s exhibition spaces, both past and still to happen.

Catalina Lozano, curator of the collective show A Natural History of Ruins, which opened this past February, interviews anthropologist Arturo Escobar in a conversation that deepens many issues that informed her curatorial practice and research for the show. The notion of pluriverse, Pivô’s guiding line for 2020, is revisited by Lozano and Escobar while they reflect upon possible relationships between decolonization and imaginations that go beyond a modern logic that sets apart nature and culture, human and nonhuman. In a similar talk-interview format, curators João Mourão and Luís Silva discuss with artist Manuel Solano, born and raised in Mexican suburbs, about the feeling of temporal dilatation that pierced through the work of the three people in dialogue during the process of Solano’s solo show, Heliplaza, conceived in a pre-pandemic world and only opened last September. Carried out in partnership with the 34th Biennial of São Paulo, Oriana, a solo show by Puerto Rican Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, starts from the feminist epopee of The Guérillères (1969), by author Monique Wittig, to create a fragmented feature film. Wittig’s work is analyzed here both as object of the free adaptation created by Muñoz on the installation that composed her show and by translator Raquel Camargo, responsible, together with Jamille Pinheiro, for the Brazilian Portuguese version of the work, brought out by the publishing house Ubu in 2020. They both talk about particularities, choices and challenges faced in their adaptations of Wittig’s emblematic work. Through a letter exchange, artist Ana Vaz—whose solo show is scheduled for next year at Pivô—addresses Juliana Fausto, author of A cosmopolítica dos animais (The Cosmopolitics of Animals; N-1 Edições, 2020), a

testimony conceived during the filming process of É noite na América [It’s Night in America], a movie in-the-making that will be presented in the context of her show. Fausto, on the other hand, replies to Vaz’s notes about her impressions regarding the Brasília Zoo, the main setting of her film, also through a poetic key. Argentinian artist Eduardo Navarro, who created his Predição instantânea do tempo [Instant Weather Prediction] exhibition in 2019 at Pivô, wraps up this publication with a visual essay accompanied by a poem, both authored by him. Navarro’s interest in the movement of the wind, a recurring theme in his production, manifests here in a new series of drawings that the artist created after receiving the news that his “aeolian costumes” created for his exhibition at Pivô had been destroyed by an accidental fire. Facing the perplexity and desolation he experienced, Navarro once again resorted to phenomena, now to cope with irreparable losses: “What we see has already happened,” the artist reminds us; his drawings are also featured in this edition’s cover. While the latest times were guided by involuntary halt of our individual and collective lives’ rhythm, perhaps now is the time to hold on to the possibility for new inquiries into the state of things, opening up to a multitude of vocabularies. Perhaps the undeniable pandemic freezeframe will allow us to glimpse the impossible and, facing the incertitude that unveils before us, reveal new—interpersonal and interspecies—alliances, so that artistic, metaphysical, political, and extra-sensorial proposals can be materialized, finding resonance or dissent in and out our physical and virtual space. We keep moving—ahead or in the direction the most favorable winds blow.#

The emergence of a political subject: effect and cause of a new understanding of choreography andré lepecki

While forms of colonial violence hidden by canonical dance start to be revealed, new understandings of the meaning of choreography begin to emerge. By expanding the realms of dance towards new theoretical approaches to artistic practices and society, we can rethink the relationship between aesthetics and politics from new perspectives on the choreographic. ¶ In the next pages, artists recently involved in Pivô’s program share, through very personal testimonies, their view on choreography and the particular uses they make of it. [LF]

CHOREOGRAPHY 4

his piece is an agreement between myself and Wallace Ferreira: to choreograph to leave a trace. ¶ It is a collection of means of defending oneself. I do not wish to create with this any future anxiety, but just to affirm life in indetermination. When I talk about self-defense choreographies, I rewrite but one possibility of escaping all of this. I am not writing anything new— these choreographies have since ever been moved by the alleys of impossibility. ¶ In Exaurir a dança1 [Exhausting Dance], Lepecki argues that, in 1588, Thoinot Arbeau, the pseudonym of mathematician and Jesuit priest Jehan Tauborot (1519-95), published one of the most well-known manuals about French social dances in the Renaissance: Orchesographie et traicte en forme de dialogue, par lequel toutes persones peuvent facilement apprendre & practiquer l’honneste exercice des dances2, later reprinted in 1589 and 1596. Dissolved in one sole word, and related between themselves, dance and writing then mobilized connections as fundamental as unsuspected between the subject writing and the subject dancing. Not by chance, the manual presents in its introduction an invented dialogue between Arbeau and his disciple Capriol, who discuss manners of dancing, its importance for the society at the time, as well as its permanence in time. With Arbeau, these two subjects became one. ¶ In the Orchesographie manual, we see male desire building itself along the choreography. Capriol, the lawyer, requests that his teacher Arbeau, dance master, priest, and mathematician, teaches him the art of dancing so he can live more adequately. The lawyer perceives 1 2

lepecki, André. Exaurir a dança: performance e a política do movimento. São Paulo: Anablume Editora, 2017. Available at https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54531m/f192.image.

choreography as technology, a time machine that will allow him to join his master after his death. The master’s anxiety regarding death becomes crucial for the creation of the choreographic project. ¶ Here, there is no alliance between modernity’s haunting performance and its desire to remain inscribed in time. I cross this haunted space only with a desire to create choreographies that can disappear, that are provisory, uncertain. We learn to move on cracked soil, to trip, we are self-destructive and there is no contradiction in that, as black bodies are capable of accomplishing their self-destructive task without repeating colonial violence, but also without self-destroying themselves. ¶ With these choreographies I commit to critically think about the world we live in, accomplishing the operation of choreographing between imagination and intuition, trying to liberate thought from the tools of understanding. In this sense, I am interested in proposing a radical choreography that confronts, exactly, the third onto-epistemological pillar, some kind of sequentiality—starting from “atravessabilidade” (a crossing-like character), a concept introduced by Denise Ferreira da Silva. ¶ I ask that this experience is not mistaken for a metaphor to cover violence and its unfolding. Self-defense choreographies are not metaphors. They must be perceived as disobedience against this world and its ways of circumscribing brutality. I do not want, with this, to create any hope that, by thinking differently, the world will be better for us. This is not a decision. I utilize atravessabilidade for its ability of perforating, creating a crack in linear time, an experience that distances from understanding and guides thought to the boundaries of imagination.

horeography. In this noun, of feminine when I interpret, isn’t it true that all grammars gender in Portuguese, I am particularly of body occupying me pulsate? Aren’t new arattracted by one of the parts composing rangements being forged from alphabets that I it: GRAPHY. I like its sound when I say it. When learned in the bodily wrappings that make me I utter it, it seems to me that something inside blossom and continue to germinate me? ¶ Acleaves a mark in the space outside of me. It is tually… I realize GRAPHY along with CHOREO is like my voice signed something that only my in- gifted with a beautiful partnership, as its partner self knows in tiny detail. I spiral when I say ner’s circularity enhances possible round shapes GRAPHY. And I cardiography my imagination already residing within it. A powerful duo, sinwhen I hear, see, touch, dance, and smell other gularizing the action of composing movement. GRAPHIES. ¶ I believe my And, even in this path, GRAenchantment is due to the PHY—both spontaneous fact that it brings in its and light—still stands out. meaning the idea of WAYS A matter of seconds. It is of writing and, in addition, not intentional. It only those of being/belonging. seems to want to remind us To inhabit through/by/ that there are many ways to with words. [And not only accomplish this feat (comthat.] This is why GRAPHY posing movements). Let’s not forget… ¶ My prayer: sounds to me like something that shelters everythat surroundings be always thing and doesn’t mind appreciated as the senses variation, including the inGRAPHY awakens in me. finite character of different paths verses can take. That, inspired by the multiplicity it is imbued Beyond that, GRAPHY seems to exist in order with, I keep on seeded of circles. And that exto confirm the obvious: there are many ways isting be all the belonging graphing or moving to desire, enunciate oneself, and dislocate one- without hindrances, fences, isolations, and fasself. ¶ When I say “words” I mean “movements” cination for the dominations of other forms of and vice-versa. I refuse the technical and formal choreo-knowledge. That subjugations not find distinction laid between two different words. I a place, time or weight in the geo[graphy] of my choose to keep the sensation the body experi- senses so that my body[graphy] always keep me ments when I produce writings or movements. in the crossing of dismantling any attempt to Thus, I create words when I move, that is why I harden the designs of my movements. That I be am as well dancing when I am writing. After all, always chorus-and-graphy.

he most difficult, beyond dancing with spontaneity, is to define choreography. I invite you to get to know my first choreographic memory: I was thirteen when a peer in my 6th grade class found excerpts of Bakunin or Thoreau on the internet, I don’t remember the exact words, but we, on that day, made a choreography of revolution: we wrote these words on the green chalkboard and—even not understanding it completely—we announced that the ’64 class was Anarchist. We stated that we did not accept orders coming from above, we barricaded the classroom doors with school desks during the break, and distributed, among us and to the other classes, badges made of notebook pages, displaying the Anarchist symbol drawn with a marker, which we started to wear every day. ¶ For a few weeks, we lived a revolutionary choreography, until we were intercepted by the educational team. At my school, the choreography of striking was usual as well, because it was a public school. Strikes were biannual, and then we would organize rallies which worked as art parades, interrupting the flow of cars from a connection to the Rebouças Tunnel—named after a black engineer—, one of the busiest in town and close to the school. I lived far from the school, and another choreography, in which I took part, daily, was my pendular commute to school, crossing stunted transport

channels. These three choreographies helped me understand the way I am today, a person acting through my own ability of acting beyond state regulation. Choreography is aesthetic, political, repetitive, intentional. It happens through a very long stretch of time and is also present in waves of institutional value of minorities in the field of art, which we still experience today. In the heat of this movement, it is completely normal that different artists, placed together, experience institutional tensions. ¶ Institutional waves are choreographies as well, which do not guarantee permanence: they cause those institutions that, over time, did not speak out for dismantling the deadly structures of capitalism to be, today, the very ones to profit from plural, multicultural identities, taking advantage of a market of visibility. As Keyna Eleison says, we need to understand we are talking about dance, we are talking about art! I understand, in my artistic production, something related to choreography. This provides me some good company and makes it clear that, even though available standards are not enough to embrace my production, they change over time along with us. Those standards are also created by us, in the positions we take along some history of art, and I make alliances so I can keep on living and maybe I was mistaken; maybe that was not my first choreography.

ncestral technology. an atemporal route. to dive into the sand and dig with one’s own hands by the atlantic. visions of the crossing, drowned bodies, memories of the rocks. the blues, geophagia. those gestures. to enter into space, to lay the groundwork. agó1! bless you. laroyè2! to close your eyes. ¶ i come from a place where everything is enchantment and presence. the river is the center of the spiral inside some choreopoetics cultivating mystery. with the waters, powers become presence, kalunga3! iabás4, orishas5, orikìs6, voduns7, ifá8. the dance is the flow of this river. our body:

one gourd. the chants are maybe the earth itself, because they evoke, cause to incorporate. very ancient memories traveled to here and manifested in me the ways to follow among transits, pauses, escapes. the same gestures accompanied me three hundred years after the colonial kidnaping, eight hundred years before the crossing, and will go on. skirts twirling, abebés9 that are mirrors and shields. the yoruba proverb will not let us forget èmi kó kán, èmí ní edbe: i am not one, i am a community. we map what we can feel, hear, and also what is invisible to the eye. memories are archived in our flesh, in our

orìs10, in our odús11. ¶ diving into space, sailing between the orun12 and the ayé, the caboclo13 is sitting in my mother’s parlor. He lights his cigar, he sings a ponto [chant], and tells me: ¶—you sitting there, come close. ¶ jurema holds me in her arms, she twirls before she is the other once again. ¶ a horse, or a body? here or there? transformation of space, subversion of logic. choreography, or shiré14? circular paths, germinating, welcoming, healing. it is a dance that knows how to die, knows how to be born, knows how to roam. spreading ashe. ¶ – anybody home!? bless iyá15. ¶ she replies: ¶ – this girl with these eyes can only be of oshosi16. ¶ yes, my body has indeed always been like an arrow. an accurate look to escape oblivion. ¶ bravun17, the rhythm of memories saluting the

elders. hands touching the soil and then the head when entering the shed. the body laying on the dirt to revere shangó18. The change in the atabaque drumming to announce the presence of a new energy in space, and this means: a new dance. everything circular, in a wheel. the iyá, the babá, the epistemological foundation that is oshum20. ¶ greek etymon: khorós, circle; graphé, writing. write with one’s body, draw, register, record the circular space. we were doing it already. dances for the harvest, dances for fertility. dances. and return to the sand, to the atlantic, to the darkness, in order to find them again. in time to spiral so i don’t get lost on the crossing. dancing i populate the graphés of memories that are the foundations of our (re)existence.

7 Candomblé Jeje is the sect of Candomblé that praises the voduns of the Realm of Daomé taken to Brazil by enslaved Africans from various areas in Western Africa and Central Africa. The divinities are pert of the rich, complex, and elevated Fom Mythology. 8 Ifá is an African oracle. It is a divinatory system originated in Western Africa among the Yorubas, in Nigeria. It is not a divinity per se, but the speaker for Orumilá and the other Orishas. 9 Abebé is a circular-shaped fan, used by Oshun when made of brass or golden hued, some might display a mirror in the center; used by Yeomoja when it is silver-hued, usually displaying symbolic drawings. 10 Ori, word in the Yoruba language literally meaning head, refers to spiritual intuition and fate. Ori is the personal Orisha, in all its power and greatness. Ori is the first Orisha to be praised, the particular representation of individualized existence (the true essence of beings). He is the one who guides, accompanies, and helps each person from before

birth, throughout their lives, and after death, referencing their path and helping to fulfill their fate. Odú is a concept of the Ifá cult, also used in Candomblé, interpreted in merindilogum, the tossing of conchs. The word odú comes from the Yoruba language, meaning fate. Each man (being) owns their destiny, similar to others’ but always including some particularity. For this study, different oracle techniques or methods are used, such as merindilogum, opelé-ifá, iquim, etc. Orun is a word in the Yoruba language defining Heaven or Spiritual World, parallel to Ayé, the physical world. Everything that exists in Orun coexists in Ayé through the double existence of Orun-Ayé. Brazilian entities, owners of the land, caboclos are outstanding presences in Candomblés in Salvador, where the Orishas, African divinities, are worshiped.

14 Shiré is a word in Yoruba meaning circle, or dance used to evoke the Orishas according to each nation. 15 Iyá is a word used in many different sects of Afro-Brazilian religions, particularly in Candomblé, meaning “mother.” 16 Shangó is an entity (Orisha) widely celebrated by Afro-Brazilian religions, considered as the god of justice, of lightning, of thunder, and of fire. 17 Oshosi is a divinity in African religions, also known as Orishas, representing knowledge and the forests. For this reason, Oshosi is also known as the Orisha of hunting, of plenty, and of sustenance. 18 Bravun, even though not attributed to any specific Orisha, is frequently chosen to greet Oshumaré, Ewa, and e Oshala. It is a relatively speedy rhythm, doubled and peaked. 19 Babá means “father” in Yoruba. 20 Oshun is the female Orisha of fresh water, rivers, and waterfalls.

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In Yoruba, asking permission for movements of entrance, exit, passage, etc. Greeting to the orisha Eshu, who opens paths, the master of crossings. Here I take inspiration from philosopher Tiganá Santana’s thought revisiting a Cosmo-perception coming from Bantu civilizing presences through the idea/concept/image of Kalunga—which can be understood as a process and principle of change and vitality. A symbol aggregating the mysteries of death and longing for what was left behind. Iabá, which means Queen Mother, is the term attributed to female orishas. Orishas (Òrìs. à in Yoruba) are divinities of the Yoruba religion. The word Oríkì in Yoruba means: “to praise, to greet, to evoke.” The Oríkì’s are words or phrases carrying Ashe (power) used by the Yorubas when they make their offerings and requests to the Orishas. Oríkí’s are also used to praise ancestors and sacerdotal leaders and to give accounts of daily life events and particularities of each different family.

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ollen is the vehicle of germination, spatial behavior is the beginning of the spatialthat which moves in the present as an ity of language. ¶ – To dance is to build spaces. original thing. ¶ – Inflorescences are ¶ – For a psychoanalysis of dance: the ping-pong like hastas, hand gesture variations that point to of the unconscious becoming of language upon some quality in the action. There is no real differ- an interpretation of movement and gesture— ence between the opening of the lotus flower and of what is left unsaid but is done. ¶ – For Lethe movement of the lotus hasta. ¶ – Lotus is the roi-Gourhan, technique—that is, the hand— link between root vegetables and aquatic plants. comes before the voice. ¶ – Systole and diastole The eye of the plant is a mirror between elements. of universal movement come to the hands’ ex¶ – Novalis’ pollen is a static dance: it fertilizes tremities as language. ¶ – The arm is to the hands’ thought and germinates as mind what the neck is to the an analogous action. ¶ – To head’s mind, this is one of move with the movement the keys to understand The is to be in the static facet of Swan Lake. ¶ – Swans and women have a metamortime. ¶ – A metamorphic choreography unfolds on phic rapport. ¶ – A swan is its own structure: before a kind of woman, according and after are mixed in the to Bateson. ¶ – Leda is a middle. ¶ – To twirl and swan as well. ¶ – The swan is to walk backwards alter in a lake‑like temporality, it the progressive perception moves in every direction. ¶ – of time, they are reversive Myth and lore are metamormetamorphoses. The eye of phoses of bodies in language. the plant—a reproduction by cloning and not by Even Lévi-Strauss contradicted himself: there is transformation—is an eye on the back. ¶ – The no language without immanence. ¶ – Poetry is Xapiris are countless, they roam through mirrors, static dance. A body that moves entirely in its and they dance. Observation and action are the place. ¶ – The language of the giants is metatwo sides of the mirror. ¶ – Just like the Xapiris phorical; the earth is to the name as the body is through mirrors, dancing is to move between dif- to the earth. ¶ – To dance a metaphor is to dance ferent dimensions. ¶ – One mirror is different a question. ¶ – Metaphors are meta-kinetic, they from two mirrors. ¶ – One body is many bod- move the movement. ¶ – A dancer is a kind of ies. ¶ – Bees, ants, penguins, beavers, deers, and woman and a kind of swan; the swan is a question. other animals who live in collective bodies: their ¶ Mantiqueira Highlands | July 2021

ANIMAL HETEROTOPIAS: MACAU AND OTHER STORIES

Initially scheduled for last year, artist Ana Vaz’s exhibition was one of those projects transformed by the temporal contingencies and is now rescheduled to 2022. Originally from Brasília, living between Lisbon and Paris, Vaz was in Brazil researching and shooting her new audiovisual work when she was prevented from going back to Europe. While visiting Brasília, where part of her family lives, the artist made various visits to the zoo. What was initially a source of curiosity turned out to be the primary setting for her upcoming movie, in which she gets closer to the captive non-human individuals living in adverse conditions. ¶ Macau, a giant otter, born in the Dortmund Zoo in Germany and transferred by recommendation of eaza (European Association of Zoos and Aquaria) to the Brasília Zoo in 2019, becomes the object of intense observation by Ana. She starts to develop close proximity to the animal by filming him on consecutive visits to the zoo. She unveils this intense experience in a letter addressed to Juliana Fausto, author of A cosmopolítica dos animais (The Cosmopolitics of Animals, n-1 Edições, 2020). This work had influenced Ana during her research process. On the other hand, Fausto responds to the artist in an equally mindful epistolary in which she comments on the perpetuation of a perverse model of imprisonment of wild animals, enforced to this day in zoos around the world. [VG]

MACAU

ong before I saw him, I heard Macau’s high, incisive frequencies. The notes alternated in volume and cadence in a strident polyrhythm broken off only by his agile swimming. Macau’s throat-flute echoed in a mix I interpreted as fury or excitement shattering the laziness of the mid-morning and interrupting a nonstop flow of a river of cars running behind his tank located on the shores of Avenue of the Nations or (Avenida das Nações) or Via L4 Sul. In that same avenue, most embassies of countries represented in the capital city are located, thus plotting a kind of heterotopia uniformizing exoticism and modernity in a sole axis. It is 9 am and Macau is furious due to the almost half-an-hour delay of his feeding, disturbed today by the arrival of the film crew. The scorching sun of the semi-arid climate is overcast by a gathering of dark low clouds announcing a storm before noon. We are the only ones present: the film crew, the animals, and their keepers. Today, there are no visitors, children— usually anxious and excited in hopes of seeing in flesh and boredom their favorite animals (promptly dismissed because they’re not the human-like animals fantasized by Disney & co.—or even the popcorn vendors, the cleaning team and the macaques choreographing the most perfect team robbery of food, trash, and forgotten objects. It is the Carnival holiday in a pandemic year. Macau waits for Luís Antônio, a keeper devoted to his tank and that of his neighbor, Ravena, an otter that was rescued by biology students in Curitiba and lived as their pet during her first years of life. Luís Antônio calls Macau by his name and asks him to be patient, his food is on the way. He says that sudden changes in his feeding schedule are positive, as frustration and fury break the boredom of a day to day regulated by feeding times. “There isn’t anything worse than an animal that can always predict the time of its feeding. Here, we try to maintain an environment that is similar to the uncertainties of wildlife,” the biologist responsible for American mammals tells us. He carries in his hands a large plastic bucket full of tilapias (probably also raised in a tank) prepared every day by the Zoo’s Nutrition Division. Macau is biologically classified as a member of the Pteronura brasiliensis species, endemic to South America, which has traveled from north to south in America, arriving to Argentina, Uruguay, Paraguay, and even the Center-Western area of Brazil. What Western science calls Pteronura brasiliensis is called by the Tupi branch of Native Peoples ariranha, that is, water jaguar; by the Kaiapós Native Peoples of Goiás from the macro-Jê branch iópaçán; and by transplanted Brazilians, ariranha or giant otter.

Despite his South American roots, Macau was born in the Dortmund Zoo in Germany and was transferred by recommendation of the EAZA (European Association of Zoos and Aquariums) to the zoo in Brasília, arriving on September 7, 2019. Also not by his own choice, Macau was elected as representative of the Pteronura brasiliensis species to go back to his territory of origin in order to replenish his population in the land of his ancestors, decimated on account of the pollution of springs and rivers, the consequent loss of habitat and intensive poaching for their hide, exported as exotic material in the shape of coats and hats until the 1970s. Macau’s return is like a post-colonial Trojan Horse, where hides come back alive in order to teach colonial subjects to conserve that which only the colonized peoples know how to conserve. After all, they have robbed the evil art of conservation from the beginning of the modern storm1: everything that is destroyed is embalmed, everything that is killed is categorized2. Curiously, the story of the zoo in Brasília with Macau’s ancestors started even earlier, in the 1970s as well, when it was still acceptable that zoos would entrap animal species in their habitats, bringing them in to populate their settings of “natural worlds”3. This is how a team from the zoo went out to entrap a group of ariranhas in the area of Flores de Goiás, about three hours from Brasília. Flores de Goiás is a town historically marked by the establishment of quilombos composed of Native Peoples, blacks, and poor whites escaping oppression and impoverishment imposed by colonial slave quarters. The town is embraced by the flow of the Paranã and Macacos rivers, part of a network of springs emerging in the Center-Western region of Brazil and flowing to the Amazon Basin. Probably on the shores of the Paranã or Macacos rivers, Macau’s ancestors were captured and taken to the Brasília Zoo, where they became an example of “success” (sic) in reproducing ariranhas in captivity. 1

“Colonial storm” is an expression utilized by philosopher Malcom Ferdinand in his extensive work Une écologie décoloniale – Penser l’écologie depuis le monde caribéen (Éditions du Seuil, 2019) in which he re-situates ecological thinking in a post-colonial eco-critique where storms, cyclones, and hurricanes gain historical-natural dimensions despite a modern rupture separating environmental history and colonial history. As Bruno Latour said in We Have Never Been Modern: “… the moderns suffer from the illness of historicism. They want to keep everything, date everything, because they think they have definitively broken with their past. The more they accumulate revolutions, the more they save; the more they capitalize, the more they put on display in museums. Maniacal destruction is counterbalanced by an equally maniacal conservation.” Actually, this dystopian populating is fully accomplished by the inauguration of the Brasília Zoo, preceding the inauguration of the city by three years, under the guise of offering entertainment to the workers who came for the arid odyssey of building modernity. It is curious to note that the location where the zoo was built was thoroughly blown up, levelling the rocky plateau in order to produce enough crushed stone to build the city. It was exactly due to these explosions that the extinction of Juscelinomys candango happened: “The rat that Brasília killed” (an account that also features in Juliana Fausto’s A cosmopolítica dos animais). Even Clarice Lispector makes an opaque allusion to this episode in her short story Brasília: “It was built with no place for rats. A whole part of us, the worst, precisely the one horrified by rats, that part has no place in Brasília. They wished to deny that we are worthless. A construction with space factored in for the clouds. Hell understands me better. But the rats, all huge, are invading.”

Curiously, I suppose that the family of ariranhas entrapped at Flores de Goiás was also, most probably, the same that featured on the city’s newspapers covers in 1977, shrouded in the evil stigma of “murderous ariranhas.” I grew up in the city hearing different accounts that ariranhas, often mistaken by piranhas or otters, would kill little children in the Brasília Zoo. I remember to this day imagining this scene many times as a fascinating cautionary tale where the child’s spilled blood had far less impact on me than the wondrous ability of those supposed beasts to shred human flash with such agility. The mental image of these beasts’ sharp teeth accompanied me in many a river bath. A few minutes before the storm, I got to know both the official narrative behind this story and its B-side, much darker than any childish fantasy could have imagined. The official narrative preaches that, in August 1977, on a Sunday afternoon, military sergeant Silvio Delmar Hollenbach had rescued a kid supposedly attacked by ariranhas after the child jumped into the mammals’ enclosure. A few days later, the sergeant passed away in the military hospital due to some infection caused by the ariranhas’ bites. The soldier was since immortalized in a statue that now decorates the zoo’s entrance as the city’s “first hero” (sic). However, those who preach the B-side of the lore are the zoo’s keepers and guards, those who had their perspectives absolutely silenced on the official tale. That second version narrates the scene from a different perspective: a child, in the apex of their mischief, jumps into the ariranhas’ enclosure. A sergeant—in civil attire and supposedly drunk—jumps into the enclosure to rescue the child. The ariranhas, then, protecting their newborn litter, start to collectively chant to loudly tell the intruders to keep away. In response to the choir, the sergeant starts to kick the family of Pteronuras brasiliensis, who then show their teeth and fury to this specimen of Homo sapiens not sapiens. A few days later, the sergeant passed away in the military hospital due to a hospital infection caused by bacterium—bacterium which is not found in Pteronuras brasiliensis (a nonvenomous species, by the way). Thus, all evidence shows that the bacterium that colonized the soldier’s body, causing his death, originated in the hospital itself. The decision of the military was, then, to decorate the memory of the sergeant, to hide the calamitous state of the hospital, and to malign the ariranhas in a unison choir of not wise humanoids as “murderous.” It is curious that, when he does not want to, Narcissus does not see himself in the mirror. The keepers say that, to this day, child tours stop before Macau’s solitary tank to scream in unison, “assassin.” However, Macau’s chants come from elsewhere, they’re never in unison. There are many different variations and rhythms, both crescendo and cryptic, that Macau utters to

communicate with Luís Antônio and now with the invading film crew who watches him, records him, stares at him. Macau stares back, agile, impossible to capture in image, voracious. When I ask the educational projects manager and historian at the zoo about Macau’s fate, he tells me, “He is able to be an ariranha, he digs his burrows, he’s virtually a full ariranha. All he needs is a female partner so they can compose a reproductive group and become an ariranha in its wholeness.” And then I wonder to myself, to be a Pteronuras brasiliensis in its wholeness then would be to complete the Homo sapiens sapiens’s desire for preservation? Amidst this imbroglio, what would be Macau’s desire in its wholeness? The first drops in the storm start to fall. Loud thunder interrupts Macau’s flute while he dives with his unmatched agility deep into his tank. Before a minute is over, we’re drenched, running towards our van, under the trees, trying to protect the machines, lenses, and recorders. I’m not sure we truly recorded anything about Macau’s spirit or story. Both 16 mm film expired rolls might have been “wasted”, maybe there will not be any image, only some noise to accompany his chanting. I close my eyes and see Macau’s water membranes, the thick skin connecting his toes, nails, his wet fur shining in the sun, his notorious hands devouring a tilapia, the dark blue reflecting the lightning, the staring eyes that pierce us, the tireless scream calling us, the unsettling speed of his movements reminds us that we will always be too late to film him. It is not possible to follow a fleeting body, a moving body, the camera will always be late where it resists to be an accessory tool to extinction. Instead of showing, could the image simply watch over and along with Macau? April 21, 2021 Ana V to Juliana F

ear Ana, While preparing A cosmopolítica dos animais (The Cosmopolitics of Animals) for publication, I removed a footnote in which I briefly referred to the concept of heterotopia, evoked by you when telling me about the first signs of Macau—the song he sings with his throat-flute, capable of shifting the axes of Brasília. The note was prompted by a comment made by the authors of Zoos. Histoires des jardins zoologiques en Occident (XVI-XVI siècles), Éric Baratay and Élisabeth Hardouin-Fugier. They wrote that “because of some French intellectual specificity,” even “Michel Foucault, the philosopher of prisons, of the clinic, and of madness, did not ask himself about zoos.” I noted, then, that there were two important zoological mentions in his work, in the lecture “De espaços outros” (Of Other Spaces, 1967) and in his book Vigiar e punir (Discipline and Punish, 1975). The second one is well known and refers to the idea that the panopticon would have been originated from royal animal collections, specifically the ménagerie built by Le Vaux in Versailles in the latter half of the 17th century: “The animal is replaced by man” (p. 205). In “Other Spaces”, a dense and short discourse, in which the notion of heterotopia is defined, gardens appear as their oldest form; in them, “the whole world comes to fulfill its symbolic perfection,” being “the smallest piece of the world and then the totality of the world.” They are, since early Antiquity, a kind of happy, universalizing heterotopia (hence our zoos)” (2013, p. 118). I have spent a bit of time thinking about this passage, so short and yet brimming with meaning. I believe that Foucault meant that zoos are inserted in a tradition of some human peoples of making the entire cosmos coexist in a single locus. When I think of carpets, which according to the philosopher, “were originally, representations of gardens” (idem), this seems to be a beautiful tradition. A happy, total microcosm. But when I recall the stories of colonization, of the expropriation, murder, kidnapping, and forced transportation of living beings, human and more-than-human; of what Donna Haraway, in a conversation with Brigitte Baptiste, explained in terms of “sucking out the vitality and generativity and breaking of generations in order to produce reproduction from which extraction of value can proceed” (2019, s/p), I realize that totalization and universalization are dangerous gestures. Who is, after all, the subject of such happiness? Macau first comes to me as a song, a throat-flute. As a polyrhythm that shakes the harmonies of a heterotopia composed in spite of him. Giant otters are a people who live in groups, although he, Macau, is forced to live alone. They are a talkative sort, among the most talkative within their otter family. Macau sings, maybe he learned how to sing with his parents, in his country of birth, Germany, from where he came, as you tell me, as “living hide” to Brazil, in a movement from the metropole to the colony. Somehow

this reminds me of the requests issued by Indigenous Peoples around the world for museums to return artifacts and even bodies looted in the past. I then imagine Macau as a living Tupinambá cloak which can no longer find its people once it gets home. From one prison to the next, incapable of living among his own. In A queda do céu (The Falling Sky), Davi Kopenawa describes more than once the greed of the white man for giant otter’s hides. He also explains that the demiurge Omama and the drone spirit Remori, who “gave white people their twisted tongue,” (p. 126) decided not to grant the same language to their peoples so conflict would be avoided among them. Not knowing what bad things one would say about the other, on top of being territorially far apart, they would be able to coexist. A study conducted with giant otters in zoos, in Germany, and in the wild, in Peru, found statistical evidence pointing to the existence of signatures in the vocalizations of different groups (Munn and Knörnschild, 2017). As if each group of Pteronura brasiliensis had its own accent, which would not be mistaken by others; thus, a series of information could be conveyed, including territorial identification. Listed in the section of materials and methods, among the zoos studied in Germany, is the Dortmund Zoo, Macau’s original heterotopia. Recordings were made in 2011. I wonder if his voice or that of one of his family has been recorded. Would he be able to recognize it? What would his accent be? You tell me that to this day people gather around the enclosure Macau was given to live—this strange traveler from whom the world was stolen—to accuse him of being a murderer. Not that he, this specimen, this Macau has killed any human being. Nor, in fact, that any other group of giant otters has done so. But this is the story. The “story that kills”, the “killer story,” as maybe Ursula K. Le Guin would tell us, that same tragic, triumphant story that narrates the Ascension of Man the Hero, for whom everything else is just the rest. We are used to believe we are bigger and better than others when they are imprisoned. That we have subdued them, that we have vanquished them. According to an account collected by Jacques Lizot and recounted by Tânia Stolze Lima to Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, “giant otters raise their heads [emerging from the water’s surface] because they perceive the Yanomami as tiny dots” (2006, p. 336). What does Macau see when he looks at the relatives of his people’s murderers? The people who rob his territory, attack and slander his people? What is the size of his accusers? What does he hear amidst their shouting? What does he say back to them? Who are they in his cosmology, in Macau’s cosmology? I once had the opportunity to visit an NGO whose aim is “the taxonomic triage and physical rehabilitation of wild animals so that they can be released in geographical areas of natural recurrence.” I’d rather not name the NGO here simply because I did not ask for their permission, as the work I saw being done there was the most serious and devoted. I met many animals there, macaws,

toucans, a deer pup, a bush dog, macaques, a maned wolf, an ocelot, some pumas, and uncountable birds. Not all of them could be released because they had physical traumas that would have hindered them from surviving in what was left of their habitat. That was the case of Marie, a Puma concolor pup whose photo I send enclosed herewith to you. In this snapshot, I have my back turned, holding the small puma who tries to escape my grip. She sticks her claws in my arm, her mouth open, and her huge eyes stare outside the frame. Outside the framing of nature vs. culture, humanity vs. animality in which she was caught. In an area dominated by sugar cane plantations, she was another victim of the practice of burning the sugar cane straw to make its harvesting easier later. I had heard of others burned pumas being rescued, often so severely injured that they would not make it. That pup, however, had survived, but would never be able to live in freedom. Freedom, as we know, is a trap-word. I always remember the words of Rotpeter, the former monkey who spoke through Kafka’s pen: “No, freedom was not what I wanted. Only a way out,” a chorus repeated together with a primate’s laugh at the pretension of an emancipated humanity, who takes freedom as “sovereign movement” (1994, p. 61). How can Macau, the giant otter, or Marie, the puma, be free in a world that believes in freedom as sovereign movement, that is, in outsourcing the dirty work, the suffering, in “freed” of any reciprocity? Are they still capable of finding ways out? Are there any ways out while the Amazon, the Cerrado, and the Pantanal burn? I invoke Rotpeter, Red Peter, who got his name due to a scar caused by a hunter’s weapon, a poacher, to rip out the exits and ways out signs on highways and roads that destroy forests and ecosystems and peoples of all ethnicities and restore ways out for animals. If there is life, there must be ways out. There is a very beautiful book by philosopher Vinciane Despret called Habiter en oiseau (2019). I don’t know if you’ve read it, but I’m sure that you will like it. I know it because while using more-than-human imaginations to develop an animal notion of territory, she pays special attention to birdsong, to sound and music, which I know are dear to you. Instead of the sad procedure of looking for the origins of the worst traits in our world in the behavior of animals, ascribing to them what we want to see and producing false myths of origin, Despret dares to “open our imagination to honor inventions,” after all, “it is about multiplying worlds, not reducing them to our worlds” (p. 42). Macau or Marie or the birds in the sky do not own any private property, but do not cease to create means of territorialization. What can we learn from them? If there are territories that insist on being sung or, more precisely, that do not wish for anything other than being sung, if there are territories that insist on being marked by the power [puissance] of simulacra of presence, territories that become bodies and bodies that expand into places of life, if there are places of life that become songs or songs that create a space,

if there are powers of sound and powers of smells, there are undoubtedly many other ways of inhabiting the worlds that multiply them. What verbs could we discover that would evoke these powers? Would there be danced territories (power of dance in agreement and chord)? Loved territories (which want nothing but to be loved? Power of love), disputed territories (which want nothing but to be disputed?), shared, conquered, marked, known, recognized, appropriated, familiar territories? (p. 41). Despret says, informed by researchers who work with animals, that when certain mammals mark their territories, they also mark themselves with that territory, with that land, with those smells—they do not claim the land for themselves, they become the land itself and turn themselves into land. She says that, for birds, territories might be the situation, the occasion for singing and dancing, rather than something to be protected; and that the birds’ vitality in their performances is such that, possessed, they express a kind of territorially winged cogito: I chant, therefore I am here. For these birds, their singing is an “act of presence.” What I think and want to tell you is that when I hear Macau, knowing that one of the giant otters’ means of territorialization is made through vocalizing, I hear a world-cry, an incantation. I know that, even though she cannot fulfill the excursions she’s called upon by the land, Marie bathes herself in dry dirt and turns into land, becoming a ghost in the enclosure where she lives. A crime was perpetrated against these animals, it is undeniable. A crime with irreversible consequences, which determines their lives, making it poorer. But this is not all, Ana, and I know you know it, because you, too, create territories with your films, animal-Ana. With you, Macau’s cry extends itself and gains body all over town, a flute that meets the sky. We are tired of living “in the shadow of all this death,” as Deborah Bird Rose once said and I never get tired of repeating. And, if we’re tired, what to say of those who live the destruction in their bodies-territories that are debased on a daily basis? A puma or a giant otter are neither the word puma or giant otter nor an image of a puma or a giant otter, however, they can mysteriously and sacredly inhabit words and images of pumas and giant otters without ever ceasing to be that puma and that giant otter who struggle every day to keep the parts of their bodies united and reunited with the land who produce them and whom they produce. A modern city is a sad place, despite its utopian pretensions. I wish Macau, the flute player, in his encounter with you, just like in the Brothers Grimm tale, lead the way out. After all, Dortmund is not so far from Hamelin. Warmly, Juliana F to Ana V July 23, 2021

A WORLD WHERE MANY WORLDS FIT IN

he group show A Natural History of Ruins, curated by Catalina Lozano, gathered, in Pivô’s two spaces, works revealing different forms of resistance to the ways in which the hegemonic modern colonial imaginary has captured our imagination. Central to the exhibition was criticism to the modern division between nature and culture and its ontological and sociopolitical implications. ¶ Colombian anthropologist Arturo Escobar is one of the confounders of the important transdisciplinary Latin-American collective Modernidade/ Colonialidade and has been devoting himself since the 1990s to investigate the effects of a de-

CATALINA LOZANO I would like to start ARTURO ESCOBAR Well, these are always by asking how you got to anthropology and the important questions: “how did one start?”, need for a radical questioning of the modern/co- “what was one’s journey?” About three years lonial episteme. I came across your work years ago, here in Chapel Hill, there was a session on ago when I was approaching what they call the the occasion of my retirement, and I was asked modernity/coloniality group, and Anibal Qui- to give a presentation on my career, and I dejano’s concept of “coloniality of power” was cided to do a kind of retrospective, which I titled very important for me to start thinking about “Epistemic Transhumance: Reflections on four several things that have become central to my decades of academic-political practice.” I started work. Perhaps your answer might include some- in chemical engineering, and then biochemistry, thing about your relationship to this “current” nutrition, food science. There I started to get inof thought. terested in the problem of hunger, and I got a master’s degree in this field. Then I also began to realize that the problem of hunger was not only a physiological or health problem, but also a socioeconomic and political problem. Gradually, this led me to political economy. Political economy was my first epistemic shift — to realize that the problem of hunger was a problem of distribution and power, it was a political problem.

velopmentalist mentality in Latin America from his academic practice and from his involvement in social movements and activists. Escobar always constructively puts together ideas about how local communities can dialogue with the modern world without leaving behind their specificities or being annihilated. Lozano and Escobar champion, each one in their own way, knowledge and ecological practices of indigenous peoples as examples of how colonial categories still in existence can be productively challenged. At the magazine’s invitation, the curator interviews the anthropologist about themes that permeated the research for this exhibition and Pivô’s program as a whole. [FB]

CL And this was in what year, approximately?

AE This was in the late 1970s. I finished chemical engineering in 1975. Then I started my master’s degree in biochemistry at the Universidad del Valle, in Cali, and then I entered Cornell University to do my master’s degree with a fellowship, and it was the time when I was exploring the concern about hunger in the world, especially based on the food shortages in the Sahel region in Africa; this deeply moved me, and I started to move from the technological and scientific side to the socio-political aspect of malnutrition and hunger. Eventually this led me to the problem of development: hunger was one dimension of a much broader problem, which was called “underdevelopment.” I started my PhD in Berkeley, still in political economy of underdevelopment, focusing on the problem of hunger and malnutrition, carrying out a case study. But I wanted to demonstrate that the theories that had been originated in the northern hemisphere — especially in English and American universities — for the purpose of “developing” the third world, especially to solve the issue of hunger, malnutrition and poverty, simply perpetuate the problem, and have more to do with sustaining power structures. I got there through science, technology, and political economy, and then made the leap, in the early 1980s, in the middle of my doctorate. Then I started, let’s say, the second epistemic shift, toward what, at that time, was beginning to be called cultural studies, inspired by post-structuralism. It had to do with my encounter with the work of the French thinker Michel Foucault, especially with regard to his notion of discourse and discursive formation as the space in which the imaginaries, the ways of thinking, and the historically constructed practices of all populations are shaped. So I started thinking about hunger as a discourse, and thus underdevelopment as a discourse. And, due to the contingencies of life, at that time there were two professors at Berkeley

who had worked a lot with Foucault, and that was niality. My first contact with some of them had why he had started visiting the university in the been in 1991, in Caracas, where we had a meelate 1970s. One of these professors was the an- ting—organized by Edgardo Lander, Margarida thropologist Paul Rabinow (recently deceased), López Maya and Luis Lander—about critical who ended up being the supervisor of my thesis, thinking and development. There I presented not formally, but rather in practice. my first deconstruction of development. The I found anthropology to be something lib- group was constituted as such—and there are erating: that way of thinking that teaches us to an- various genealogies of this group—in 1998, in alyze every social formation, every culture, every Montreal, at the World Congress of Sociology, social group as a particular historical phenomenon, more specifically at a meeting attended by myself, as something historically constituted. It teaches Walter Mignolo, Aníbal Quijano, Edgardo Lanus that every social and cultural order is arbitrary, der, Fernando Coronil, and María Lugones or historically constituted, and obviously under the Enrique Dussel—I don’t remember exactly. As hegemony of a particular social order—the West- a group, we had a series of meetings over fifteen ern one, considered to be true, while the others are years, in different parts of the world: Caracas, Boseen as lesser, or underdeveloped, or simply ata- gotá, and Chapel Hill. In 2002, I wrote an article vistic, anachronistic. However, the Western way in which I described the group as a research proof thinking and being and the Western model of gram on modernity and coloniality. In the last life are as historically constructed as the others. decade, I have taken other paths. It is not that I In this context, little by little I also came across am not interested in decolonial thought, because decolonial theory, which goes along well with it continues to interest me and is part of my traiFoucauldian post-structuralism—the analysis of ning, but let’s say that epistemic transhumance discourses, including colonial discourses. In the has taken me to the terrain of political ecology 1980s, especially in California, there was a great and ontology. surge of these analyses of the so-called colonial discourses, focusing on the representations that the metropoles made of the colonies. Orientalism, Edward Said’s famous book, was published in 1978. It was the paradigm of these studies, analyzing in detail how the West actively constituted and constructed the East through the production of discourses and representations in literature, philology, economics, history, the arts, in all fields of knowledge. The West created an East that had no relation to the so-called “Orient”, but rather to the way the West needed to create the rest of the world—in its own image and likeness or from its hegemonic perspective, to ensure its domination on a global level. Already in Massachusetts, in the late 1990s, I began to connect with the group that would come to be called modernity/coloniality/decolo-

CL I think one of the things that I missed in the modernity/coloniality group was precisely a feminist perspective, besides the fact that there were few women in it… Recently you have taken up feminist thinking.

AE Yes, for sure; that was a weak point of the coloniality/decolonial thinking group at the beginning. María Lugones and Catherine Walsh were members, and we were inspired a little bit by the Mexican feminists, but we didn’t really cultivate this fully. It took a generation of young feminists interested in the decolonial framework to really start a major development of decolonial feminism, which now seems to me to be the most interesting strand within decolonial thought, and one of the most interesting among the great Latin American feminisms.

CL Starting from the notion of coloniality, but AE The capture of imagination by dominant also from Silvia Federici’s work, I began to better discourses is very real. Not only do they capture understand what you put forward as an “ontol- imagination, but also the concept of the possiogy of separation”—modern, capitalist, colonial, ble; they domesticate conceptions of the possible. patriarchal—in contrast to a relational ontol- And there is that famous aphorism that you paraogy—which characterizes the pluriverse. One of phrase in your question. I didn’t know it that way. the implications of this binary regime of separa- I knew it this way (and I think it is attributed to tion is the division between nature and culture, [Fredric] Jameson or David Harvey): “it is easor nature and society. I believe that there really ier to imagine the end of the world than the end is a naturalization of the modern Western epis- of capitalism.” I put it differently: “it is easier teme which creates the illusion that notions like to imagine the end of the world than the end of progress and development—within capitalism, modernity.” With North American, English, or of course—are inevitable or undoubtedly desir- Northern European colleagues, it often happens able, something that you have already dismantled that someone talks about the end of modernity through your work decades ago. There is a British and this produces a fear and a kind of anguish, filmmaker I like very much, Patrick Keiller, and in which must be considered as very real. But mohis film Robinson in Ruins, he quotes F. Jameson: dernity, as a civilizing historical project, is coming “It seems to be easier for us today to imagine the to an end. And this is said by very many people, thoroughgoing deterioration of the earth and not only the activists of indigenous movements of nature than the breakdown of late capitalism; in Latin America, who have been proposing it perhaps that is due to some weakness in our imag- for thirty years, but also spiritual leaders, enviination.” I am interested in understanding and ronmentalists and feminists who already dare to challenging the way capitalism and modernity suggest that what is at stake is the end of what we have captured the ability to imagine other worlds call modernity; that the deterioration of the land for us, whom you call urban moderns. Could you is not only caused by capitalism, but that capitaltell me a bit about your actual experience with ism is a phase of something older — patriarchy, black and indigenous communities in Colombia and also modernity. and comment on how this journey allowed you I really learned a lot from the activists of to identify this capture of the imagination that the Proceso de Comunidades Negras (P.C.N.) makes only one world seem possible—and how in the South Pacific and the northern Cauca. In these communities create other worlds and even their struggles, they always emphasized that the other notions of humanity? goal of the struggle was the defense of cultural difference. Not even the fight against racism. At that time, at least in the Colombian Pacific, there was not much talk about racism yet. They spoke of the struggle for cultural difference and for the territory, the defense of the territory. In the 1990s, the P.C.N. and other groups formulated four major principles for their struggle, which are still in force. The first is the right to be, the right to identity, to black identity; the second is the right

to the territory as a space for being; the third, the CL Speaking of imagination, I would like to right to autonomy as a guarantee to the exercise know what you think of dreams as tools of invesof being and control over one’s territory; and the tigation and creation. Airton Krenak, for examfourth, the right to one’s own vision of develop- ple, says: “When I suggested that I would speak ment according to one’s worldview, or the right of the dream and the land, I wanted to communito one’s conception of the world, of the good life, cate to you a place, a practice that is perceived in and of the future. different cultures, in different peoples, of recogSo when we work from the reality of others— nizing this institution of the dream not as a daily and this is what anthropology and ethnography al- experience of sleeping and dreaming, but as a low for—we end up entering another cosmovision. disciplined exercise of seeking in the dream the And then we realize that there are other worlds, guidelines for our daily choices.” Davi Kopenawa imaginations, and possible futures. At that time, also tells Bruce Albert that his masters did not the concept of ontology was not yet used as it is teach him how to dream as the Yanomami do. used today. It was used in philosophy, obviously, But I also know that anthropologists like Barbara but not in political ecology. Nor was there the field Tedlock have incorporated dreaming into their of political ontology, as we call it now. “technologies” of inquiry, and Eduardo Kohn But the P.C.N. and the indigenous mo- has said that dreams “grow out of and grow on vements of the 1990s—in a new great wave of the world, and learning to be attuned to their mobilizations, of the emergence of black and special logics and their fragile forms of efficacy indigenous identities, among others—basically helps reveal something about the world beyond emphasized that the world is not one, but that the the human.” world is many worlds. The Zapatistas, from 1996I am curious to ask you, on a more per98, had already been saying very clearly: “we want sonal level, how you relate to your dreams, to the a world where many worlds fit,” the pluriverse. notion of dreaming as an exercise while we sleep, So, yes, the hegemonic discourse captures perhaps to think about how to expand the imagithe imagination and naturalizes only one form or nation to break this hegemony, this univocal imexpression of the possible as continuity of what age of the world that modernity has produced. is given; the possible cannot exist as rupture. To some extent, decolonial thought—and, today, political ontology—states, “no, we must break through, we must make visible the many worlds that exist, and therefore liberate the future itself from this imagination of a single world that has been imposed on it.”

AE In this case I don’t think I can help much, CL Lately I have been interested, however because I actually know that I dream, but I have without much deliberation, in the ways in which never thought actively about my dreams, and conceptions of time are represented spatially: In rarely remember them; I think Kopenawa is the West, linearity and the notion that the future right when he says that Westerners have not been is ahead and the past is behind us predominate; taught to dream, to cultivate dreams and learn for the Aymara people, it’s the opposite: we walk from them, as many native peoples do. So I find looking at the past and the future, what we don’t it super interesting when I hear people talking see is behind us. And Yásnaya Aguilar says that about dreams, about the role of dreams within “in other languages, like Mixe, my mother tongue, anthropology, for example, and in many native which is spoken in the state of Oaxaca in southpeoples. Dreams are an active dimension of life, ern Mexico, they also use a linear metaphor, but it is placed in a vertical position, and the future of the present, of the world’s composition. One of my favorite authors, and one of the is falling on us, crossing our bodies and bathing few authors from the northern hemisphere that us with time: menp këtäkp.” I continue to read from time to time, is Gaston Bachelard. His phenomenological work fascinates me—not the epistemology, which is also interesting—and especially books like The poetics of space, The right to dream, Air and dreams, his books on water, fire, are very precious. In this sense they have more to do with daydreaming and imagination than with dreaming, but I believe that here and there dreams also appear. There may be something to explore there.

This is very beautiful.

CL These different ways of viewing time also produce different understandings of the future, in relation to what has been experienced. Do you believe we may be about to experience a Pachakuti, a resounding shift in the space-time continuum that will allow us to imagine the future in other ways? Is the civilizational paradigm that has dominated the world for the last five hundred years going to collapse dramatically, or is it eroding little by little?

AE Recently, I read about the conception of time in a book by Rodolfo Kusch, La negación en el pensamiento popular (Denial in Popular Thinking), in which he says that the West had to invent history and linear time for its ontological project, which focused on the self and therefore on the object, and not on being, on existing. Now, why does he say that the self is the object? Because he equates the Western philosophical concern with the self-in-itself, with an objectified world. We also find this in Heidegger. Modernity too invents this ontology of the object. In fact, Heidegger said that “modernity invents the object” as something intrinsically existing in itself, including the individual, which exists outside the threads of relations that constitute it. I remembered a very lovely book that I read many, many years ago, written by the historian David Landes; it was a history of clocks, and how time began to be marked in medieval Europe, starting in the monasteries, moving on to the villages, where bells called people to work and pray, until it came to the world of factories, with the Industrial Revolution. Today digital time inhabits us, and even nano-seconds matter. In the Olympics, we consider hundredths of a second to determine who won the race! Well, linear time is also the time of accumulation. The articulation that takes place historically between economics and history has to do with time, the accumulation of time in Western history, which is then imposed on all other cultures because “this is real, true time, you are falling behind, we are far ahead.” Progress, accumulation, teleology, everything is linked to this notion of time.

CL The denial of coevalness that Johannes Fabian talks about.

AE The denial of coevalness, of other times. restructuring itself, in the face of the ecological The circular, cyclical, spiral, vertical time, like the crisis, as green or “sustainable” capitalism, but Mixe, etc. Now, the notion of Pachakuti seemed this process is deeply contradictory. These convery suggestive to me, and I would like to study tradictions are gradually deepening until, suppoit further. Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui has written sedly, there will be a terminal crisis of capitalism. some very interesting things about this. The We haven’t seen it yet, although there are authors concept comes from the Aymara people, and I who say that we are already living it. believe it is also very similar among the Quechua. I find the concept of civilizational crisis It refers to a complete change of the established very interesting, because it allows us to see many order, an internal change from which the order more dimensions of what is breaking down or breaks down, becomes disrupted, and something being recomposed, re-articulated, reassembled. new emerges. For me, one of the best treatises It is a process of simultaneous disassembly and to investigate the possibility of a specific society reassembly. But a process that also has to do with heading toward a Pachakuti process is Marxist, something that Marxism did not conceptualize feminist sociologist Raquel Gutiérrez Aguilar’s “or did not conceptualize well”, which are the book Los ritmos de Pachakuti, a very rigorous in- non-linear processes of emergence and self-orgavestigation of what happened in Bolivia between nization that the science of complexity and chaos 2000 and 2005, the period of the popular upris- offers us. I believe that today we need to pay close ings that put an end to the white-mestizo dom- attention to the articulation, the intersection of ination and culminated in the election of its first non-linear ecological dynamics, including what indigenous president, Evo Morales, who later they call “ecosystem regime shifts” or “cascatook other directions. But this is another story. ding effects” and “positive feedback loops.” For Pachakuti seems to me to be a very inte- example, global warming is causing the melting resting concept, which goes beyond the Marxist of permafrost in Siberia, and this will generate dialectic, although I think this dialectic still helps greenhouse gases, especially methane, which is us. It helps us to think about whether change co- much more potent than CO2 and will increase mes from within, progressively, or whether there global warming, which will cause the permafrost must be a great catastrophe, a great rupture, and to continue to melt, and so on. These non-linear a great discontinuity in history for significant cascading effects reinforce each other and need change to really occur. Both can happen and both to be taken into account. And this could work in have happened in history. favor of a Pachakuti, although not necessarily. It But dialectics falls a bit short (as Deleuze depends on how the social forces will reassemand Guattari put it bluntly in What is Philosophy?). ble themselves in the midst of the socio-environFor example, in the field of ecological Marxism, mental catastrophe that is emerging. what has been called the second contradiction of capitalism has begun to be discussed. Basically, capitalism destroys itself by destroying its own conditions of production, that is, land, labor, water, life. But capitalism is always actively restructuring itself, addressing such contradictions, although these measures are contradictory in themselves. For example, capitalism today is

CL I am interested to know whether you be- AE I think there are three positions regarding lieve that the nation-state is capable of sustaining the state today, both in activism and in critical the processes of recommunalization, decoloniza- social theory. The first position says that the tion, de-racialization, and de-patriarchalization state is the central mechanism for the constructhat you have observed in communities strug- tion of societies, for the institution of the social, gling to make their world possible. This inter- and therefore should be preserved. And within ests me because I believe that the nation-state that there are two positions: on the one hand, was a very efficient tool of colonization, even in those who say that the state is fine as it is—the Europe, and, although I recognize it as an effi- representative, parliamentary states, representacacious fiction, I find it difficult, not to imagine tive democracy, the neoliberal state. On the other a world without nation-states, but the process hand, there are those who suggest that the state is of their disappearance or of their radical trans- very important, it is essential, but it is completely formation so that, as you say, an ontological and distorted, and it needs to be radically democraepistemic democratization can take place. tized. Thus, there is talk of democratization of On July 21, Francia Márquez1 officially the state, including, say, epistemic and cultural launched her candidacy for the Colombian pre- democratization, according to which the state sidency through the Soy Porque Somos [I am must embrace different ways of considering life. because we are] movement, and since the early In a way, this is the pluricultural or pluri-ethnic, 1990s, several Nasa leaders have been involved in multicultural state, which we know turned out parliamentary politics2. In Chile, Elisa Loncón to be quite unsuccessful in the Colombian case Antileo, a Mapuche woman, leads the consti- and in the cases we know today in the world, but tuent assembly. Do you think that the presence important nonetheless. The third position is the of indigenous, Afro-Colombian, and peasant autonomist position which basically says “nothfighters in power structures contributes to the ing to do with the state.” The state is not only popular struggle in the territories? Do you think an instrument to organize domination and is in the hands of those who hold power, but also repthere is a dialectical relation between the two? resents the worldview of those who dominate the world, and therefore every effort must be made to build from below, with the people, within communities at the local and regional level, and to expand horizontally without appealing to the state. These three positions seem clear to me: the neoliberal state, radical democratization of the state, and the autonomous position beyond the state; the latter requires non-state, non-liberal, non-capitalist societies. The second po1 Francia Márquez Mina (1982, Suárez, Cauca, Colombia) is an Afro-Colomsition points to post-capitalist but still liberal and bian community activist, feminist, and ecologist who won the Goldman state-centered societies in which the state and Environmental Prize in 2018 for her fight against mining exploitation and the displacement of communities from their ancestral territories. the legal rights play a key role. Now, I believe that 2 The Nasa indigenous people have structured different forms of struggle in Colombia we are witnessing the emergence of in defense of their territory through, for example, the Consejo Regional Indígena del Cauca (cric, founded in 1971 and still active)—along with a new kind of leadership. I see more social leaother indigenous people—, the Movimiento Armado Quintín Lame ders like Francia Márquez and Isabel Cristina (1974-1991) and participation in parliamentary politics.

Zuleta3, or Ángela María Robledo4 in feminism, for example. These are women for whom it is very clear that the state is a tool and a space for struggle, but that the real place from where they should think and with whom they should think is not with the state, but with the people, with the communities, alongside their struggles. Francia said it very clearly at the launch of her candidacy for the presidency of Colombia a few weeks ago (July 2021), and then at the session they held with the Pacto Histórico in Bogotá with Gustavo Petro5: “we have to start thinking that you don’t govern from above, you do it from below, with the people.” From this point of view, I believe that these are new leaders who suggest that their struggle within the state is also against the regime that has perpetuated this kind of undemocratic state and this undemocratic and accumulative economy, and therefore it is a struggle for a state that creates better conditions for the life and struggles of communities and peoples. But this is not a struggle for the state per se, and neither is it a struggle for power per se.

Isabel Cristina Zuleta (1982, Ituango, Antioquia, Colombia) is a feminist environmentalist leader of the Movimiento Ríos Vivos Antioquia that fights in defense of the Cauca River and against the mega-dam project known as Hidroituango. Ángela María Robledo is a Colombian feminist, psychologist and politician. She was a representative in the House of Representatives and candidate for the vice-presidency of Colombia in 2018 for the Colombia Humana party. Pacto Histórico [Historic Pact] is a new political movement that brings together leftist political parties and social movements, with an eye on the 2022 presidential elections. One of its leaders, Gustavo Petro, is a Colombian senator who was a presidential candidate in 2010 and 2018 and a militant of the M-19 guerrilla group, which was demobilized in 1990 after a process of negotiations with president Virgilio Barco’s government.

CL So it would be precisely what you proposed as this radical, epistemic and ontological democratization of the state. I suppose that, after this process, we would not be able to recognize the state as we see it now. It would be another organization.

AE Something else, a much more decentralized state, with greater local autonomy, building from the bottom up, as the indigenous Minga Social y Comunitaria6 envisioned it in its last documents after the strike, building from the bottom up in large assemblies, up and up from local, regional, and finally national assemblies; a very participatory assembly process, of direct democracy and truly autonomous.

CL I am a contemporary art curator—I studied history at the National University of Colombia, but then I got into art—and I often work with museums that are institutions with histories that are closely linked to the history of colonialism. Even “professionalized” art, as we modern urbans understand it, is profoundly detached from the everyday experience of most people. I believe this is not the case for many peoples for whom art is integrated into their daily life and their relationship to the land (many languages do not have a word for art, which does not mean they do not have artistic expressions) … What I mean is that I often wonder what to do with those institutions through which my work is possible, but which are part of the whole modern colonial apparatus that supports a hegemonic and univocal image of the world. My very partial answer is that it is possible to transform them from the inside out, to the point where they can no longer be recognized as tools of oppression, and I feel that is what decolonization is largely about. How do you relate to these institutions: museums, hospitals… but especially universities, which is where you have mostly worked?

Minga Social y Comunitaria por la Defensa de la Vida, el Territorio y la Paz [Social and Community Minga for the Defense of Life, Territory, and Peace] is an indigenous and peasant social movement based on an indigenous organizational principle, the minga, which brings communities together in tasks of different kinds aimed at the common good of peoples and territories. As a social movement, “la Minga” has become one of the main engines of mobilization in recent years, through its journeys from the southwest of Colombia to different parts of the country.

AE I sometimes say that the university, taken as a whole—although there are always contestatarian spaces within it—is part of the forces of ontological occupation of the territories and lives of peoples and individuals. Because the university creates and provides the categories and trains the professionals who will occupy, precisely as “specialists”, people’s lives and territories. And it will deprive them of their autonomy over their communities, over their ability to live and build housing, to heal, to feed themselves, and to learn more autonomously. The decolonization of the university—there is the concept of epistemic decolonization in decolonial thinking, which has been very fruitful—seems important to me. And there is also the possibility of creating other academies, which are not conventional academies, which are spaces for the construction of knowledge and awareness with other rules, with other epistemes, within other constructions of the world and which do not work with the same laws of modernity, or which can be hybrids, like, for example, some of the indigenous universities—which are hybrids of the modern and the indigenous universities. So there is a lot of room for maneuver, but I think that, on the whole, all these institutions, universities, museums, hospitals—and this is, after all, Foucault’s work on the emergence of the clinic, the prison, the asylum, the military barracks—are the spaces where modernity is constructed as such, where it normalizes and disciplines ways of being and existing, where it declares what is normal.

CL And where these separations are also practiced.

AE Exactly. They are what Foucault called dividing practices. They set apart the good from the bad, the criminals from the non-criminals, decent people from evil people, the wicked from the non-wicked, and so on.These practices normalize a society and every society has to have norms, obviously, but with modernity norms are dictated: a heteronomic society is a society in which the norms that govern social life are produced mainly by experts, in institutions, and by the objectifying discourses of science, and not so much by the encounter, face to face, in an autonomous, localized, communalized manner, as has occurred throughout history—and by this I don’t mean that traditional communities were necessarily better than modern ones; simply different. Autonomy is the struggle to regain the ability to define the rules by which we want to live, how we want to be educated, how we want to heal, how we want to build and live, how we want to learn, how we want to feed and nourish ourselves.

CL What do you think about the processes of struggle that are taking place in Colombia at the moment7? They move me to the same extent that the response of the government—which I consider illegitimate—terrifies me.

In Colombia, since the end of April 2021, there has been an outbreak of social protests against the neoliberal measures of the current government, violence, racism, corruption, social inequalities, environmental devastation, and lack of opportunities.

AE Someone said they like the concept of explosion to describe what is happening in Colombia, because it denotes something that is very hard, but also enlightening. It seems to me that this explosion is enlightening new paths. It’s very hopeful, yet very painful at the same time, and it’s getting harder and harder because of the repressive response of this government, as you say. I think that with the recent wave of protests—which has been going on since 2019 and is perhaps a process that started with the peace agreement8—new political actors, who are contesting the very model of society, are emerging. One doesn’t protest only for inclusion or for better wages, but it is the very model of society that is at stake. Therefore, it is possible to say that these are anti-systemic movements that could lead to a kind of Pachakuti. Camilo González Posso, director of INDEPAZ 9, suggests that we are witnessing the emergence of new transformative political subjects: young people, for example. Obviously, the Black and Indigenous communities had already spoken out before, but now there is also this actor, the youth at the frontline of the demonstrations, which I think is very important. And in the face of all this, the state shows more and more its intellectual and political weakness, because its only responses are violence, repression and bullets. So what will determine what happens from now on? I think the elections will really be a kind of litmus test, a potential moment of a significant turning point, which will come in different forms and you don’t know where it may end up. But when I talk about the possibility of a Pachakuti, I think of 8

countries like Colombia and Mexico, possibly also Peru, where the breakdown of conventional institutions is already very advanced, and forces are being recomposed from below and in a new and interesting way, which constitutes favorable conditions for a significant upheaval. Although we cannot predict what direction this will take. It is an emergent process, and like all self-organized emergent processes, it depends on how and which forces manage to capture it from an imaginative and political standpoint. Unfortunately, a very important factor for the direction this process will take is the extent to which the Colombian state, the government, is willing to use force, to massacre. If this factor were not present, I would say that Colombia is already heading toward a very significant transformation. But this factor may make this transformation still impossible or historically unfeasible, although it will come sooner or later.

CL Yes, because the speech of incredible so- AE They can’t talk in the same terms, exactly. phistication of thought by someone like Fran- And I think it’s very clever that, for example, cia Márquez contrasts sharply with the state’s people like Francia, but also Petro, are speaking response, which is totally brute. It’s a crude, in a very different language. They are not, say, brutalized and impoverished response. I think demonizing the enemy class as they did before, dialogue is hardly even possible, because they but neutralizing it with a policy of care that also can’t speak in the same terms. involves those same enemy classes. Petro even used the word “love,” which surprised me. A politics of love. And I don’t think he is doing this just strategically—although he is a great strategist—but something is really brewing, something that has more to do with the emergence of a paradigm centered on caring for life. If we are to care for life, it is the life of and for all, although we must always beware of those who kill life.

Peace agreements between the government of Juan Manuel Santos (2010-2018) and the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (farc) guerrillas, who laid down their weapons and integrated into civilian life. These agreements prioritized reparations to the victims of the armed conflict, but the current Colombian government has obstructed the fulfillment of these agreements. Instituto de Estudios para el Desarrollo y la Paz: http://www.indepaz. org.co.

CL Finally: do you have daily practices that bring you closer to the pluriverse, to a political ontology, to a connection with Mother Earth, to its liberation?

AE In short, I will tell you about the practices that bring me closer to relationality or to the pluriverse. For example, I have been living for twelve or fourteen years (in a small town called Carrboro, near Chapel Hill, North Carolina) in a co-housing, a type of “intentional” housing where there is more relationship and cooperation among its inhabitants. Each person, couple or family lives in their own house, most of which are small houses with some environmental technology, such as solar panels. We have a community garden and a large common house where there are spaces for guests, a kitchen, a dining room, rooms for games and meetings, etc. Sometimes there are group meals. I think this is very, very cool. It’s a very interesting model of recommunalization against the individualization that is radical in this country and, increasingly, worldwide. My partner and I also like to plant, and it is very important for us to do this, a small connection with the soil and food. The things you can produce on your own, like tomatoes, peppers, arugula, lettuce, red onions, jalapeños, herbs… Also, well, as much as possible I tried to do meditation, especially Buddhist meditation. I’m not a great practitioner of meditation, I wish I could do it better, but I get caught up in my obligations. I often end up getting caught up in the days, and I can’t meditate. And the last thing is that I have always conceived my intellectual production as something collective and I have participated in many, many groups. We now have a large group for the collective project of designing transitions in the geographic valley of the Cauca River. We are advancing slowly, “slowly but surely,” as we say in our group. The group is mainly made up of feminist environmental activists, Afro-Colombians, and some academics. Right now we are trying to find some funding, which has been very, very difficult. But we have been excited about this col-

lective project to reimagine the Jurassic Valley of the Cauca River, this beautiful space devastated by the agro-industrial model. Chapel Hill and Mexico City, July 28, 2021

In Years?

THE PILL Bernardo José de Souza

According to UN forecasts, by 2050, 70% of the world's population will live in cities. Facing imminent environmental catastrophe, increase of income concentration, of unemployment, and of general poverty, and among faster and faster technological changes, cities are confirmed as settings for the most dystopic among speculative fiction. ¶ In his short story A pílula [The Pill], Bernardo José de Souza imagines the República district, in central São Paulo in 2074, inhabited by cyborg sex workers. The story is narrated by Oval, an android who tries to rebel against the state’s project of biopolitical control, engineered in collusion with big corporations. ¶ In A Parábola do Despejo [The Parable of the Junkyard], abigail Campos Leal blurs literary genres and creates an essay-like fictional piece speculating about Carolina Maria de Jesus’s work in 2077, the year of her death’s 100th anniversary. By proposing a journey in time and space, abigail puts the production of this Brazlian author in a dialogue with another prominent female author of the diaspora: Octavia Butler, from the United States. [LF]

São Paulo, September 14, 2074

t was rose, and pale, inoffensive on its round surface: a weapon of sorts to defeat sex; a chemical asset devised to emancipate body & soul. The pill was supposed to be taken once a day, religiously, so that the human spirit would be led astray, untethered from frantic sexual intercourse—an efficient libido suppressant comprised of different hormones for the various sexualities, accordingly. It came in boxes of 30 tablets, enough to endure a month of monastic endeavor. Most importantly, though, pharmacies weren’t allowed to sell them, as commitment to sex was part of a hegemonic plan insidiously devised to commodify desire. Some sort of duty, sexual performance had become the most valuable kudos humanity conspicuously posed on the vital core of their precarious lives, straining routines and omnipresent virtual personas. Fucking was a token to be publicly displayed, albeit devoid of real pleasure. If not mandatory, it was bound to become an index of social status, or the gradient of visibility an individual wanted to achieve. Having turned into a bureaucratic instinct, desire gradually ceded to a systematic reification of the body on social networks masterly devised for sexual dependency. But then the pill came along, as an antidote for the pavlovian cyber-capitalist sexual roulette, to the absolute dismay of the Big Tech’s tycoons. As sex drive distanced itself from the exchange of affection and was converted into sheer mechanic action, enacting the choreography of love through sex came to be an obsessive and fruitless habit, a quest for fulfillments most unlikely to come true; and the more unbearable this lack would appear, the more pills were sold in the deep web. After the arrival of such subversive novel (a biochemical liturgy emerging from the underground), sex mania remained a risk to be taken only by the ones who were still up for to noxious game—and those were many, believe me. Conversely, though, within the conundrums of pirate pharmacology, the compulsion could be deviated into a limbo, into a sequence of images forever safely guarded within the palimpsest of memory: forgotten layers of vicious thoughts, feelings of fault and frustration. (Indeed, a far too heavy burden to be carried away by a rather lonely, impoverished and sorrowful population.) But even if neural-psychosomatic virtual mechanisms of human control could be tempered with drugs, and no longer represented an insurmountable trench for the subversive citizens, they still remained the Eldorado for the markets, the sacred secret for capitalism’s longevity and its ever addictive,

albeit remote, promise of emotional gratification; the latter, a fleeting feeling that could be temporarily purchased or abstracted from all forms of life and technology that had insidiously acquired exchange value in the course of history. Natural instincts and neuronal impulses conjured up the recipe for all transactions, on the net, on the ground: “Go, bitch, fuck as fast as you can!” Afterall, we were just preys in a floating sea of likes, algorithms, virtual gold and pictures of “decapitated” plumped bodies. That’s how they liked it; that’s how the market envisaged the world: a time of reckless tribes, bribes and matches, a merry-go-round destined to drain the once routed resources of love. And since no more public displays of affection were allowed, the implosion of solidarity and empathy eventually became an imminent hazard. Ultimately, most people believed they had all been left to God and its virtual commandments, or else, Its secular misdemeanors in the course of existence. Sex mania was the crudest of all religions! My name is Oval, by the way. I am a robot, a militant, a sex worker, a drug dealer, my reputation is second to none, and I shall never retire from your world.

***

And there I was, a rare species in the midst of another century to go (and counting…), a substitute for love, a replacement for real life. Evidently, there had been plenty of lavishly lethal moments in my history: flashy apartments, orgies with treacherous creatures, or simply with bodies disassembled in fearful features, as if on the penthouse of Medusa, trapped in a cul-de-sac, in a chain of frozen orgasms. My clients, OMG!, they all lived like stray dogs, unseemly happy. And every single body maneuver I’d carefully learnt to copycat from hookers in the past was now being reproduced elsewhere by a plethora of sex addicts lingering over steamy old-fashioned cashpoints, all-the-more like baths, cubicles for dreary fantasies, like drive-in cinemas in a swamp of hurtful souls, paranoid labyrinths, passages to nowhere beyond self-indulgence. On the long run, sex would become a curse to all of us, particularly to humankind, as nobody was able to reach orgasms anymore—such was the craving—, no matter how committed to it they could be. From my vantage point at the Copan building, I could spot a parade of torsos ran by, their faces urging for a gaze of retribution or a simulacrum of love. (At times, sex would still be called love, this ever-mysterious realm of so-called redemption, a forbidden luxury I was never to afford and indulge with, or so I thought, as a robot.) Bleak as ever, the cityscape was an invitation to mumble an overwhelming arch of languages, and delve deep into cosmopolitan life, lowering the standards of communication to the

level of mundane economy: tongues and tits, assholes, pussies and penises, wallets, gadgets and condoms, apparatuses for the trenches of a runaway world. Though being as good a deviant as one can be, I knew quite well how to cross the lines and survive in a state of calamity. I was just partly human, so they claimed. Not worthy of psychoanalytic sessions or a gesture of compassion. I was made to last, for as long as the human species would, in order to make good universal use of my body parts, and knew it to the core, suffering like a ghost trapped into private and selfish inner worlds, economies of fault and despair. Most surprisingly though, my body felt extremely real to me: synthetic leather flesh and graphene bones urging an unfathomable orgasm, a rush that could possibly kill me in the end, burn my circuits in burgeoning ecstasy. And yet, my AI psychological autonomy was an anathema for all crying human souls melting into virtual existence.

***

Years passed by, or lasted, to unlikely ends. And I’d had my own share of guilt in the whole process of gradual human alienation, I was well aware of that: a complacence to sex up until the point of absolute intolerance, which I reached more or less at every morning, when the torrid sun prompted early bureaucracy to reenact the world again and again, as if nothing could acquire a different shape when night turns into daylight, every 24 hours— NO CHANGE was the ruling norm. All was supposed to go back on track after dawn, when the morning whiff would call it a day (or else, a night). But there was a dodgy place where bouncers, drug dealers, robots, go-go dancers and other outcasts would sit at ease for endless hours: Love Story was such dungeon, the day-denafter-mayhem. “Where are you, babe?,” someone most likely asked a coke dealer. “Not so far from you, honey…,” I could overhear the conversation on the phone) “Good, that’s how I like it, straight and swift!” So, the navire night would fall into oblivion. That club was a realm to which one could retreat in debauchery and dance the day away in disdain of the outside world. República, the neighborhood, was vertical and poignant as a knife, always tricky, ever elucidatory, for as long as one could survive the stress, felt both emotional and physically, equally damaging, nonetheless. And there I was, a simpleton, working out daily sex routines for pocket money, or selling all sorts of drugs as if on the brink of a hedonistic revolution—an anachronic legacy, an inheritance from the 20th century doomed to be simply forgotten or buried sometime in the future.

As for my errands around town, they were mostly destined to please man, those hideous figures, obsolete in their impatience and slimy punch. Disobedience was one of my perks, and that seemed to please the gluttons at large: nouveau riche corrupt art collectors for whom laughter was nothing more than etiquette, means of betrayal, a choreography of happiness aimed at healing their corrosive souls. Being a devious humanoid though, I would always pretend to enjoy sex for the sake of surviving, one more time. At the end of the day, sex is money.

***

A disturbing sound emanated from the Copan building, a mix of sexual arousal and grief, a morbid wave of horror. The place was filled with maniacs, it was a 24/7 motel where the relentless horny hordes would gather every single day. On the side streets, one could hear, smell and see through the brise-soleil a myriad of bodies trying to engage in sexual intercourse—a contemporary chimera made of thousands of people entangled in libidinal operations without being able to come. An enduring collective sacrifice that ought to stop! By that point, it was crystal clear to me that in order to survive the agony, sex had to be temporarily suppressed. And so we did, against all odds, with or without the help of the pill. At least some of us did, humans and androids alike. That was when we decided to call for a general strike: Right on the day when the solar eclipse was to cast its mantle of darkness over the city of São Paulo, the former militant sexual abstainers would unleash their vital stream of joy provoking a devastating short-circuit, the next Big Bang, or the birth of a new era. Freedom was to be found once again in the non-tradable nature of feelings, regardless of the remaining derelict minds, their leftover bodies and limbs in tandem with credit cards, avatars and all paraphernalia consumed over the previous years of sexual dependency. República was to explode in an overwhelming torrent of years-long sublimated orgasms, at once released to annihilate the internet servers via a collective tantric sex: bombs of orgasmic energy to implode the system!

A few years later…

blinking mottos Join the sexual frenzy, boost your account! or Upgrade your account! Safe sex for free now! displayed on bright billboards only served to produce a majestic violent rebound from the thousands of entrenched rebels. Every activist is getting naked, kissing and making love, AGAIN! The atmosphere is thrilling, tremendous, but rather volatile around the Copan building immediacies —drones overflying people’s heads, the cavalry marching over their ecstatic bodies.” “What a disaster!” “People call for help, but no one seems to even hear them. We keep hopelessly trying to communicate with paramedics, and among ourselves. I guess encoded laser messaging is probably the safest way to call for help without being intercepted by the police, to get ahold of an emergency cab, or even a shutdown discharge, as in the worstcase scenario I might be caught up by the pigs, suffer a violation of my system, and have my entire hard disc downloaded alongside the future plans of our organization.” “What the hell???!!! “Energy just keeps building up! As I speak high voltages of sexual orgasms are being amassed at the clandestine power station at Republic Square’s underground. It’s getting darker and darker. I can barely sense where my body begins and that of the others, all blissfully shagging around me… It feels amazing!” “Oh, God, I’m about to lose my senses… This is too much! My body can barely hold it… There is so much energy running through my circuits! Look at the buildings! It’s spreading all over town! The lights are blinking!” “Oh, dear, what if this is an encrypted message and I should to be able to decode it???” “Damn! It feels SOOO good! Ohhhhhh! I feel like, I feel like… I’m losing it! Ohhhh, dear! Tell me this is… not happening to me… OH, PLEASE! Someone tells me, ooohhhh… Tell me! Ohhhh! Ohhhh!” “Bless thiss messszzz…” (Abrupt interruption.) Extract of an archaic form of journal retrieved from the memory of Oval, a 21st century android who happened to take part in the Sex Revolution of the year 2074, in Brazil. Excerpt from the research conducted by Dr. Talullah Ugá at the Center for Political and Anthropological Studies at the University of São Paulo.

***

2:43pm (recorded live from República Sq.) “The Big Techs imposed a cordon sanitaire near the Chá viaduct, so far to no avail as the subversive crowds keep advancing towards República Square. The

a PARÁBOLA DO DESPEJO: O FIM DO MUNDO Y O TEMPO ATRIBULADO DE CAROLINA MARIA DE JESUS abigail Campos Leal

2077 ∞ x ∞ Because of this, the extreme force of Blackness resides in the turn of the thought; knowledge and studies conducted by Blackness announce the End of the World as we know it. Denise Ferreira da Silva – A dívida impagável [An Unpayable Debt], p. 91

it was a fine winter evening. the fire crackled & the laughter of the pickaninnies echoed everywhere in the Quilombo das Araras. in the reading room, the soiree was going on so well! Urú was very elegant, he came as Luiz Gama. at the back, some children rolled over the bright colored mat, among trodden popcorn & wrinkled books. the battle of passinho was on a roll like in the 2020s, the beginning of the End. it was the first time Ossos was to recite in public. his brown & chubby calves were sweaty. they chose that dream of theirs that I reproduce in the Parábola do Despejo (Parable of the Junkyard) as its debut. you were particularly moved. certainly because it was the opening of the Carolina Maria de Jesus Ancestral Library. but also because you remembered that trans-dyke living by Zefa’s shack & who was never included in your book. they were nervous, cold sweating dripping & stopped reading. “calm down, close your eyes, breathe, my son,” you whispered in their ear. they shivered, calmed down, breathed deeply & went on: “I was going from the Earth to the heavens…” I cried feeling their magic & their power, in the black cover of the endless night. you brushed my smoked tear with your thumb, looked at me & smiled.

fire dreams, dance dreams I make the juggernaut go, A thousand heads in the ship; But if I brush a vile creditor, The dream escapes, then I’m awake! Luiz Gama – Trovas burlescas (Burlesque Ballads), p. 136

it was a hard winter morning. the last few days had been particularly difficult: dizziness & sickness caused by hunger piled up on your carcass, while your notebooks accumulated emptinesses. suicidal thoughts were inevitable, as much as you chased them away with working & chanting. you made dinner, actually, you only added a little more water & yucca flour to the remainders of the soup. you took Vera & went out. your eyes always on the trash bags scattered over the sidewalks. it can always get worse: even paper was getting hard to collect. but thanks to your attentive eyes, you found a couple of cans. tiredness & the sweat stink bothered you quite a lot; a good shower, rest & a lavish dinner were all you wished! daydreaming, you were almost run down by that butcher’s truck! “be careful, yo crazy woman,” shouted the mad white driver. you ducked & before you went on you had an idea to ask for a bit of meat. he didn’t say anything, just closed the door, climbed down from the truck, went to the back. you were flustered. he took a huge bag & walked towards you, without saying a word: “take your pick!” it was a huge bag of bones, you took the largest & thickest, thanked him & went your way. Vera was tired & complaining. back to the shack, you made soup & soon sought your notebook. you wrote for almost 2 hours, which flew by. you went out for a walk through the shantytown, passed by the religious movie showing at the court, saw the children playing in the park. & finally Madam Carolina Maria de Jesus, you, yo… “… I sleeped. And I had a wonderful dream. I dreamed I was an angel. My dress was wide. Long pink sleeves. I was going from the Earth to the heavens. And took the stars in my hand to gaze at them. To talk to the stars. They put on a show in my honor. They danced around me and formed a luminous beam. When I woke up, I thought, I’m so poor. I cannot attend a show, this is why God sends me these wondrous dreams for my aching soul. To the God who looks after me, I send my gratitude”1. water was bubbling up in the kettle, you heard its whistle almost too late. your office was far from the kitchen. you were busy, preparing your research for the next volume in the series on which you were working. you were also obsessing, thinking about racism in the publishing industry, about the constant devastation that was already announcing itself everywhere, but also about the beginning of the book that did not please you yet. it was a drag that you had not yet garnered the recognition you deserved. the Xenogenesis series had been a success, but it was not enough, & you were bigger than the numbers showed. on the newspaper, news about censorship of rock & rap records fed by religious moralism, about the rain patterns in Oregon due to deforestation & about the aids epidemic among the US lgbt community stroke you hard, & had you be even more certain that those writings you were gestating were important. the coffee was ready. on the first sip, you were already taken far away! the scene came

in full. you held the cup with your two hands & ran to the office & started typing on the typewriter even before you sat down, isn’t it so, Madam Octavia E. Butler?! “I had my recurring dream last night .[…] It comes to me when I struggle—when I twist on my own personal hook and try to pretend that nothing unusual is happening. […] I’m learning how to fly, to levitate myself. […] I drift towards the doorway. […] The wall before me is burning. Fire has sprung from nowhere, has eaten in trough the wall, has begun to reach toward me, reach for me. The fire spreads. […] I fade into the second part of the dream—the part that’s ordinary and real, the part that did happen years ago when I was little, though at the time it didn’t seem to matter. Darkness. Darkness brightening. Stars. Stars casting their cool, pale, glinting light. […] She shakes her head. ‘Kids today have no idea what a blaze of light cities used to be—and not that long ago.’ ‘I’d rather have the stars,’ I say.”2

2024 Robledo ≈ 1959 Canindé Let’s start with the end of the world, why not? […] The world has already ended inside of her, and none of these two ends happens for the first time. n. k. jemisin – A Quinta Estação (The Fifth Station), p. 5 This is the last time I mention this: the world is ending. Again. jota mombaça – Não vão nos matar agora (They Won’t Kill Us Now), p. 13

Lauren Oya Olamina is a black teenager with hypersensitivity syndrome (a condition that makes her capable of feeling pain & pleasure experimented by people or animals in her presence), in 2024. she lives with her family in a low-middle-class community in Robledo, California (US). a /community/ majorly composed of racialized people. Robledo is a /gated community/. most of the social-geographical structure of the world as we know it has crumbled; countless people have found themselves in deep poverty, furthermore, a new drug, whose “thrill” is to get enormous pleasure from burning or watching fire consume things & people, is spreading; people roam the streets burning, looting, robbing & killing. beyond that, the world is taken by a new wave of Christian fundamentalist terror: camps of forced conversion, slave work, persecution & murders befall “heathen” flesh; armed militia spread as they see opportunities to cash on widespread chaos & insecurity; moreover, the world is devastated by overwhelming environmental & climate transformation, consequences of the colonial organization of the world: extended draught in some areas, devastating rains & snowstorms in others; sea level rising. This is part of the World in

the Parable series with two volumes, Parable of the Sower & Parable of the Talents, written by Octavia E. Butler & published in 1993 & 1997 respectively. but the World has ended before! Brazil is an end of the World! & in the 1950s, Brazil ended once again. Quarto de despejo (Child of the Dark in the US; Beyond All Pity in the UK) by Carolina Maria de Jesus, originally published in 1960, is a chapter in that end. ms. De Jesus’s Diários (Journals), which transmuted into a book, are part of a precarious archive of the end of the world called Brazil, but they are also its excess, testimony of its improbable passage, of its impossible escape! it is crucial to read Quarto de despejo not only on that which is written on paper, but also in the long periods & intervals in which silences & mysteries are inscribed in & of a black carcass. Carolina Maria de Jesus had fled before: Sacramento (state of Minas Gerais). in the mid-1950s, the Shantytown of Canindé ($ão Paulo capital city) was then a sort or precarious & improvised refuge, which sheltered both her escape and her dreams. neither Colonization nor Enslavement ended; the World is what came to an end, but the end of the world is Colonization & Enslavement themselves, which go on… she opens her book with renovation of black life which is concomitant to its announced end. “July 15, 1955 Birthday of my daughter Vera Eunice. I intended to buy a pair of shoes for her. But the cost of food prevents us from fulfilling our wishes. We are currently slaves of the cost of life.”3 in the 1950s, but not only then, collecting trash is what’s left for many black carcasses who survived the end of the world in piled-up shacks while Brazil keeps on following its unequal process of racial accumulation through vertiginous industrialization & urbanization. Picking trash as forced destiny is enslavement itself, continuing under a different form. “It’s like I came to the world predestined to pick [trash]. The only thing I don’t pick is happiness.”4 you roamed around Canindé, the Downtown & the North Area, picking paper & metal, as a way of making black life sprout. “May 9 [1958]… I pick paper but I don’t like it. Then I think: let’s pretend I’m dreaming”5. this is all you wrote that day. how can you have any energy left to write after walking miles, just picking? but dreaming that you were not picking, you picked your first notebooks from the trash &, without knowing it, you started to execute your escape plan & to fulfill your dreams of prosperity. you rushed, didn’t you?! you were always rushing! in the rush! you woke up, you read a little, you wrote a little, then you went out to fetch water, you warmed the food (when there was food to warm), bathed the kids, swept the shack & went out to work while it was still early, walking, roaming, running, searching, running away & dreaming. most often

you would only come back in the evening, when you would again write & read & run away & dream. yes, madam Carolina Maria de Jesus, it’s a pickle! “July 16 [1955] […] I got home, I mean my shack, nervous and exhausted. I thought about y busy life. I pick paper, I do the laundry for two youngsters, I’m out all day long. And I’m never caught up. […] But poor people never have any rest. They can never enjoy rest.”6 It is hard to live between the times of black death, the time of Enslavement & Colonization that goes on, the time of Industry & the City announcing infinite eviction coming. black now is the coagulation of ends. Those who run between different times in order to be able to live get invariably tired & vertiginous. “July 8 [1958] […] At four I started to write. When I wake up, I take long to fall asleep. I keep thinking of my busy life”7. it is difficult to fall asleep while incessantly escaping & going through different times of the anti-black that yesterday-today-tomorrow’s Brazil is. “December 31 [1958] […] my life is confusing like a puzzle”8 you were disoriented & tired, but not so much that you would not realize your localization in the crossroads of the end of the world & you would not keep on escaping and planning. crossroads of times are also geographies. you roam between ends. you knew that the shantytown of Canindé was the end, & you would walk its ruins even before it was completely evicted in the 1960s to build the Marginal Tietê Highway. lost in times, roaming the space, you created a different geographical-historical experience. a sensitivity of the end. “When I am in the city I feel like I am I the sitting room. […] And when I am in the shantytown I feel like I am an object no longer in use, fit to be in a junkyard […] and whatever is in a junkyard is burnt or thrown away”9. a geographical-historical sensitivity of the end. a kind of black ethics of value. the shantytown is not only a junkyard, but the end itself, social death as condition of black existence, devoid of value. “Shantytown, a branch of Hell, Hell itself ”10. but what your sensitivity & ethics announce, however, is not death but resurrection! Living-dead, Zumbi, quilombo! you never had a home, not even when you were living in the shack, not even when you bought your home, because the black experience in Brazil is the infinite eviction! “But he must learn that the shantytown in the junkyard of São Paulo. And that I am junk”11. but even then, despite Brazil & the end of the world, despite the exhaustion & vertigo these ends caused on you, you were able to dream and to open your impossible escape! “May 10 [1956] I am writing a book, in order to sell it. With that money I am at buying a plot so I can leave the shantytown”12. leaving the shantytown was a way of crossing the end. roaming, picking, digging, recycling, you dreamt & wrote your escape. “July 30 [1959] […] I wrote until late, because I cannot sleep. When I lay

down and fell asleep soon, I dreamt I was in a different house. I had everything. Bags of beans. I looked at the bags and smiled. I told João, now we can kick misery out.”13 the black Goddesses were with you, in the shack, crossing $ão Paulo’s large & dirty avenues, searching trash in order to create writings & other fodder. “If God helps me I will leave here, and I will not look back.”14 you crossed the end & you escaped demolition & eviction. January 1, 1960 is the last record in your journals that were left to me. that same year you published Quarto de despejo, which was immediately translated into a dozen foreign languages. that year you finally succeeded in escaping the shack, the shantytown, the end. you were with God & God is change! soon enough you realized escaping the shantytown was not escaping the anti-black end, which would come back again & again… what you did conquer was a certain stability, a soil that was yours, so you could go on escaping & dreaming…

once again 2077 “Come here,” you said, “I want to show you something.” then we went back to the library. there was Ossos, now reciting a different text. much freer, more flowing, almost at ease. I more or less recognized those words, but I could not remember from where. everything was still too confusing for me. “You’re right, you know these words well,” you said with a mocking laugh. you raised your hands before yourself, with the palms upward & closed your eyes. the air started to thicken around you forming a kind of living smoke bubble between your hands, pulsing and stirring, going around in multiple directions. Even after all I had gone through over those last few months, I was still in awe of the mystery carried by the endless night. inside the smoky bubble was Ossos. vibrating like a smoke flag. probably at the Quilombo courtyard, even younger, with his Quarto de despejo in his hands, reading & writing. crossing some sentences, putting others together. opening some pages, sometimes quickly skipping them, sometimes taking his time. stitching together phrases cut out from top to bottom, from bottom to top, stitching together phrases from the same page, from crossed pages, only from odd-numbered pages, back to front, increasing intensity flow, crossing methods just like… “Just like you did before? Yes (laughs)…” & all of a sudden, a new smoke bubble started to appear inside the smoke bubble. now I was in there, one of the many Is I have been … I was in there, too, with your Quarto in my hands, cutting out and stitching together your words in order to create different things. at that time, maybe

I already knew that those chills were also the mark of your presence, of our meeting. To gather those words together on an invocation. it was difficult to focus in the now, as the here did not exist any longer. I dreamt so much with Quilombo das Araras, but I admit I never thought I’d be able to step on it with my own two feet, some day. at least not while I was alive. laughs. Quilombo was different every time I wrote but, strangely, I felt at home there. you spoke little & that was not a problem between us. I felt you like a grandmother, like a teacher. it was comfortable & calm, almost like a home. you manipulated the World & you could recreate scenes, memories, prophecies, events, dreams, mirages & things that I can’t even imagine. I don’t know if I remembered or if I just saw everything, but they were there, the scenes of the Second M1ll1t14 Coup, the first swarms of drones, the emergence of desertification, the birth of Quilombo das Araras, Quilombo do Jabaquara in Nova Mooca… events & words mixed together in me. I felt like I was going to faint at any moment. I felt honored before a war commander but also thankful before a comet. Today IS the day of the Abolition. In prisons the blacks… are the most educated That god eliminates whites so the blacks are happy It is still raining… The rain falls hard I am writing with the money from the irons I lit the fire and went running away I kept on thinking in the world’s… misfortune I dreamt of 4 thousand cruzeiros I told him I would commit the hunger of Jerusalem I did not come into the world to wait I shall put and end to Man Have you ever seen… a dog… flowing… my poetic repertoire? I wish I were black… , Hell the World is the Devil’s cabinet In the past I sang… it’s raining I went… in the water in the morning? do you have meat? Do you have… furious shantytown… God created black and gave me food He said that the blacks could rebels I write because… I’m not afraid of that fucker I’m eating what I dreamed Looks like my life was more beautiful than the dream I went to write… in the sun to warm… with life’s bitternes… Roaming here in this world

Joy of not being… Man (or woman) When night fell, we sang the Jardineira If God helps me I will get out of this

2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14

de jesus, Carolina Maria. Quarto de despejo: diário de uma favelada. São Paulo: Ática, 2014 [1960], p. 120. Published in English as Child of the Dark: The Diary of Carolina Maria de Jesus, translated by David St. Clair, New York: E. P. Dutton, 1962; and as Beyond All Pity, London, UK: Souvenir Press, 1962; Panther, 1970; Earthscan, 1990. butler, Octavia. E. The Parable of the Sower. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2007 [1993], p. 3-6. de jesus, Carolina Maria. Ibid, p. 11. Id. Ibid., p. 81. Id. Ibid., p. 29. Id. Ibid., p. 12. Id. Ibid., p. 85. Id. Ibid., p. 149. Id. Ibid., p. 37. Id. Ibid., p. 165. Id. Ibid., p. 147. Id. Ibid., p. 27. Id. Ibid., p. 185. Id. Ibid., p. 188.

What an

Happens Artistic

n the first days of March 2020, the first resident artists of Pivô Research program were welcomed at the space and started to settle in their designated studios. Within less than a week, the institution and the entire country underwent lockdown. ¶ A proposal for an experimental “remote residency” was quickly outlined and presented to the residents. The new program relied on the experience of guest curators Livia Benedetti and Marcela Vieira, responsible for overseeing this cycle. Benedetti and Vieira are cofounders of the digital platform aarea.co, aimed at artistic projects specially conceived for the web. On that note, they were the ones to introduce Pivô to Zoom, which wasn’t yet a ubiquitous tool in everyday working from home practices. ¶ The first cycle of

When the

Residence Pivô Research 2020 was therefore a pilot experiment. Remote residencies turned out to be a way to deepen the institution’s understanding of the specificities of digital media, in order to carry on with our mission while our doors remained shut. Since then, three cycles a year have been occurring online and, as the “curve flattens”, the studio spaces have gradually being occupied. In the last year, Pivô finally managed to secure a much-needed research fellowship for all the resident artists. ¶ Taking part in an artistic residency without leaving their actual residencies raised many questions: How can an artistic residency happen remotely? What to think of a residency when it occurs from the residence itself ? Some artists and curators who shared this experience try to answer these questions. [LF]

It Residency

in Itself?

The residency can be a moment to open spaces, to move the artists within inquietudes about their own work. I believe that, in Pivô’s residency, this movement occurred through an investigation about the hidden meanings in the words we draw to drive our practice. ¶ We were provided with a distorted time to build reflections that always bumped into another artist’s thoughts and created an individual challenge, often shared (via audios, drawings, screenshots), resulting in an approach where the meaning of the words “physical” or “face-to-face” weakened in their importance. ADRIANO MACHADO

Thinking about a residency without leaving home implies detaching the idea of the studio space as a place for research. ¶ In many cases, artist residencies are looking for a place to physically develop our plastic and creative research. The physical space and the possibility of getting to know another context, different from the personal one, force us to question our practices in relation to other realities. In this sense, space influences and becomes an agent of a residency. However, when we develop an art residency without residing in a context other than our own, and even if we do it virtually or remotely, it makes our approach less material in terms of artistic production and allows the practice to take on a more critical and reflective position. ¶ This is why remote or home-based residencies are closer to the idea of a study group about the same practice and the different realities of those who take part in it. CHRISTIAN SALABLANCA DÍAZ

When body and home are merged and become inseparable, to reside elsewhere may mean to get closer to other bodies; to inhabit, even if from a distance, perspectives that can only be triggered by relationships with those who are not equivalent to us. ¶ Therefore, in the experience of the Pivô Research online during that 4th month of the pandemic in Brazil, the displacement that seemed to us not only possible, but also desirable, was an invitation for each participant not to be exclusively dedicated to him or herself during the residency. In an attempt to relieve some of the saturation of self that many of us had already been experiencing, we proposed a space-time of interlocutions that took as central not only the process of making oneself known, but also, with equal importance, that of diving into the other. We try to provoke some—even if minimal—inflection in the experience of social enclosure that tends to put each one in their bubble, mixing our angles a little more, drawing a more relational geometry. ¶ That was the displacement that, in a residency in our own residences, we had as a horizon. CLARISSA DINIZ

To tension the concept of art residency, where everything that operates within the “institutional” field becomes a domestic extension. The processes that are stored for a space like “studio” are no longer directed outside of it, they adapt to the system of the home without any kind of projection/ fantasy of art space vs. home space. The question is only: discipline so as not to sink into a “burnout with spots of aesthetic enjoyment”, that is, the illusion of functioning 24/7 since such art is no longer separated from life when it is made within one’s own residence. DENISE ALVES-RODRIGUEZ

Photoperformance. That was the viable language. ¶ On March 10 I arrive in São Paulo. I stay at Juan Parada’s house. ¶ I arrived at Copan! I spotted Helô Sanvoy and we went to investigate the castle walls. My space is incredible, illuminated and abysmal. A blank slate. I am interested in the balcony, a sumptuous corridor between tons of concrete and glass and people. ¶ Through the crack I can peek into the work of the neighbors, who are of the highest level, David Bergé, who lives between Athens and Brussels, works with spaces and paths. I can spy an area of taps. A spa? ¶ We are welcomed by Fernanda Brenner, Leo Felipe and Rachel Sena, a circle-oracle to establish the first contact. For the Pivô residence I propose a cycle of actions with the artists Eleonora Gomes, Gustavo Francesconi, Leo Bardo and Adriana Tabalipa. Practices in open sessions of performance art. ¶ Now I have two beach chairs from the maze-workshop. Matias Oliveira is sharing the fan with me. ¶ On the 15th I have to go back, before they close everything. David left a book for me in the office! ¶ In Curitiba, isolated, how to do performance art? ¶ (Giving up Pivô is not a possibility.) Looking inside! Inside the egg. ¶ Along comes Carolina Mendonça’s interlocution (!!!) and we discuss the poetics of monstrosity. ¶ Fernanda Pompermayer will photograph the objects that I brought to São Paulo. EDUARDO CARDOSO AMATO

hen I applied for the Pivô Research selection, I already thought that this residency time would be W of great gain for my artistic process and for my personal growth. Participating in an artist residency, in difficult times, of social distancing, of paralysis in the cultural sector, becomes a way to remain artistically active. Pivô Research, remotely, provided me with discussions with several artists and curators, from various locations in Brazil. During this remote residency period, I have been closer to my creative process, to the notebooks—to the materials and thoughts of working at home—and close to the processes of the other residents and noticing similarities/differences that each one has experienced, in the current moment of uncertainty that we live in. Thus, being a resident and the existence of spaces for residencies, in virtual environments, are of utmost importance in the current artistic context. Residencies become places of poetic resistance. ESTEVÃO PARREIRAS

The question you asked was one of the things I asked myself when I saw that I had been selected for last year’s program and that it would take place remotely. I was like, guys, is this possible? Could everything that I was planning for the Pivô residency program, that I wanted to research and think about, could all of this be possible? Will the exchanges that I was willing to have have will have the same level of quality that I imagined they would have? And surprisingly for me the answer was yes. Surprisingly because my work happens, or rather, used to happen mostly in a very face-to-face way, that is, in a non-virtual way of presence. Not only mine but also that of other colleagues who participated in the same cycle as me. And it was very interesting to see how we managed to get around what would then be this emptiness, but which was not really an emptiness. What would be this relationship through the intermediary of light, both of this screen-body that casts the illumination, and the camera-body that captures the light as well. And how much effort was necessary for this to happen, how much I realized that not only me, but all the people were there with the same intention of connecting beyond the idea of being connected online on the internet, in order to seek this idea of connection that maybe we could have interpersonally if we were all physically in the space of Pivô, at Copan. And that everything in the end turned into a great speculation and didn’t cease to happen, in fact the cycle was very remarkable also because one of the twists it gave me was this, the possibility to think of the multiple ways that my work, for example: I could be present now and participate in a research process, an immersion process that doesn’t necessarily need to be connected there hand to hand, because there were other ways without us losing the quality of being together. This was very magical and at the same time very hard work. It was really necessary that all the people were willing for this to happen so that we were not just in some zoom meeting. And that doesn’t mean that we didn’t have obstacles. During the process, silences, exhaustion too, I think there is an exhaustion of being there, an exhaustion of the screen itself, because not only me, but I think other people were also involved with other works that also had the computer as mediation. But anyway, I can’t say what a remote residency is made of, but I know that the residency I did at Pivô was made of a lot of effort and collective effort to be there. A collective effort to really be together. Maybe as cheesy as it sounds, it is very real, because it really was a collective will to make it work, without knowing exactly what would mean to work within that context. And it ended up working out (laughs). IAGOR PERES

To be in an Art residency is to be open to exchanges and connections. Either with others, or with what is reverberating internally or externally. To me, it is more a “way of being,” rather than a “where to be.” We can make our residences (in a broad sense) anywhere, as long as the intention is there. JULIA DA MOTA

yesterday I broke a white crockery cup. by the way, this cup I brought home from the opening night of the 23rd british culture festival, at the british culture center. it was an evening that the institution offers to the winners of the festival. in this case, we were on behalf of the play IMAGINE. I left the building, in the pinheiros discrict, drinking my english tea in this cup that has become part of the set of china here at home, each one coming from a different situation. ¶ when I looked at the broken crockery, I realized that it was yoko’s work itself, and yoko and john are the main references of our piece “IMAGINE.” “mend piece”: shards of white crockery arranged to be glued together collectively. ¶ once, angelica freitas posted on instagram: “the spellchecker always stubbornly inserts crazy when we write crockery.” ¶ this event produced at home, in the kitchen, the clearance of the boundary line that supposedly defines “work of art.” in situations like this, ¶ and contradictorily for the sake of a “work,” we are able to see the strange beauty of a broken white cup. and the crockery the crazy crockery has been the great partner of the residency in times of health crisis. ¶ as we have been doing every meal at home since March 2020, washing the dishes-washing the dishes is the most insistent artistic practice of the moment. ¶ I answer the question. ¶ first, we cannot ignore the fact that the context of Pivô Research residency, in the case of my cycle, took place simultaneously with the suspension of the world ¶—during the first three months that no one knew where it would lead. ¶ so the whole process happened starting from this adaptation/adaptation that we had to create almost instantaneously. ¶ if it is possible? it was possible. ¶ I don’t know exactly how to describe what happened. ¶ I may have been able to reiterate that a large part of my processes are domestic, I have always worked from home, the “é selo de língua” is at home, the library is at home. ¶ and I remember this interview dominique gonzalez-foerster gave to obrist about her meeting with félix gonzalez-torres ¶ “yes, he would stay at the table, read, always worked at home, and in that we were also very similar: I was never a studio artist either. we were apartment artists, also in the sense that we both talked about books, about reading, about what we did to eat, about photos… we shared the same love for the 10x15 format, the snapshots, and for everything that could have to do with a domestic format. and also the letters he wrote me (…). I have never met anyone who had this attention, an attention also as a form of beauty, a beauty that is not frozen. (…). his sense of beauty went toward the ephemeral, rather than what is already finished and done.” ¶ much of what I produced were e-mails, ¶ attempts to address. ¶ to chat. ¶ and some conversations have stretched on ¶ have lingered—and are in flux until now. ¶ I also think it’s important ¶ the big piece we don’t know ¶ suddenly other contact points appear ¶ this is what I work for ¶ to free the accesses ¶ and let things just wander around. ¶ p.s.: I remembered that the caption of my blog post had this vice-versa. ¶ I leave it here ¶ “… it is at home as well as the remote residency that I am part of. the work space in the residency is my home, which is the residence where I work.” ¶ p.s.: to get to the blog, I ran into a page that said ¶ “… Participants are offered a research scholarship-aid in the amount of r$ 750 per month, throughout the term of the program.” ¶ and I did not get it. JULIA ROCHA

In a very unique performance, since we are talking about aarea (which has chosen to inhabit the virtual in its different facets)—the residency is completely possible—and by this, I mean that I find it complete in its entirety. The experience that we had already been investigating, scrutinizing, and refining in the artworks exhibited in the site was expanded, moving on to the encounters and consequently to the zone of affections, which is no less obvious, full of surprises and challenges by its very nature, be it virtual or not. Everything there interested us, and everything there could be interesting. And it was. ¶ The residency made from one’s residence (on the internet) must be thought of without prejudice and without comparison (with physical space). But there is no formula; the answer can only be found at the end of the process, with hindsight. Even if the proposers have in mind a project, a proposition, the residence will be discovered collectively, within this very relative space and time, open—and here I speak with optimism—to every opportunity of the language. Pure construction. MARCELA VIEIRA

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MATHEUS CHIARATTI

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PEDRO ZYLBERSZTAJN

First time I will spend more than a month in Brazil after eight years away. ¶ Before starting at Pivô, a trip along the coast. My brother would come with me, we would do the Joatinga crossing. I buy the tickets, snacks and insect repellent for four days of camping, but an hour before we leave he has an anxious outburst and gives up the trip. ¶ I am at the pharmacy buying antiallergic when my mother calls with the news. My brother lives with her, I am living with my grandmother. “Your brother is lying on the bedroom floor in the dark, motionless, afraid you will be angry at him.” ¶ That’s fine. I’m going by myself. São Paulo—Paraty / Paraty—Rio. I retrace my uncle’s steps. At 21 he left home and went to live in Copacabana, in an apartment bought by my grandfather. ¶ In Rio, the first cases of Covid in Brazil are reported. In pharmacies, alcohol gel is in short supply. I visit my aunt, we talk about my uncle. She tells me the circumstances in which he contracted HIV in the early 90s, and what it was like when they lived together, when they returned to São Paulo, and she was taking care of him. ¶ On the plane back to São Paulo, I am already afraid of the Coronavirus, and ashamed every time my allergy leads me to a sneeze... muffled in the mask, I sneeze inward, implosive. ¶ The residency begins, we enter the studios, I buy an armchair with wheels and drag it through Consolação all the way to Copan. ¶ Living with my grandmother has been difficult. She sleeps with the door open and wakes up every time I come home at night, she hears my footsteps in the hallway, asks me if “everything is okay,” and this unsettles me, I’m not used to someone being so concerned about me anymore. ¶ Infections grow in São Paulo. The residency becomes virtual. Afraid of infecting my grandmother, I move to the apartment with my mother and brother, far away from everything, but with two balconies and a small swimming pool in the courtyard. ¶ New habits: reading novels standing in the pool. Madame Bovary and La Disparition. My uncle’s topics. With my mother and brother, a new coexistence, unexpected, after all we had not lived together for more than ten years and until recently my father lived there and his presence made everyone tense. ¶ The three of us are now very close. I cook for them the dishes I learned to cook myself: shakshuka and yakissoba. We exercise: crossfit in the living room and krav maga in the yard. In one of the classes, my brother punches me with all the contained violence of already two months of quarantine. A pain starts in my right shoulder, a pain that ibuprofen and the massage wheel relieve but do not resolve. ¶ Three months later, back in Germany, MRI reveals, “Wear in the acromioclavicular joint, signs of arthrosis (despite young age).” ¶ A year later, it still hurts. Even with physical therapy and steroid injections. Three weeks ago my mother had an operation for breast cancer. The operation seemed to have gone well, but the biopsy reveals that fragments of the cancer still remain and she must have another operation in three weeks. ¶ Right breast. A ganglion is compromised. I will go back to Brazil: she needs help. Someone to cook, wash the dishes, and bathe her. WALTER SOLON

question what were the ways that we wanted to connect and to be okay with each other. When we launched the letter to you, at the beginning, questioning the possibility of having a scholarship, a permanence scholarship, this was very much an arrow, the way our residency took place. I think it was a first moment, I think we also proved that an artistic residency is made up of encounters, because even though we were separated from each other, we still shared a space-time of residency. Those were very intense exchanges, but at the same time they were exchanges that required a range of encounters from us, I think if it were otherwise, maybe it would be intense in another way as well. Anyway, these are some of the things that I think, these spaces of dignity, where the Money and the meetings are some of the pillars that sustain our relationship with the institution and with the very idea of collective creation and collective dialogue. YHURI CRUZ

I think that to do an art residency from home, the first thing is to have a home, to understand that home is much more than the ceiling, the wall, it is really to have a place of dignity for you to really think about creation. Because I think it is very difficult to think of creation in a place without dignity. Of course, many of us think within these circumstances. I feel that both the Pivô and the residents themselves tried to make this moment of the pandemic a moment to rethink and really

Beatriz Santiago Muñoz on her visual translation of Les Guerrilleres as told to Fernanda Brenner

TRANSLATING LES GUÉRRILLÈRES Every serious translator knows the point where one language cannot be translated into another. A translation process goes far beyond a mere exercise in finding direct correspondences between foreign words. The “untranslatable” is often the first trigger to language experimentation and opening access keys to different contexts. What does it mean to “translate” cultures, nuances and turn phrases into images or words? What is lost when we cannot speak in the language that we feel to be our own, and what kind of magic happens within frustrations of incommunicability? ¶ Les Guèrrilléres, a novel by Monique Wittig, first published in French in 1969 revealed limitations of that language as some supposedly neutral structure. In the book, Wittig subverts the use of pronouns and other linguistic structures to narrate a kind of epopee experimented by a tribe composed of bodies understood as female, referred to as “elles” in the original. When the author actively refuses the gender-binary (still perceived as a natural division), by subverting the use of language, she offers a challenge until then not quite usual to her translators: how to tell a story completely removed from the shackles and predeterminations of heteronormative ideas? ¶ In 2021, artist Puerto Rican artist Beatriz Santiago Muñoz exhibited at Pivô her multichannel audiovisual installation Oriana, loosely based on Wittig’s novel, translated for the first time into Portuguese by Raquel Camargo (with Jamille Pinheiro) in 2020. Santiago Muñoz and Camargo reflect upon their processes, choices, and obstacles in reconfiguring this emblematic text. [FB]

read Les Guérillères when I was around 19 years old. I think I spent all of this time figuring out what it does and how it does it; what are its structural and formal elements… I mean the use of the pronouns1, which Wittig has questioned and written about specifically on essays that were, in a way, the theme of both L’Opoponax (1964) and Les Guérillères (1969). In these books, she creates a subject outside the heterosexual binary—or the binary implied by compulsory heterosexuality—that exists in political and social life and is indexed in language. For example, the beginning of the novel—or what could be read as the beginning of the chronological time—is about two thirds into the book. It has a circular structure. Other elements contribute to this break with gender normativity, like the presence of displaced proper names throughout the text and other, harder to describe, aspects to it. For example, there is no remark of interiority in the text. Wittig was a materialist Marxist thinker, and she was also considering the classical structure of the novel and also the idea of the individual. She created a story that stands against the multi-layered interiority that is the individual in the modern world. Les Guérillères is a novel that, in terms of its form, does away with that completely. You go from singular subject to singular subject. The description is based on senses, actions, and the relation between bodies and objects. People may scream, piss and vomit, though you do not access feelings or some interior difference. Each singular subject is constructed by describing their sensorial life, which is really interesting and strange. It has something to do with Wittig’s insistence on creating a universal subject outside of the heteronormative binary. In a way, it’s a remaking of the subject’s relationships to the world. There’s one essay in The Straight Mind 2 in which she speaks about her, let’s say, dissatisfaction with the English translation that replaces “elles” with “the women”; as if women could only be defined in relation to men. What she wanted with the book was to create, or emphasize, the emergence of a subject that exists outside of that system. In this essay, she points out that “they” is a pronoun that should be ungendered. She can redefine it through its relationship to the adjectives and verbs and to other words that surround it. She speaks how this isn’t just a matter of pronouns but a kind of reconstruction of language at the level of its underlying structure, at the “the nerves of language,” as Wittig says. The reason why I’ve been interested in this book for so long is that I think it works! I think it does what it set out to do, and through a straightforward formal mechanism: don’t take anything for granted; don’t take gender language for granted; don’t take the structure of the novel for granted or even the idea

that one should understand a character or follow subjects in their interiority. So, I’ve been trying to think about what does it mean to do that in film. Of course, this is an impossible problem, because it’s very different to do this through language, written language. It would be another thing if it was spoken or a performed speech, which is embodied. There is a way in which language can exist by itself on the page, and in speech, it cannot. Even that alone—the change from text to speech—would be already one complication. Still, adding this embodiment or finding its analog in film or video is another problem because of “the language of looking” that informs filmmaking. Those are the things I’m thinking about in this new project. I’m constantly trying to answer the impossible question of what this sort of “analog” would be. I was able to retain the idea that you don’t follow anyone, you don’t see a person appear and then find out what happened to them, or in which ways are they conflicted or what the relationship between this person and the other. It has no importance at all. What is important is the particular moment when these subjects relate to each other and their sensorial and visual descriptions. I stayed with the image of the group of singular elles that make up the larger collective. There are aspects of written language that behave differently when vocalized; for instance, when a proper name is mentioned within the film it has a different weight than in text. The “she” spoken by a woman in the film does not do the same thing that the “she” one reads in the text. These are some issues that I’ve been struggling with. Another aspect that I think it’s essential in the text is its “presentness.” How it describes things is always non-hierarchical. When Wittig writes that “they might do this” or “they might do this other thing” or “they might dream themselves to oblivion, or pick flowers or instead they will decide this other thing… there’s never a single description of a battle won or lost. A different kind of novel would tell you who was the winner of a particular fight and would describe it in detail or in an emotional way. There is a kind of distance in the way she is describing that brings out a really strong set of images, smells, feelings … all of that seem like pieces of the idea of taking the gender out of language, out of these pronouns, and taking the binary out of gender or any form of domination. What Wittig really hates is “the male” as the generic subject, in grammar, in the realm of philosophy… the masculine is a universalizing experience while feminine is the particular. She is really interested not only in an inversion of this but in finding a different kind of universal subject. She knows that it is not just about the use of pronouns but everything else that is constructed around it. This part makes me think that there is something there that I could transfer to film.

In filmmaking, it’s not only the story you tell or how things move from here to there that matters, but also how the camera approaches a body or how it defines the viewer’s position, how it creates a kind of desiring viewer as well. I’m interested in the way you frame, the angle through which you observe something, how this also contains a type of ethics for example, in how the camera moves. Whether it moves like a body or like a machine, or whether it looks straight at something or from somewhere… I think all these things are, in many ways, already assumptions. They are analog to the way the structure of a novel might take for granted who or how a subject is constructed. That’s sort of how I’m thinking about Wittig’s task in terms of language. I’m also really interested in this kind of grand gesture and the idea of the “total battle” where she sets her experiments with language. I wouldn’t say that the somewhat futuristic or retro sci-fi aspects she uses to describe imaginary tribes, animals, weapons or signals are utopian… I think she knows in depth that language and the world co-create each other. Wittig is interested in how language bears the mark of gender, which makes me want to ask how a visual construction bears gender. There are moving bodies in this film. It’s not only about how the camera moves or how I’m using it when women’s bodies are populating the film. That is not the same thing as words on a page. It creates its own questions. A couple of years ago I read a book by Svetlana Alekseivich called Unwomanly Face of the War. She is a Russian journalist and writer who works mainly from oral histories and interviews. It is a recollection of women’s testimonials on the Second World War. The way those women describe their experience, their memories, is so similar to Wittig’s novel. It’s so strange. Oddly, it is the only thing in which I saw a connection to the structure of Les Guèrillerés. I brought this up because it still intrigues me. Why is that? What is it about their experience and the way they remember that leads to that connection? There is one moment in which the author describes a man sitting next to the woman she is interviewing, correcting her dates and places. She doesn’t remember the dates or locations, but she remembers exactly how it felt to squat in a swamp very quietly with somebody else who had a small baby. Her description of these scenes is similar to what Wittig is doing in the book. Perhaps this is not related at all, but Wittig was trying to describe the material conditions of women as a class and how this class is created through sociolinguistic, political and material structures. The category of women is created by all these different systems and the book highlights that. Talking more specifically about translation, in this work, I am thinking about translating these ideas conveyed in the book into film. Not only the ideas but the actual questions. How do these questions translate into

something happening in front of a camera or in speech rather than in written text? One last thing that is really important about the text is that all these moments in which they speak, narrate, ask each other questions, and scream. Their speech is so important, so central. What matters is keeping the record of an action, to then question that record. To tell a story while questioning the story, tearing it apart. The subject of the text folds in itself, and it makes total sense. In terms of translation, the questions that I should be asking are about how to see, how one is seen, how to embody, what is the embodiment of words and other kinds of sensorial queries. Perhaps my first attempt in visually answering these questions should have been an adaptation of L’Opoponax 3, which is in first-person and set in childhood, not precisely set in childhood, but during the development of the “I,” or what she calls: the “subject of discourse” during childhood. This other book implies a first-person experience of the world and clearly indicates how you should use the camera. Maybe it would have been an easier first experiment (laughter), but I still love Les Guérillères.

Translating Les Guérillères by Monique Wittig [From French into Portuguese] Raquel Camargo

mong the many ways of viewing translations, it is possible to think of them as a spectacular activity. Its role would be to produce a mirror of the original copy, project it in the destination language, some would say, with the “utmost fidelity.” The idea of fidelity on translation is now unsustainable—“What is fidelity related to?”, “To which dimensions of the work?”, “To which choices?”, these would be some of the first questions to ask if we want to destroy this paradigm. In the same manner, the (sole) image of mirroring does not seem like a good choice. Not by chance, in the field of translation studies, a notion of refraction, which pointedly produces deviations, is today considered more appropriate to reflect upon the translation activity. Among other aspects, it allows one to realize that transferences between one work and the other are not linear. In the Brazilian translation of Les Guérillères (As Guerrilheiras 1), however, the challenge presented required us to go beyond2. Within the work itself, in the questioning brought up by the Guérillères, language is a source of suspicion. It is impregnated commonplaces, and it is urgent to deconstruct it: They say, the language you speak is made up of words that are killing you. They say, the language you speak is made up of signs that rightly speaking designate what men have appropriated. Whatever they have not laid hands on, whatever they have not pounced on like may-eyed birds of prey, does not appear in the language you speak.3

If patriarchy appropriated language to the point that it does not allow us to think and speak in different ways, as fossilized as it is in a world molded by men, how can we say that which cannot be said? How can we create a new language to speak of silences, to think on intervals, to encompass that which is not seen in the malleability of signs, which is not formed in words? As the anarchic muses the Guérillères whisper in our ears: 1

2 3

The most used pronoun in Monique Wittig’s book Les guérillères is “elles” (a plural of she or feminine they). The author sees the lesbian as a figure that exceeds the categories of sex and gender, and navigate outside the political regime of heterosexuality. By addressing this issues through the subversion of the use of pronouns, Wittig opened up a conceptual path that had been unthinkable before. See more in: Namascar Shaktini (ed.), On Monique Wittig: Theoretical, Political, and Literary Essays. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2005. Monique Wittig, The Straight Mind and Other Essays. Boston: Beacon Press, 1992. Idem, L’Opoponax. Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1964.

When referring to the book, we’ll use the title in italics Les Guérillères (which kept the same title in its US edition and was translated as As Guerrilheiras in Portuguese); when referring to the female guerillas who compose the work, we will write the word with a cap: Guérillères. Les Guérillères, an epic-poetic prose book by Monique Wittig, was first published in 1969 by Éditions de Minuit. It was translated into Brazilian Portuguese by Jamille Pinheiro Dias and Raquel Camargo (author of the present essay) in 2019, published by Editora Ubu. Translator’s note: The excerpts in English are extracted from the US edition of the book, first published by Viking Press in 1971, translated by David Le Vay. The version used was the Kindle edition of the 2007 paperback published by the University of Illinois Press. wittig, Monique. Translated from the French by David Le Vay. Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois press, 2007, Kindle edition, loc. 860.

… this can be found in the gaps, in all that which is not a continuation of their discourse, in the zero, the O, the perfect circle that you invent to imprison them and to overthrow them.4

Intervals, discontinuations, gaps. Breaches to reinvent, to create on new bases. In Wittig’s project, revolution must arise from the interior of language. Destabilization of established order will come from a shake-up of language. Because of that, the Guérillères’ language is—has to be—ingenious. However, is there a staring point for such deconstruction? Where to start to encompass such ingeniousness? In its collective project, aiming at founding a new revolutionary order, the Guérillères ask themselves: “What was the beginning?” and they tell us that … in the beginning they are huddled against each other. They are like black sheep. Their open their mouths to bleat or to say something but no sound emerges. Their hair their curls are plastered against their foreheads. The move over the smooth shining surface. Their movements are translation, gliding. They are dazed by the reflections over which they pass. Their limbs gain no adhesion anywhere. Vertically and horizontally, it is the same mirror neither hot nor cold, it is the same brilliance which nowhere holds them fast. They advance, there is no front, there is no rear. They move on, there is no future, there is no past.5

The challenge of the Guérillères is reflected, therefore, in the challenge of translation itself. And, to understand it, we need, every time, at every translation choice, to “listen” to the work, to harvest what it has to tell us so that the translation will say it too, in its own way. Let’s go back, them briefly, and think a bit about what is acting in the Guérillères, about the issues present in the book. According to a French critic of the book, it is possible to think of Les Guérillères as a kind of épopée6. An epic poem, if we can say so, having as main subject the elles (feminine they) anonymous collective. The structure “they say,” ever present in the original and equally present in the translation, captures the foundation of a new worlds enunciated by “women.” Quotation marks are justified because this collective women’s subject, “elles,” do not exactly correspond to the image of women, seeing that the idea of “woman” in entrapped by a system of binary thought; in a heteronormative ecology that imprisons any idea of woman, of feminine, in 4 5 6

Ibid, loc. 863. Ibid, loc. 192. Among other women authors, cf. ecarnot, Catherine. “Monique Wittig: Le chantier littéraire et le métier d’écrivain.” Nouvelles Questions Féministes: vol. 31, no. 1, 2012, pp. 141-144 <https://doi.org/10.3917/nqf.311.0141>.

a dualistic system: masculine/feminine; man/woman. To escape this duality is, therefore, to recreate possible worlds, to find new ecologies of life that are still to come, which acquire existence as they are executed, experienced, recreated without the help of a mark existing before the collectivity of “elles.” From this collective subject, which also reflects a place of plural enunciation in a world without men, the Guérillères found revolutionary orders through their discourses, putting into work a community within utopian lines, inaugurating possible realities. We watch these “women,” their ways of life and their discoveries in a reality without men from a three-part organization whose divisions are graphically marked by circles. In the first two we see a society of “women” marching and escaping the binary issues typical of this category. On the last part, what we have is a war between women and men, which could have happened at the beginning, at the foundation of the new order. What is fought, however, is not exactly men, but the logic of domination. The logic of possession, of possessing things and worlds, established symbols: They say, men have foreseen everything, they have christened your revolt in advance a slave revolt. A revolt against nature, they call it revolt when you want to appropriate what is theirs, the phallus. The women say, I refuse henceforward to speak this language, I refuse to mumble after them the words lack of penis lack of money lack of insignia lack of name. I refuse to pronounce the names of possession and non-possession. They say, if I take over the world, let it be to dispossess myself of it immediately, let it be to forge new links between myself and the world.7

War is necessary so the new order is founded, but men’s status as is not to be maintained by the Guérillères: They say, it would be a grave mistake to imagine that I would go, me, a woman, to speak violently against men when they have ceased to be my enemies.8

To Wittig’s extraordinary powerful prose, a philosophical power, an epistemological revolution is added. After the hetero-patriarchy is vanquished, it is necessary to devise new logics, recreate with intelligence so domination forms are not reproduced under new guises. At this point, let us go back to translation. Facing this quick panorama, what is reserved to it? To us, it does not seem like an option to start a translation biased reading of Les Guérillères without reflecting upon the 7 8

Ibidem, loc. 804. Ibidem, loc. 1008.

project developed in the book itself. By listening to it, by learning it, how is it possible that translation answers to it, reacts to it? To put it in a different way, in order to get to know a translation project and to fulfill it, it is necessary, each time, and every time in its own way, to understand what the original work is telling us, what are its times and what can be translated into other languages and in a different context of reception. Regarding literary works, it is usual, even recommended, that translation works as a very fine film, allowing the original work to go through it, getting to a new context without many burdens, without hiccups, flowing. In these cases, it is possible to see the colors of the source work, weirdnesses are not effaced, they are not left behind. According to Lawrence Venuti9 ethics regarding the otherness of a foreign work, its strangeness, must be contemplated. This dimension of respect to the original work was mobilized in the translation of Les Guérillères ; however, it was also necessary to adhere to a translation project with a more interventionist bias. Generally speaking, it can be said that the translation of Les Guérillères happened as the response to an impulse, a stimulus. This was the way found to make Wittig’s project come to Brazilian Portuguese in the 21st Century: an answer, a response to the original work. In a more specific plane, three aspects can be highlighted among translation choices that composed this project. One of them, as previously mentioned, is an interventive action, to a certain point, by the translators. In a way, the original work asks for a strong translation for a work equally powerful. After all, they are Guérillères. In order for them to come to us with their own revolutionary force and power, it is not enough to allow, through linguistic choices, that they cross over the frontiers of the languages and exist on this side. In other words, the language revolution advocated by the Guérillères needs to be heard and replicated by its translation. It has to react to this elan, of course going through choices. It has to undertake an interventive recreation, at some level, but never autonomously, always reacting to the original work. When they are transposed to the Brazilian reality, Les Guérillères will sound differently, they will revolutionize differently. And, so that they can explode on this side, on the Brazilian Portuguese side, they need energic act, a force, an activity of re-composition that can be thought of as interventive. In other words, in order for the power of the words to be transferred, it is necessary that the Guérillères update themselves at the moment they inhabit a different language. One of the most evident examples of such intervention is found in the name of the warriors themselves: 9

Cf. venuti, Lawrence. Escândalos da tradução: por uma ética da diferença. Trad. Laureano Pelegrini, Lucinéia Marcelino Villela, Marileide Dias Esqueda e Valéria Biondo. Bauru: edusc, 2002.

ce qui les désigne commme l’œil des cyclopes, leur unique prénom, osée balkis sara nicée iole coré sabine danièle galswinthe edna josèphe10 o que as nomeia como o olho dos ciclopes, seu único nome próprio, oseias balkis sara niceia iole coré sabine daniela galsuinta edna josefa11 that which identifies them like the eye of the cyclops, their single forename, oseas balkis sara nicea iola cora sabina daniela galwintha edna josepha12

In principle, translating forenames goes against a translation that respects the otherness of the source work, when weirdness is allowed to sound, be present in the translated work. However, in this instance, respect also goes through an idea of expansion of the Guérillères through the creation of identification devices, through a new necessary guise so adherence to readers, both women and men, are created on this shoe of the Atlantic. In other words, respect for Wittig’s utopian project implies inclusion of extra otherness in this project, a widening of its reach through a device of approximation of the work to readers located in today’s Brazil, more than fifty years after Les Guérrillères was first published in France. In order for the Guérillères to land on this shore, it is crucial to allow things that are able to connect to do so, not to eliminate comparative effects. It is possible, for example, to cast a trans-historical view to the tribe of Guérillères women that was mobilized, although with caution, with references to the Pindorama matriarchy by Oswald de Andrade13. Or, why not, it is even possible to invoke the mythological version of the warrior Amazonas of the 10 11 12 13

wittig, Monique. Les Guérrillères. Les Éditions de Minuit: Paris, [1969] 2005, p. 15. wittig. 2019, p. 11. wittig. 2007, Loc. 64. Cf. amaral, Maria Carolina de Almeida; nodari, Alexandre. “A questão (indígena) do Manifesto Antropófago.” Revista Direito e Práxis. Rio de Janeiro, vol. 9, n. 4, 2018. <https://www.scielo.br/j/rdp/a/nRTJWzK4pkWq8CM wG7Lqz7G/?lang=pt>.

Native Brazil, which takes to the myth of the Icamiabas,14 warrior women from a tribe with no men, living in a matriarchal society. Such references, when mobilized, allow to read the work closer to familiar imaginaries to the many brazils within Brazil. A second, equally important aspect in the translation of forenames is the possibility of vocalizing them, of evoking such names, of pronouncing them in Portuguese. Again, respect for the work’s otherness also goes through focus on the readers, both women and men, in order to insert them in the Guérillères’ reality, including the possibility of pronouncing their names with certain familiarity. In this sense, adapting forenames to Brazilian Portuguese is also a way to accomplish a possible ethos of Wittig’s epopee. Even though it was written the year after May 1968 and, of course, in a direct dialogue with it, Monique Wittig’s prose goes beyond, extrapolates, overflows. Its power and its ability to cross over temporalities explain, some say, the ratification of May 1968, but also its need for expansion.15

Therefore, political effects derive from this choice, which permeates the whole book, of “transcribing” the as Guérillères to Brazil, allowing them, also, to be called by their Brazilian names. They are Niceia, Daniela, Josefa, Lélia, Isadora. They are Marlene, Gabriela, Domingas, Helena. They are Regina, they are Madalena, they are Cecília. And why not? If updated to Brazilian realities in the 21st Century, they are always women in Brazilian inner cities, single mothers in low-income communities whose practical experiences are close to what we could recognize as matriarchy. Translating forenames was, therefore, a political option to update the work; to allow it to be (re)situated and (re)updated; so, it is read, also, through the lenses of a current reality in the 21st-Century-Brazil, producing possible connections, fulfilling, in any case, this poly-temporal ethos and the work’s opening. In other words, because it is situated in a moving reality of confrontation, the Guérillères project can expand to other realities, translating them, but also letting itself be translated by them. Still regarding these openings, the work’s uncertainties that make it great, inclusive, poly- temporal, some choices included keeping if not otherness, aspects that are prominent. Or, according to Antoine Berman,16 aspects that converge to form semantic nets in the work, i.e., manners of speaking, specific compositions that add sense to the work. Occasionally, 14 Cf. almeida, Luiz Sávio; galindo, Marcos; silva, Edson. Índios do Nordeste: temas e problemas. Maceió: edufal, 1999. <http://etnolinguistica.wdfiles.com/local--files/biblio%3Amindlin-1999-amazonas/Mindlin_1999_AsAmazonasOuIcamiabas.pdf>. 15 Cf. <https://www.franceculture.fr/oeuvre/les-guerilleres>. 16 berman, Antoine. La traduction et la lettre ou l’auberge du lointain. Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1999.

these senses were constructed through distortions in language and syntax. An example of such compositions can be read in one of the excerpts above, repeated here: [They say] that in the beginning they are huddled against each other. They are like black sheep. Their open their mouths to bleat or to say something but no sound emerges. Their hair their curls are plastered against their foreheads. The move over the smooth shining surface (author’s italics).17

Despite mentioning something anterior, the narrative that supposedly would allude to a past time, a beginning before now, the French verbs are used in the present. The translation pointedly restores this choice in Portuguese [and English]. The habitual temporality it presupposes, with some linearity, the order of past, present, and future, is disturbed by the choice of verbal tense. The Guérillères talk about the beginning, supposedly “before,” but they situate it in the present. This juxtaposition of temporalities says something about the ongoing revolution itself. Even though there is a beginning, there is no past to dictate the present’s path or a future to be anticipated, glimpsed. The time is for rupture. It is for opening space to what is new, to invention. Les Guérillères are not static. Monique Wittig’s prose flows, it stays in a shaky zone. Translation, on the other hand, aims at reacting to that, to (re)produce these movements. The translation was composed through choices such as those exemplified here, ruminated each time and with attention developed to the many layers of the work. It gained its own life, it became, in its own way, but always as a response, as refraction. If on the one hand it is composed of thought-of decisions, on the other it opens itself to extrapolation, occasionally allowing the work to often overflow. And, in these gaps, departing from the collective subject of enunciation elles and a temporal mix that highlights the future, the following derivation can be made: Revolution is female, it is now!

wittig. 2019, loc. 192.

MEMORIES FROM THE PLAZA

anuel Solano was born in Mexico City and currently lives in Berlin. From their individual experience as dissident body (in their case, a nonbinary person who lost their sight due to complications caused by hiv), they examine how pop culture produces conflicting identities and molds sensitivities. ¶ The exhibition Heliplaza explores Solano’s relationship with the shopping malls they visited with their family since they were a child when they still could see. By delving into a mental space of memories and diachronic impressions, Solano overlaps the early recalls from Mexico City and new information about Edifício Copan, the iconic modernist building where Pivô is located. Solano started from a scale model of the exhibition space, “seen” and thoroughly studied through their touch to give shape to the group of new paintings and sculptures on view. ¶ The Portuguese duo João Mourão and Luís Silva, curators of the exhibition, talked to Solano about the show that opened last September at Pivô. [LF]

JOÃO MOURÃO, LUÍS SILVA Manuel, it’s great to have this online dialogue, given the current status of the Covid-19 pandemic. Last time we were together in your studio in Berlin discussing the project for Pivô, in early March if we’re not mistaken, seems a lifetime ago, in a different world altogether. First things first, how have you been dealing with this new state of normalcy and how has it affected your practice? MANUEL SOLANO When we met back in March 2020, I had just finished setting up a temporary studio in Berlin. The full weight of that moment didn’t even sink in for me then, but I had been working towards settling down away from home ever since before I became blind. We had begun working on three large canvases for this show, as well as some three dimensional models. I remember many aspects of this upcoming show felt very new to me, even though we have been planning this show for some time, because I had just recently had my assistant make me a scale architectural model of Pivô. And so I had only recently learned of the, shall we say, peculiar architecture of the space. I had to go to Mexico City then, and was planning to come back to Berlin after three weeks and continue with and finish the production. In short, I was almost ready to work full speed. And then the lockdown started. After the hassle of finding a suitable flight back to Europe, I came back to Berlin and my studio, only to be stuck without being able to work much, as the travel restrictions made it impossible for either of the people I work with to travel to Berlin to assist me. So, I took on the training of someone new, to teach them the techniques that make up the painting method I have been working with for the past few years. And then, in the midst of that, I had to move again and set up the studio in a new space. So, for a very long time, it felt like I was swimming upstream while producing this show. And now I am finally settled in and, for one year now, I have finally found stability and it’s done a huge amount of good, not just in terms of being able to work, but in my life in general. JM, LS Let’s talk about Heliplaza, which is simultaneously the title of your exhibition and the name of a shopping center in Ciudad Satélite, the neighbourhood where you grew up and a suburb of Mexico City which was developed from the 1950s onward. Why is this reference important to you and to the exhibition? MS I’ve always had a special love for shopping malls. Where I grew up in the suburbs of a huge city, there weren’t many things to do other than going to one shopping mall or another. I distinctly remember this one afternoon when I was 7 years old. It was a Sunday afternoon, the kind where you begin to feel this dread creep in at the thought of your weekend being over and

having to go to school the next day. And I remember feeling sad without knowing why. And my parents also seemed to feel a bit down, everyone in the house was quiet and keeping to themselves. And then I just felt the need to be in a shopping mall. Surrounded by unknown people who don’t interact and look at displays and shiny floors and novelty. I asked my mom if we could go to the mall and something in her expression told me she could tell the sadness behind my prompt. So she just turned to my father and repeated my proposal. And we didn’t say much, we just all wordlessly agreed that the best thing to do at that moment, even if we had nothing to do, was to go to the mall. I love even the background noise of a shopping mall, I wish it was available as an option when looking for relaxing ambient noise online. And I particularly love how each shopping mall has an identity Or personality that is expressed visually, for the most part. This personality affects everything in the shopping mall, from what can be found there to how people behave there. And Heliplaza is a mystery that way. Heliplaza is a mall with a very strong and peculiar personality. Built on a very steep hillside, there are two main accesses to the building, one at the top of the hill and one at the base. And the inside of the building is shaped like a spiral around a vertical, circular space. It was furnished with materials that felt modern in the late 80s. The shopping mall’s logo, I felt, was an excellent design, as it reminds of the letter P and the letter H, at the same time as it conveys the spiral shape of the inside of the building. This logo synthesizes the design and the personality of the architecture and services provided there. And yet something, I don’t know what, about Heliplaza is off, as it has remained half empty throughout all my lifetime, hosting mostly dentists and travel agencies instead of fashion or entertainment, turning it into a fascinating place to me. JM, LS You mentioned the architecture of Pivô as being peculiar and how each shopping mall has its own very identifiable personality. Is this something you are exploring now? A sense of self-expression through architecture and décor? MS When I was about to graduate High school, they gave us these little workshops on choosing career paths and I remember taking some sort of questionnaire where they asked me to think of the activities that make me feel inspired or creatively replenished. And I remember being a little surprised at myself even then, because the first answer that popped into my mind was flipping through coffee table books on interior decoration and architecture at Gandhi, which is a Mexican bookstore sort of like Barnes & Noble. That is, rather than pictures of paintings, I preferred pictures of nice homes or buildings with attitude. It hadn’t been a conscious decision, though. Before I was blind, I had just made a painting titled Exquisite and

Innovative Interiors for This Season, which depicted this big luxurious bathroom with tall windows. I paid close attention to the detail on the faucet in the bathtub and I was very proud of how well I captured the refraction of light on the faucet. However, I have to admit that my main goal with that painting was not achieved. I wanted my painting to have the look of those photographs in my mom’s Interior Decoration magazines where the light seemed kind of hazy. I think I’ve always had an appreciation for architecture and interiors. And a frustrating relationship with them, now that I can’t see. And yeah, I remember, for example, bathrooms from my childhood that really had a lot of personality . I remember being like seven or eight years old and wondering that my great aunt Ana, whose style and panache I’ve painted before, had a black sink and a black toilet. JM, LS You also mentioned a childhood memory of, let’s say, boredom and anxiety towards the future, and how the shopping mall and its own personality could counteract those feelings. How do memories of your childhood, and your biography for that matter, play a role in this project? MS Yeah, growing up, I had the impression that nothing bad can happen to you in a shopping mall. And that it was an activity in itself, to go to Plaza, as we called the mall. Ciudad Satélite, the suburb where I was born, is literally built around this shopping mall. If you look at a map of Satélite, you can see that the streets are concentrated in circuits around this one large center area, which is where they built Plaza Satélite. I believe it was the first shopping mall in Mexico as well. At some points in my life, depending on what part of the suburbs we were living in, I would have to cross one or two shopping malls getting back to school or to my family’s restaurant to eat, once or twice every day. And when we would visit my dad, we would go to the mall. Or drive to San Antonio, Texas, and go to the mall. My favorite mall in San Antonio has a sculpture of a giant pair of cowboy boots outside, and a long empty blank hallway inside somewhere with a title above it reading The Promenade. One of the paintings in this series depicts a mural painting that I used to see in one of the malls. When I was very little, my Mom was carrying me and pointing out this painting with some birds flying off into the sunset. But I couldn’t make out the shape of the birds at first. My mom had to explain that we were seeing the birds in the painting as if from behind, because they were flying away from us. So, seen from that angle, you wouldn’t see the beak or the face or even the head of the birds, only their wings. And that is when I first grasped the concepts of depth of field and perspective. In a shopping mall. I am certainly responding to the same part of me that craves for these places and how they look. I have been trying to paint that for some time. As a painter, I would like to be able to

express personality and humanity as much through paintings of buildings or decorative items, as through paintings of people. JM, LS We’ve been talking about how your show intertwines architecture and interior design on one hand and the shopping mall culture on the other in order to rescue notions of self-expression and maybe even self-worth from your childhood memories. Besides these you are also including sculptural elements, paintings and even display choices like wall colors associated with community pools and sport centers. Would you say we are witnessing the coming together of decor, consumerism and leisure as defining elements of how you remember your childhood and how your personality developed and crystalized? Could these three be queer forces in Mexico City’s 80’s suburbs? MS I think there is definitely truth to that. Growing up lower middle class, these spaces and activities certainly had a special allure for me and helped shape my personality. I don’t know if I would say the expressions I gravitate towards in my taste in decor and architecture are queer in themselves. However, they are quite camp sometimes, and kitsch, all of which are often visual cues for the expression of queerness. JM, LS Usually artists tend to shy away from their biographies in a move that hopefully grants them a more universal voice. You, on the other hand, have been making your biography, your life, the narrative and formal core of your practice. Heliplaza is of course a perfect example of this, but older projects such as the series Blind Transgender With AIDS put yourself at the center of the stage. Why do you think that is? MS For what seems like the longest time, certainly longer than I’ve been an artist professionally, I’ve only been moved to make work about the things that make up my personality and identity. It wasn’t always so clear, but I can see now that my goal is communication and intimacy and that I’ve been using my work as a means to that end. This has always been my objective, even if I didn’t know it. It was never a conscious decision between making work about myself or making work about other subjects. Personally, I can’t understand how anyone makes art that doesn’t speak about oneself, I just don’t know how one goes about doing that or what the appeal would be. Growing up, I just took it for granted that I was the main character in the story of life, I just started making art accordingly. However, I do firmly believe that by addressing myself through my work, I can come through to other people who perhaps see my work and feel similar aspects of their person acknowledged. I like to make art that is strong-flavored and fully charged. I have no time for the cryptic and inert and sterile.#

Las panteras

Pimienta, en un acto de locura se desnuda en público y deja que todos vean su verdadero ser.

i En una gran hoguera

(pimienta era una foca)

Quemó todo Quemó todo

Sal se hace mar en pristina comunión.

pie de pan duro camina inmaculado sobre braza blanca

Foca vista a Sal y juegan en la eternidad de las olas.

Ojos bizcos de un sinfín de flechas clavadas en un bizcocho borracho

iii

No quedo nada? no.

el viento apantalla con su lengua muda las llamas

soy madera, por que no me queme? En Brazil el fuego baila sobre los techos corazón a baño María Cuece en cacerola tronco tierno que nace sin voz

Los bomberos se disfrazan de panteras para ahuyentarlo haciendo gruñidos roncos

Las panteras regresan a sus casas a quitarse el hollín y lamerse las quemaduras

Nada se salvó, solo fotos quedan de los techos que una vez fueron

Sal y Pimienta (inseparables)

iiii

se separan frente al mar

La pérdida echa una lista,

Sal mira el mar

1-poema chino milenario se consume entre las llamas.

llora lágrimas saladas

Decía así: “Donde reencarnan las rosas, crecen espinas”

Irreemplazable perdida

que tardan años en llegar.

iiiii

Recordándonos:

Soy ceniza echa vajilla en casas de familias y fantasmas que coleccionan esqueletos firmados

Lo que vemos ya ocurrió

Lo que se quema se hace nube La nube se hace pis El pis cura quemaduras

iiiii Loro amazónico dibuja con su pico el cosmos a cambio de pan con banana Loro escribe su último poema: "Por que soy loro-soy fénix soy pan con banana repito, repito y repito. a mis obras el fuego no las quema"

iiiiii estrellas miran el suceder esa noche olvidan su lugar en las constelaciones cambiando el destino para siempre de lo que el fuego consume Avergonzadas, parpadeantes besitos de luz envían desde arriba

Las panteras

Seal sees Salt and plays forever in its waves.

i iii

iiiii Amazonian parrot draws the cosmos with its beak in exchange for banana bread

In a large bonfire Everything burned Everything burned stale bread foot walks unscathed on white embers Eyes crossed from countless arrows stuck in a drunken cake Nothing left? no. I am wood, why didn’t I burn?

heart in a water bath Cooking in the pan tender trunk born voiceless

the wind wags the flames with its mute tongue

“Because I am parrot—I am phoenix In Brazil, fire dances on rooftops Firemen disguise as panthers to scare them off with grunts

I am banana bread I am what I Repeat, repeat and repeat: “fire won’t burn my works”

Nothing was salvaged, only the remaining pictures of the roofs they were before The panthers go back home shedding the soot and licking their burns

iiiiii stars watch the events tonight they forget their place in the constellations changing fate forever from what fire consumes

iiii Loss creates a list,

Parrot writes its last poem

1-millenary Chinese poem withers among the flames.

Salt and Pepper

from above, they send away shy little kisses that take years to get here Reminder:

It says: (inseparable) separate before the sea

What we see has already happened “Where roses reincarnate, thorns grow” Irreplaceable loss

Salt watches the sea Cries salty tears

Pepper, in a bold move strips in public and lets everybody see her true being.

iiiii I am cinder turned into crockery in homes of families and ghosts who collect signed skeletons That which burns becomes cloud

(pepper was a seal) The cloud becomes piss Salt becomes sea in pristine communion.

Piss heals burns

PIVÔ MAGA ZINE #2

1 Editorial: Bonding at Another Level Fernanda Brenner, Leo Felipe, Victor Gorgulho 4 On Choreography Davi Pontes, Deise de Brito, Diambe da Silva, Inaê Moreira, Maria Noujaim 14 Animal Heterotopias: Macau and Other Stories Ana Vaz, Juliana Fausto

26 A World Where Many Worlds Fit In Catalina Lozano, Arturo Escobar

46 In 50 years? Bernardo José de Souza, abigail Campos Leal

62 What Happens to an Artistic Residence When It Is in the Residency Itself ? Adriano Machado, Christian Salablanca Díaz, Clarissa Diniz, Denise Alves-Rodriguez, Eduardo Cardoso Amato, Estevão Parreiras, Iagor Peres, Julia da Mota, Julia Rocha, Marcela Vieira, Matheus Chiaratti, Pedro Zylbersztajn, Walter Solon, Yhuri Cruz 72 Translating Les Guérrillères Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Raquel Camargo 86 Memories from the Plaza João Mourão, Luís Silva, Manuel Solano 93 Las panteras Eduardo Navarro 98 Collaborators

Pivô Magazine #2 Vol 1. n. 2, 2020/2021/2022 September 2021 Triennial issue Editorial Director: Fernanda Brenner Editors: Leo Felipe and Victor Gorgulho Executive Producer: Carolina de Sá Graphic design: Bloco Gráfico Translators: Ana Ban and Julia de Souza Proofreader: Eloah Pina and Richard Sanches

Collaborators: abigail Campos Leal moves between art and philosophy. She lives and works in São Paulo; Adriano Machado is a visual artist. He lives and works in Salvador; Ana Vaz is an artist and filmmaker. She lives and works in Paris, Lisbon, and Brasilia; Arturo Escobar is an anthropologist and Professor at the University of North Carolina. He lives and works in Chapter Hill, USA; Beatriz Santiago Muñoz is an artist. She lives and works in San Juan, Puerto Rico; Bernardo José de Souza is a curator and writer. He lives and works in Madrid, Spain; Catalina Lozano is a curator and writer. She lives and works in Mexico City; Christian Salablanca Díaz is an artist. He lives and works in San José, Costa Rica; Clarissa Diniz is a curator, writer, and art teacher. She lives and works in Recife; Davi Pontes is an artist, choreographer and researcher. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro; Deise de Brito is a dance and theater artist, educator, and writer. She lives and works in São Paulo; Denise Alves-Rodrigues is a self-taught technologist, artist and amateur astronomer. She lives and works in São Paulo; Diambe da Silva is a visual artist. She lives and works in Rio de Janeiro; Eduardo Cardoso Amato is an artist. He lives and works in Castro; Eduardo Navarro is an artist. He lives and works in Buenos Aires, Argentina; Estevão Parreiras is an artist. He lives and works in Goiânia; Iagor Peres is an artist. He lives and works in Recife; Inaê Moreira is a black woman, artist, and mother of Ayomi. She lives and works in Salvador; João Mourão and Luís Silva are curators. They live and work in Lisbon, Portugal; Júlia Rocha is an artist. She lives and works in São Paulo; Juliana Fausto is a philosopher and writer. She lives and works in Curitiba; Manuel Solano is an artist. They live and work in Berlin, Germany; Marcela Vieira is a curator, editor and translator. She lives and works in São Paulo; Maria Noujaim is an artist. She lives and works between Serra da Mantiqueira and São Paulo; Matheus Chiaratti is an artist. He lives and works in São Paulo; Pedro Zylbersztajn is an artist. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro; Raquel Camargo is a translator. She lives and works in São Paulo; Walter Solon is an artist. He lives and works in Cologne, Germany; Yhuri Cruz is a visual artist and writer. He lives and works in Rio de Janeiro.

Images: Eduardo Navarro, Ideas and sketches flying in the mind wind, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. (cover, p. 92, 95) Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, Repertório N. 1, 2018. Photo: Victor de Beija. (p. 4, 5) Diambe da Silva, Direito ao ócio, 2018-2021. Photo: Herbet de Paz. (p. 8) Maria Noujaim, Estudos para metamorfose das plantas, 2020. Courtesy of the artist. (p. 12) Ana Vaz, É noite na América, still of a film in process, 2021. Courtesy of the artist. (p. 14, 15, 24, 25) A Natural History of Ruins, exhibition view, Pivô, São Paulo, 2021. Photo: Everton Ballardin. (p. 30, 40, 45) Luiz Roque, República, exhibition view, Pivô, São Paulo, 2021. Photo: Everton Ballardin. (p. 52, 53) Eduardo Cardoso Amato, Pavê, photo performance, 2020. Photo: Fernanda Pompermayer. (p. 65) Matheus Chiaratti, 2020. (p. 68) Beatriz Santiago Muñoz, Oriana, film still, 2021. Photo: Bleue Liverpool. (p. 77, 78) Manuel Solano, Heliplaza, exhibition view, Pivô, São Paulo, 2021. Photo: Everton Ballardin. (p. 91) Font: Signifier Papers: Pólen Soft 80 g/m2 (core), Cartão Supremo 250 g/m2 (cover) Print: Ipsis

Pivô Artistic director: Fernanda Brenner Executive director: Paula Signorelli Executive coordinator: Carolina de Sá Curator: Leo Felipe Producer Pivô Research: Thiego Montiel Head technician: Matias Oliveira Production assistant: Marina Schiesari Institutional assistant: Jessica Gonçalves Visitor services: Daniel Lima Executive assistant: Luana Lima Space maintenance: Cristina Serra Press office: Pool de Comunicação Financial consultancy: 2P Financeiro Legal consultancy: Pannunzio Trezza Donnini Advogados Accountants: Quality Contabilidade Pivô thanks its sponsors: Alexandra Mollof, Almeida e Dale, Ana e Marco Abrahão, Andrea e José Olympio da Veiga Pereira, Bergamin & Gomide, Carbono Galeria, Coleção Coletiva, Fabiana Brenner, Fernando Marques Oliveira, Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel, Galeria Kogan Amaro, Galeria Luisa Strina, Galeria Millan, Galeria Nara Roesler, Georgiana Rothier e Bernardo Faria, Graham Steele e Ulysses de Santi, José Leopoldo Figueiredo, Marcelo Tilkian Maia, Mendes Wood DM, Vera e Luiz Parreiras, Virgínia e Daniel Weinberg, Vivien Hertogh e Jairo Okret and those who preferred to remain anonymous. The opinions expressed in the articles of this journal are the sole responsibility of the authors. The authors have established the gender designations for each text. © All rights reserved by Pivô Arte e Pesquisa. It is not allowed the use, total or partial, by any means, of any element of this publication without the prior express authorization of Pivô Arte e Pesquisa.

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