At the entrance of the parking lot transformed into an exhibition space, a visitor listens to syncopated beats, which lead them to the left side of the place. They walk, and when crossing a structure—a kind of wall—they doubt whether what they see is an exhibition element or a job. They come across a monitor vertically fixed on a black wall, and conclude, after reading the legend, that the structure is: Vermelho como brasa, 2021, a piece by Antonio Tarsis. Installed there, it creates a kind of disguise, accommodating the video work, whose sound attracted him to that corner.
The sound seems to be produced by the footsteps of two people, and besides them there is no other noise in the video; it sounds like: 1-2-, tap; 1-2-tap; 1-2, tap; “tap” is the snap caused by their footsteps on the hall’s floor. Solemn in appearance, the place looks familiar to them: the visitor see two naked young men; they are black and have short blonde hair, in the emblematic “loiro pivete” tone (bright blonde). They also wear silver chains and earrings, as well as Nike sneakers (“these bitches want Nikes […] but the real ones”, the visitor thinks). The visitor wonders why that hall is familiar to them. Still in front of the TV, they face both: it is like looking in the mirror; transmitted on that screen, they are almost the same size as the visitor. 1-2-, tap, they spin, 1-2-, tap.
A few minutes pass and, unlike the performers, the visitor remains motionless. The camera that follows their movements, at times coming closer, at others, moving away. The sequence accelerates, the duo spins, and the focus that was once on their feet now seems to involve other parts of their bodies as well. Their heads move frantically over their shoulders, back and forth, as if they were on alert. Almost as fast as a blink, and as if it was always necessary to know what is ahead and what is next.
One of them seems to be safer with the new chain of steps. He bites his lips, looks at his partner and continues the sequence, as if it were as natural as his daily walk. What appears to be a little more confusing slows down. Slightly lost in the marking of the steps, he seeks to resume the tuning of the beginning of the choreography; he smiles, and their eyes meet. It is reciprocal, suggesting intimacy and trust, and pointing out that, even in the face of the imminent error, that look works as a sign that any slip or misstep of one of them would not halt the choreography’s continuation. The choreography would be reorganized; it would not be a mistake, but a rehearsal, a drill. They continue: 1-2-, tap, 1-2-, tap.
***
The paragraphs above describe the meeting of a visitor with Repertório #2, by Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira while visiting the 3rd edition of Frestas – Triennial of Arts: The River is a Serpent. As the name suggests, the work is part of a series that, via the repetition of gestures, steps and codes shared only between the two performers, creates a set of movements, “an attempt to archive actions to elaborate resistances, conjure ways to remain in the world and invent what is about to succeed it.” The creation of this archive begins in 2018, with the conception of Repertório #1. Facing the absolute violence authorized by the State and that historically haunts the life of Black and Indigenous populations in Brazil, the artists ask themselves “how to elaborate a dance of self-defense?” In this quest, the duo strives to create a “body score in which dancing and living can be synonyms,”, articulating an involvement with dance to protect Black bodies. This engagement is not merely a metaphor or the reproduction of defense practices, but the starting point for the work, or as André Lepecki mentions:
Emphasizing the non-metaphorical impetus is important. Choreography should not be understood as a political or social image, allegory or metaphor. Choreography is, above all else, the first matter, the concept that names the expressive matrix of political function (LEPECKI, 2012).
But violence has a very specific operational logic that, once triggered, does not meet the limits set by whoever evoked it, got close to it or was a victim. Considering Jota Mombasa :
No one goes through violence unscathed, and all of us who have been violated and wronged throughout our lives know that. Violence creates marks, affects lives, it is never a simple event, it is always complex, multidimensional, and, therefore, requires care (MOMBAÇA, 2021).
So, how could it be possible to elaborate a dance of self-defense, a combative choreography or an instrument of protection without reproducing the violence and running the risk of being crushed by it?
Pontes and Ferreira’s choreographies project steps to escape the pitfalls of the representation of violence by daring to be as dynamic as the speed of everyday brutality and the speed of new forms of control and domination that move along with them. They do not speak about the violence that surrounds them, but they choreograph the lines that guide them so that they can live away from it. Part of the strategy (and of the secret) also covers the importance of a dance that, in addition to the antimetaphorical character (LEPECKI, 2012), can bet on what is provisional, in the ephemeral effect that can only offer an answer and protection for the now; a dance that focuses on the limits of our bodies, remembering that “self-defense is not just about hitting back, but also about perceiving one’s own limits and developing escape tactics for when it is necessary to escape” (MOMBAÇA, 2021).
II
In October 2021, during my participation in the webinar organized by MAC USP, in collaboration with the Getty Foundation, I began my presentation with two questions that guide my research:
- How to create curatorial experiments in dialogue with the works of artists whose lives are deeply connected to colonial violence without contributing to the capture and assimilation of these practices?
- How to articulate refusal as a practice in constant negotiation with policies of visibility (representativeness), in order to contribute to a profound unlearning of colonial categories in artistic institutions?
When I ask these questions, I do not exactly seek an answer for them, but the development, as I mentioned above, of a series of curatorial experiments that create territories, even if temporary, in which there is room for the practice of possibilities of artistic creation capable of mobilizing doses of refusal, shifting race away from choreographies and tracing new paths for us to live in a world not forged in violence.
During the seminar, concerned about the task before me, right after exposing my questions, I was overcome with a certain malaise—in fact, a discomfort. I tried to follow with the presentation; however, already quite unsatisfied with my own difficulty in elaborating a speech that could really address curatorial experiences involving Black or dissident artists (including Pontes and Wallace’s work), without letting race (or any other marker of difference that structures our lives) reenact colonial violence scenes. In other words, my fear was that, even symbolically, I would reify everything I fought.
A few hours later, with the bitter feeling of a mission unaccomplished, I remembered the essay “O desconforto e a imaginação: processos para estranhar e conjurar modos de saber” [Discomfort and imagination: processes to question and conjure ways of knowing] , by the professor, researcher and artist Cíntia Guedes, divided into three moments: the first is a brief introduction of the text, describing how Guedes elaborates her pedagogical practice; in the second part, she describes a situation that happened in her first semester lecturing at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), in 2020; she closes the text with a fictional turn to a dystopian future that mirrors current days—in it, we are in 2039, and we accompany Guedes herself revisiting an abandoned campus of the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), in a Rio de Janeiro where militias were no longer a parallel power but had taken full control of the State:
Rio de Janeiro emerged strangely and pleasantly before her. Even the green moss that violently covering the floor and half the walls seemed inviting, a noisy image that perfectly matched all the colors of the surroundings. The wet-looking browns of the barks of the trees. The stained gray of the cobblestones. Except for being dressed in moss, the School of Communication of UFRJ was as she remembered it: a colonial building with wide windows and little to hide its ghosts. She had arrived in the city two days earlier and struggled to accommodate the sadness when she found the city impregnated with the crowd guards. The Guard had been operating in the metropolitan region of Rio de Janeiro for twenty years, shortly after the end of the Military Police. It was the arm of the central government in the city, planned to exist exclusively in that territory, as a laboratory of horror. (GUEDES, 2021).
It is in the second moment of Guedes’ text that she narrates a situation in which one of her students states discomfort during class:
The debate was about onto-epistemological positions, soon noticeable of the bodies that shared that meeting. The course deals with the ways in which raciality operates with and for a hegemonic visual and narrative system in the production of images. She, a young white woman evidently committed to anti-racist literature and attentive to Black artistic production, nevertheless and perhaps precisely for this, felt uncomfortable, and with that also wanted to tell us that she was in the process of active listening (GUEDES, 2021).
Despite sharing a common cause—the world as we know, based on violence—for obvious reasons, my discomfort during the webinar did not inhabit the same place as the malaise felt by that student. What I felt was more akin to a fear of succumbing to the “hegemonic visual and narrative system in image production” that made it difficult for me to develop a speech that could really articulate the transformative power that works like Repertório #2 bear. That is: the obstacle was to externalize the how that sets the tone of my concerns and present artistic practices without imprisoning them in the old drawer of raciality.
By addressing discomfort as a “way of knowing” or “as a fissure that disorganizes pre-established choreographies,” Guedes’ text led me between the contradictions that mark our position in this circuit, and the anxiety we feel when we perceive the dimension of the labor ahead.
The discomfort I felt there was, as Guedes writes, a “process of strangeness, elaborated as the beginning of a perceptual fissure that happens in the best ‘meetings of de/formation’” and alerted me to the complexity and the care required for us to continue with our task—that is, the promotion of artistic practices in the reconfiguration of the place we want to occupy in this world.
As I mentioned above, in the last part of her essay, instead of describing the writing exercise she proposes to her students, we read her own task. Thus, Guedes brings imagination not only as a metaphor, but as a method—the very process—to redesign the world. Similar to Pontes and Ferreira, who, by creating a self-defense choreography that does not describe or mimetize fights, develop a series of gestures with the promise that the practice and repetition of those movements are the realization of a protective barrier for their bodies. Therefore, the three allow me to remember that my questions can also operate as the very practice of creating a relationship between a curatorial and a political imaginary that sustain our presence in this world and contribute to a continuous work of what is yet to come.
References
GUEDES, Cintia. O desconforto e a imaginação: processos para estranhar e conjurar modos de saber. In: Afluentes publicação educativa da 3° edição de Frestas – Trienal de Artes: O rio é uma serpente. São Paulo: Sesc São Paulo, 2021.
LEPECKI, André. Coreopolítica e coreopolícia. Revista Ilha, [S.l.], v. 13, n. 1, p. 41-60, jan./jun. (2011) 2012.
MOMBAÇA, Jota. Rumo a uma redistribuição desobediente de gênero e anticolonial da violência. In: MOMBAÇA, Jota. Não vão nos matar agora. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Cobogó, 2021.