There is an insistent question hammering the minds of artists, producers and thinkers of culture in Brazil: how to react to the barbarities of the present? From the government’s denialism of the pandemic to outright lies about the country’s environmental policy; from the condescension of racist, transphobic, homophobic and misogynist postures to the attempt to flexibilize the gun possession – How long are we going to tolerate people being killed, by covid-19, by violence against minorities, by environmental policies that destroy, with a single stroke , an entire community, or even because of “food insecurity” (the new name for hunger, an old familiar in Brazil)?
Is it possible, at this moment, to articulate a critical answer from the sphere of culture? Putting art back into the public debate so that it might be able to make, through its acute questioning, the images it creates, the affections it mobilizes, a broad and forceful critique of the situation in which we find ourselves? How to keep producing, publicly exhibiting and funding current projects? How to think about all of this when, often, survival itself is at risk? How to work in a time of social isolation, in the middle of dismantling the precarious ways of financing artistic actions, at a time when the government labels artists as “vagabonds”? Wouldn’t it be necessary to stop everything, to refuse to continue, to do anything, in a kind of radical refusal of everything that this instituted power represents?
These are the questions this project looks for: Can art “Dizer Não” [Say No]? What is feasible to put in motion today? And how to do it? Is it possible for us to reflect together on what artists and other cultural agents should – in an ethical sense – do or not do? What is up to us in this situation? What are the limits of our actions?
It is in this constant oscillation, between doing and not doing, that this project took shape. It is between the will to fight and the mourning that is imposed on us daily, between the bet on the importance of symbolic, language and thought experiments and the confrontation with death, with the insignificance of life, that we move forward and backward. It is necessary to continue. I cannot continue. It is necessary to continue. So I will continue. Even so, echoing Beckett’s final lines in L’Innommable, we go back and forth in wavering, ambiguous, stunned motions.
Against the speech that hastily decreed the obsolescence of physical shows, we decided to try once again. Insisting on the object presence, on the possibility of bodily enjoyment, on contact with matter. Even in a period when encounters between people have to be strictly regulated. As organizers, we propose to build, with the help of each artist who takes part in the project, two complementary platforms: a shed space in Barra Funda and a website. Those who are not inclined to participate in one of them can contribute to the other. Declines from our invitation may also be shared publicly on the site, as forms of “Dizer Não” [Saying No].
In addition to this text, which presents the principles of the project, we would like to indicate a group of works – some of which are well known – that were present in the construction process of this proposal. They were used as a conceptual basis and form a kind of nucleus, reminding us that aspects of what we are looking for have already appeared in the work of other artists. Cildo Meireles, Fiat Lux: o Sermão da Montanha; Francis Alÿs, Paradox of Praxis 1: Sometimes Making Something Leads to Nothing; Jota Mombaça, Veio o Tempo em que por Todos os Lados as Luzes Dessa Época Foram Acendidas; Juçara Marçal, Encarnado and Regina José Galindo, Monumento a las Desaparecidas.
This is not an invitation to participate in a show, but a proposal to be together. To the extent of our own limitations and the limitations of the time we live. Through this project we try to make public what is being thought and produced in this dark ages, betting we can construct a huge “No” together.
ORGANIZERS
Adriana Rodrigues, Edu Marin, Érica Burini and Thaís Rivitti
ARTISTS
Adriano Machado, Ana Dias Batista, André Komatsu, Bertô, Bruna Kury e Gil Porto Pyrata, Cildo Meireles, Clara Ianni, Craca e Raphael Franco, Cuca Ferreira, Daniel Jablonski, Denise Alves-Rodrigues and Pablo Vieira, Edu Marin, Elizabeth Slamek, Fernando Burjato, Flora Leite, Frederico Filippi e C. L. Salvaro, Graziela Kunsch, Isael Maxakali, JAMAC, João Loureiro, Juçara Marçal, Kadija de Paula & Chico Togni, Kauê Garcia, Laura Andreato e MuitasKoisas, Leda Catunda, Lia Chaia, Lícida Vidal, Lucimélia Romão, Marcelo Amorim, MUSEUL*RA, Paola Ribeiro, Rafael Amorim, Raphael Escobar, Regina José Galindo, Rochelle Costi, Shima, Sol Casal, Vânia Medeiros, Wagner Pinto
DESIGNERS
Elizabeth Slamek, Lia Assumpção, Roberta Cardoso
WHEN
De 22 de Julho a 19 de Setembro de 2021
WHERE
Rua Cruzeiro, 802 – Barra Funda. São Paulo – SP
SUPPORTED BY
