Learning from the Source: Performance Art and the Climate Crisis in Contemporary Brazil | Indigenous Perspectives Series & World Anthropology

Original link: https://tyingknots.net/2022/09/learning-sources-performance-and-climate-crisis-four-brazilian-works/

As a translation of the series “Brazil Indigenous Perspectives”, this article turns its perspective to topics such as performance performance, public participation experience and community practice in the field of contemporary art. In the face of macro and subtle themes such as the Anthropocene, colonial history, climate change, species and cultural extinction, which are often not directly perceptible, multi-faceted contemporary art has increasingly become the most powerful way to perceive, witness, tell, connect, and share. It is a medium of emotion and action, and it constantly penetrates into everyday life outside of art.

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From the origin of art, the spontaneous stretch of the body and the interconnected feeling between the bodies are the ecological expression of the living body in the environment. This article selects four female artists and aboriginal artists from many contemporary Brazilian art, and traces the signs of water to connect the stories of dissolving, recalling, watering, drying up, overflowing, and flowing. The author, Martin Domec, is a theatre director, graduated in Philosophy at the University of Buenos Aires and in Performing Arts at the Federal University of Bahia. He is currently a teacher at the Faculty of Arts, Sciences and Humanities of the Federal University of Bahia South. The relationship between performance art and the environment. The two poems echoed at the beginning and the end of the article are from the Brazilian poet Marcia Vaina Cambeba of the Omágua/Kambeba ethnic group and Marcia Teofilo, a poetess living in Italy. .

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The “Brazil Indigenous Perspectives” series will successively introduce the indigenous narratives in the current Brazilian society, with these stories we know little about, to open the cocoon of civilization. From the perspective of the planet, the center of the destiny of the earth today should belong to the Amazon rainforest, the fringe area of ​​the international stage. This place, which concerns the miracle and destiny of all life, is being pushed to the tipping point of destruction step by step in the current dark and corrupt Brazilian political situation. In this context, the indigenous movement in Brazil continued to rise and was at the forefront of resistance. Born out of the forest, the people who always endure the most appalling violence have the most acute perception of the environment and danger, and at the same time carry the suffering and poetic justice of history. In their lives and struggles in various places, the Indigenous people both face the problems faced by all peoples today, and open up these problems, opening up to us other human existences, other worlds, and casting us a vision of connection—— We have always been the natives of the earth.

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Therefore, this series (the specific link is attached at the end of this article) also reflects the perspective and care of world anthropology. As Tim Ingold pointed out, we live in the same world, but this world is not a homogeneous universe, Rather, it is a multiverse full of situations and possibilities.

Original author / Martin Domecq
Original title/ Learning from Sources: Performance and Climate Crisis in Four Brazilian Works
Original source / HowlRound Theatre Commons, April 20, 2022, link to the original article in the “Climate Emergency” series / https://ift.tt/p9ZOc5X
Translation / Heidou Special Editing / Cataloging by Zhou Xingyue / Wang Jing

A warm breeze in March

Whisking: Today’s soil is full of gravel, pure sand

Memories of bright green water

Leaves, bright yellow and red fruit.

“Rain, Tupang!” Mangalore called

But the rain will avenge them

school of fish buried in water

New water destroys everywhere

Peter’s Earth Center

From heaven? Desert invasion, on the verge of.

– “The Living Madeira”
Márcia Theóphilo

01. Hover state

 

Néle Azevedo’s momentary art, Estado de Suspensão (Hovering State), was first shown in São Paulo, Brazil in June 2019. The silhouetted ice flakes hang on the street in front of the Municipal Theater of São Paulo. Each piece is suspended in its own time and space. They are juxtaposed in groups, but each piece looks so lonely, silently undergoing its own dissolution.

“Hovering State” is intended to be a poetic attempt to trigger a response, making the individual or collective more sensitive to their own vulnerability. I wanted to talk about performance in the context of the climate crisis and the humanitarian crisis, so I was interested in this piece as a performance. What is being performed in the “hover state”? Slow death, powerlessness or passivity? Or is it the effects of global warming that are cooling people’s hearts while destroying the planet? Work has these two meanings, and more.

As so often happens, the field of art is anticipating and merging the situation humanity is about to face. In June 2019, we did not yet know the impending human tragedy of the Covid-19 pandemic. In 2020, like these icy silhouettes, we are about to become alienated, paused, and wait indefinitely. That year, many people in Brazil witnessed fires in the Pantanal and Amazon rainforest that accompanied accelerated deforestation. The art of São Paulo native Nelé Azevedo draws attention to the fact that it’s not just the planet that is heating up. Life also melts in a sort of icy silence, as if hovering in a nightmare frozen in motion.

Fighting to protect Brazil’s environment often involves confronting unbridled violence from those who profit from the destruction of our common home—agribusinesses, real estate interests, mining companies, financial speculators, and their state representatives or the like. State representative. Covid-19 has only made our need for more collective action to stop the catastrophe more urgent: the catastrophe of deforestation, the catastrophe of inequality, the cataclysm of indigenous and black peoples. These disasters Brazil is not alone. These scenarios are happening in many Latin American countries, as seen in reports of fires, logging, and mercury pollution in the Pan-Amazon region.

I begin this reflection on performance art and the climate crisis with The Hovering State, because it raises the question of “the end.” If the prevailing culture celebrates youth and denies death, vulnerability and interdependence, it will be difficult for people to meet the many challenges that follow.

In a state of suspension, one can no longer remain indifferent and wait for a response from the same actors, institutions and ideologies that have created and profited from the climate crisis (whether ignored or profit-driven). Cold hearts cannot sustain the hope needed for collective action. Brazil is at the center of environmental issues because of its geography and biodiversity, so I have selected four powerful and inspiring Brazilian works of art, each pointing to a vision of what is possible, like piloting stars. I want to focus on these artists, but I am not and cannot speak for them.

02. Jaguar Chief Blitz

This piece is Denilson Baniwa’s performance art “Pajé-Onça Hackeando a 33ªBienal de São Paulo” in 2018. In the cosmic origin of the Baniva people, the jaguar people (povo-onça) were the guardians of ancestral wisdom. The role of the jaguar chief (pajé-onça) was created by De Nielsen, a native Amazonian artist living in Rio de Janeiro.

In this performance, the Jaguar Chief walks through each piece in the gallery with flowers, offering flowers to his brothers from other eras who have been exposed to white photography. Wearing his jaguar mask and leopard-skin-printed cape, he walks through rooms and corridors, quietly identifying himself in some of the works, searching for artworks that showcase contemporary Aboriginal culture.

Finally, he bought a copy of A Brief History of Art in the museum’s bookstore. Standing in front of a photograph he had paid tribute to, he studied the book, realizing that the history within was so brief that Aboriginal art was not included. He was furious, tearing up the book while giving a speech:

A Brief History of Art.

Theft, theft, theft, theft, theft, theft, theft.

white art.

theft, theft.

Indigenous peoples do not belong only to the past.

They don’t have to be imprisoned in the image white people create for the natives.

We are free, free, free.

Despite theft, violence, art history.

Oppose white people taking our art and turning it into knockoffs!

His speech forced audiences to question Western historical narratives about art that continued to inflict violence on Native American culture five hundred years after colonization began.

I think one of the morals of “Chief Jaguar Strikes the 33rd São Paulo Art Biennale” is that our most urgent task in the Americas is to decolonize our cultures and institutions, those who do not recognize the current values ​​of Indigenous peoples, Belittling and codifying their discourse, erasing the struggles and violence they faced, questioning who they are today, trying to see their cultural creations as exotic or romantic elements.

Without this profound shift, nature would be nothing more than a carbon repository, ready to feed the neoliberal machinery of a centralized state in exchange for a little local elite dividend. Culturally white people (myself included) have a duty to condemn and deconstruct this pedestal upon which colonialism and racism are built upon our feet. We all need to raid the system like the jaguar chief, because the colonization machine never stops.

03. Leisure place

The third piece I want to introduce is by Sallisa Rosa, an Aboriginal artist from the state of Goias. Rosa was awarded a Pampulha Fellowship and in 2019 worked on the “Holiday/Umuarama” project around the Pampulha Art Museum in the state of Belo Horizonte, Brazil.

In the Tupi language, Umuarama means “a sunny place where friends meet; a place to relax,” the artist explained. In this participatory art of hers, people collectively grow cassava on the museum’s land and harvest the fruit. There are other parallel common actions and activities during the period from planting to harvesting.

Continuing the perspective of decolonization, I would like to emphasize the shared social space created by this project, and the warm community created by it. At the project site, the artist stated the following:

In the globalized world we live in, our senses are exhausted and it is necessary to establish new values ​​that lead us to re-evaluate the cultures of our ancestors. What once seemed outdated is now futuristic…I understand cassava as a way of the ancestors, a possibility to root the indigenous culture in the city. Cassava is a homegrown technology and a wonderful creature that can be cultivated in groups. Come together to grow, harvest, conjure up the world of cassava, that is, to think about the tradition of food, the decolonization of food, the culture of cassava flour on the cassava land, the culture of planting, the culture of belonging, our culture – then, it is possible Interact with this universe in different ways.

People spend many hours planting and harvesting together. There are also ceremonial moments, including exchanging experiences, eating together, and resting, a series of actions that reduce the hectic schedules of individualistic and capitalist production. This performance art does not abandon convention, nor does it intend to create an extraordinary event, not just to bring together groups of similar backgrounds, nor to shock or create uncomfortable experiences. It simply establishes a new daily habit, deep and simple, communal and diverse, engaging and caring. A spirit of hospitality permeates the entire experience.

OK, but what is welcome? What “Holiday/Umuarama” proposes is that spaces like cities can welcome wider biodiversity and complexity, can create new habits, break the violence and logic of Western commercialism and individualism, and live in harmony with life. Other possibilities re-establish the bond.

In my opinion, Hangout/Umuarama opens up the possibility of experimentation to explore the creation of new habits at the heart of the machine-like urban labyrinth of our consumerist and extractive society. Every different habit spreads hope and cracks the system.

This experimental act echoes the concept of porosity, an idea derived from Benjamin, and for Ernst Bloch, Mássimo Cacciari, urban planners Thought by Bernardo Secchi et al.

Pores break the homogeneity of the city, embracing the diversity of life within the city: the life of those elements that sustain the city, the soil that nurtures those lives, all the interactions of different life with its environment. Pores in the city allow subjects of different classes or species to communicate with each other, seeking to respect common rights, as opposed to erecting barriers, high walls or sieges.

In Eduardo Sombini’s recent interview with Italian architect and urban planner Paola Viganò, the architect stated that “every city, big or small, can participate in and Be a part of this experiment… It is possible to imagine the capillaries of cities in relation to non-human populations, the key is to see the whole area as a living being in which other beings live. We must treat them (non-humans) See it as life. When you do that, your perspective has shifted.”

This means a new paradigm for Europe. And from a non-European perspective, this paradigm is nothing new, although those who do so are the objects of colonization in Africa, Asia, and the Americas. In the words of Ailton Krenak, a Brazilian environmentalist, philosopher, poet and writer from the Krenak ethnic group, “When we impersonate rivers and mountains, When they rob them of their meaning, their feelings, that these are things that are uniquely human, we leave these places as remnants of industry and grabbing. We are divorced from our integration and interaction with Mother Earth , which makes us orphans, not just for those of us who are called Aboriginal to varying degrees, but for all of us.”

This divorce manifests itself in the way big cities are built, in the way things are produced and consumed, in the predatory use of technology and knowledge, and in everything that exists outside the neoliberal logic of competition, individualism, and busy consumption and production The violent erasure of things. Nothing can be free, slow, useless, timeless, simply beautiful, or spiritual. Everything becomes a commodity. One of China’s largest commercial companies has launched a facial recognition app called “Smile Pay” that lets people shop with a smile. The face, the most sacred embodiment of each person’s uniqueness, becomes a credit card. Smiles, the most generous and subtle expressions and our boundless emotions, become the password to authorize payments. The logic of capitalism continues to commercialize every relationship we have with the world, with other human and non-human beings.

04. Pursue the memory of a former river

In the interview above, Paola Vigano said: “Depending on the type of rock, porosity correlates with the ability of liquids to penetrate into the rock. So we talk about social porosity, imagining that relationships between different groups in a city can flow. And we What is seen more and more in cities today is the reduction of porosity and the difficulty of flow and communication between different groups. It is possible to imagine porosity in relation to non-human groups, based on seeing the whole area as a Be a subject in which many subjects live. You need to see them as subjects. When you do that, your perspective has shifted. For example, I see water as the subject. The logic of water in the city must be understood, not only As a functional element that you can redefine according to your own needs, but as a subject with its own way of thinking and behaving.”

The last piece I want to share here is called Catando Memórias de um Ex-rio (Catando Memórias de um Ex-rio), by artist Gabriela Oranda from Bahia and Pernambuco (Gabriela Holanda) performance in 2020. In this work, a group of four, Orlanda, Iara Sales, José Cirilo Neto and Marcela Aragão The course of the Fragoso River, from its source to its estuary, shows the different forms of the river’s relation to its environment, the aggressions it has suffered, its resilience, its worst enemies (including the excavators that threaten its urbanization mega-development), and the river’s ally in everyday existence. An audiovisual piece, one of the outcomes of this project, can be accessed in the artist’s portfolio. Oranda describes the development of the project:

In the development of “Pursuing the Memory of a Former River”, we expanded our listening field,

Make the memories of people who have been marginalized in the urbanization of Olinda visible.

Soon, we’ll be developing an app for socially mobilized performance art,

Not only because of the many problems that can arise through art, but also because local communities can understand their own history and know themselves in their works.

In this way, we aim to raise the question of the relationship between rivers, communities and cities,

Weave a sustainable future in Pernambuco, reducing social and environmental inequalities.

In creating, we strive to identify things that are comparable to each other in the river:

Water, concrete, desert, vegetation, performer skin, skin somewhere.

Our aim is to examine the emotional and conflicting relationships between rivers, communities and governments (or cities),

Be aware of these different rivers living in one river.

I corresponded the human blood vessels and arteries to the image of the river, which is the blood vessel of the city.

Orlanda’s work is interdisciplinary and holistic, involving historical research, listening within the river community, interviews with experts in the environmental field, collective action interventions by residents, asking questions to governments, and performance interventions that make people aware of rivers Human-like qualities and their surroundings, including mating dances, healing dances, coexistence dances, and resistance dances performed along the river.

Let me interpret it, not only do I take the “before” (ex-) in the title of the work as a reference to a dying river that is about to belong to the past, I hope to also understand it as “ex”, the love of the past. The river will remain a river. Before, the river was our companion. We date the river; the river is the source of life. But then came the divorce that Krenack described. The Fragoso River’s name suggests the challenge of its relationship with humans [Fragoso means ridged, craggy, and a touch of fragility (fraco)]. It’s not easy. There are boulders and impenetrable areas.

Does this give us the right to bury it under tons of concrete? Doing this is as if the government is saying, “Look I have something to tell you, our relationship has been fine, but it’s over now. I’ve been so bad with you. I’ve thrown so much garbage in your body. and sewage. I’ve polluted so much of your water that the best thing to do is to kill you outright so I can more easily forget what I’ve done.” No longer having a good relationship with the river doesn’t give us The right to be buried in a concrete grave.

Along this path, we can read Orlanda’s work as a process of recovery, of the emotions, histories, memories and dreams that have nourished and will continue to nourish the community’s daily relationship with the river. It is a loving relationship that shows empathy, presence and generosity with the river whose existence is part of our being.

06. Epilogue

Just performance and art cannot change the paradigm that leads us from genocide to ecocide. More battles are needed, and all parties involved need to be united. Still, performance art helps shape the experience of a new poetic, political, and civic culture to support these changes. The four pieces here are just a few examples out of thousands.

Defending the Amazon is a struggle to defend the guardians of the forest. But there is also a need to rethink our cities, understanding that we don’t need to start from scratch or turn the world upside down. These performances tell us that the Roots of America is full of many futures. A river runs through the four works. They invite us to traverse the source, to rediscover the traversable route to a common future – the overflow of history, culture, geography, biology, spirit and language. If we do not learn from the source, there will be no real change.

I pray to Tupang to cleanse me, to praise me that I can quench my thirst and quench my heat. I water the plants, the seeds sprout, I wash my clothes, I listen to people chatting, I shelter the schools of fish and snakes and pythons, all things are in my body, endlessly. But I couldn’t take it any longer, watching my cheeks get muddy and my eyes burning with unsolicited garbage. A piece of iron cut my heart, and the blood dried up the Solimones. Scarred by the lack of education, I stopped running and saw only the situation. The dry soil is like the desert in the hinterland, the fish are struggling and unable to breathe, and even the giant python wants to escape this disaster. And what about people? Your intellect cannot rain down, and without your cassava field you are in so much misery but you don’t know what to do. But the mother is caring, to love, even if not to be loved. So I still face my perilous journey along the river. Crying has overdrawn me, what will happen tomorrow? I do not know. I only pray to God Tupang, may I not be left helpless. this life! Does my life no longer have any meaning? I want to run free and feel loved. This is the mourning of abandoned water.

——Márcia Wayna Kambeba, “The Lamentation of Water”

Special thanks to

Black beans, lie flat in the sun every day in the house.

Zhou Xingyue: Small earthworms that loosen the soil everywhere.

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Aboriginal-related past articles

The Red Saint Michel and the Pacific Aboriginal Heritage of the Paris Commune

Who Defines Aboriginal Art: Settlement Colonialism in East Asia

The Fall of the Sky | Aboriginal Perspectives Series & World Anthropology

Our worlds at war with each other | Aboriginal Perspectives Series & World Anthropology

I’m Aboriginal, not mixed race | Aboriginal Perspectives Series & World Anthropology

This article is reprinted from: https://tyingknots.net/2022/09/learning-sources-performance-and-climate-crisis-four-brazilian-works/
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