Statement 2019
Transcription of the statement for the 21st Biennial
Our relationship with Movimento de Luta nos Bairros, Vilas e Favelas , MLB, emerges organically as of 2013 through the activism and constant and increasing cooperation of the artists that make up the creative and technical team of this work. This relationship is founded on our belief in the agenda and actions of their struggle, whose main goals are not only decent housing and urban reform, but also the socialist revolution and consequently the creation of a new popular collective imagination.
The film Conte isso àqueles que dizem que fomos derrotados, screened at the 21st Biennial, stems from a process of organization and development in whose nature lies the instrumental excellence of words. However, what we address here is a different moment in this process, in which the layers of sound, resulting from concrete body actions, lead us, by means of what is unseen, to a greater sensorial understanding of the issue at hand—it is the exchange of meaning for feeling as the path to hearts and minds. To this end, we pored over MLB’s archive for about six weeks to better understand the latent aesthetic powers of that heterogeneous amalgam of images and sounds. By imposing a few rules on the archive research, we were able to first define the material that would compose the film, to then shape it as idea and gesture.
We sought here to embrace a number of proposals related to art and politics, carving time and space to speak about language and action, aesthetics and tactics. We expanded territorial materiality through sounds and images in order to circumscribe different spectators-bodies to a political practice at a specific time in the processes of popular struggles. It is a gesture of approach—and rupture of such approach—which sees aesthetic experience as presence, so that it is felt inwardly, driving the sensorial potentialities of the body towards reflection and awareness, producing subjectivities by broadening the scope of the collective imagination of political action; however, it is aware of its nature of a “mere” film and its inherent role of instigating, promoting and rallying: a call to arms!