Under the sign of motion
by Sabrina Moura
about Focus 5 of 18th Contemporary Art Festival Sesc_Videobrasil's Public Programs
A hybrid project – halfway between artist book and essay collection – done under the sign of lived and felt motion. Thus the artist-researcher Marie Ange Bordas introduced Geographies in Motion, the ninth edition of Caderno SESC_Videobrasil. Part of the 18th Festival’s fifth Public Programs focus, the meeting about the publication, held in December 2013, discussed issues dear to Videobrasil, in a debate marked by the deep practical involvement of each of the guests in their research subjects.
By discussing art as a political exercise that is open to a collective construction process, the meeting’s conversations echoed the very way in which texts were drafted for the publication. In a plot of continuous dialogues, Achille M’bembe, Magdalena Campos-Pons, Simon Njami, William Kentridge, Rogério Haesenbert and Ana Paula do Val fed the publication with expanded contributions regarding their practices. Geographies in Motion is thus outlined by multiple exercises in exchange, interspersed with the experiences of Marie Ange Bordas as an artist, educator and researcher, which she initiated over twelve years ago.
In her Displacements project (2001-2006) – involving refugee groups from England, France, Sri Lanka, Kenya and South Africa –, Marie Ange made her first inroads into reflection about belonging “amidst a ceaseless movement of crossing visible and invisible borders.” In the process, Marie Ange recalled her stay in Johannesburg- a city to which she returned during her research as editor – as a particularly formative experience. To the artist, Johannesburg represents urban Africa – a contemporary metropolis built upon its own differences, allowing for multiple intersection points with the issues facing Brazilian society.
Marie Ange’s experiments were complemented by the views on cartography and territory of two public meeting guests: the urban planner and research Ana Paula do Val and the geographer Rogério Haesbaert. Do Val and Haesbaert pointed out practices and concepts for thinking about a world in motion, discussing new perspectives from which to consider individual subjectivities, affections and presences in building and understanding space.
Defining her trajectory as an exercise that comes from being “out in the field,” Ana Paula do Val highlighted the attention to “world narratives built on the other’s gaze” as an important feature her work shares with Marie Ange Bordas’. The researcher underscored the artist-cartographer’s image of the body-territory as a political field that contains the multiplicity of a nomadic identity.
What can a given territory activate or refuse? How does one represent the occupation of a space and its cultural practices? To what extent can we give shape to a physical and psychosocial landscape consonant with our lived experiences? In her myriad projects, do Val strives to answer these questions, proposing a questioning of official cartography and discussing the city through parameters that are not set forth by its master plan. Her praxis revolves around another epistemology, a form of knowledge production that validates the body as a source, and takes into consideration experiences not circumscribed by social data.
Understanding the map as a strong political narrative, Rogério Haesbaert reaffirms do Val’s view to fathom and recreate transit experiences, like those outlined in the publication. The author of the reference text From multiple territories to multiterritoriality (2004), Haesbaert problematizes the notion of territory as a politically and symbolically charged definition. In his production, the geographer works with the notion of territory as “lived space-time,” always multiple, diverse and complex, and states: “It is precisely because they make too strict a separation between territory as (material) domination and territory as (symbolic) appropriation that many ignore the complexity and richness of the ‘multiterritoriality’ in which we are immersed.”
In his speech, Haesenbert discussed aspects of his theoretical production, punctuated by personal experiences that came up in conversations with Marie Ange while preparing his text for the book. Mixing images from his travels and field research, the geographer sought to reaffirm the understanding of territory as a process rather than a datum.
“Can art help us consider this (these) Geography(ies)?,” Haesenbert inquired, highlighting the project’s interdisciplinary character. This question is crucial and somehow echoes the entire project devised for the public programs in this festival edition. If, on the one hand, one runs the risk of hermetic shock or of a certain “superficiality” on approaching the festival’s theoretical sections, largely in response to the need for language adaptation; then, on the other hand, one is allowed to create friction across specialty fields, giving rise to tensions that contribute to the questioning of the topics’ containment in these same fields.
Therefore, one of the main inputs to Geographies in Motion is its diverse composition. Guests with different backgrounds gathering around artworks that use concept as a weapon to create and act allow us to consider art’s commitment to its political effects, in an aesthetic and affective exercise. If we take as our horizon the methodological premises of a possible epistemology of the South, an important consideration may concern the dilution of knowledge compartmentalization, towards a complex thinking, as Edgar Morin used to put it. And as Marie Ange Bordas so aptly put it, the most important thing is not to affirm oneself as representing a practice. “Being an artist is the least important thing,” says Bordas, “To me, what really counts is being a bridge.”