Contemporary Laboratory group. Encounter with Gustavo Ciríaco. October 31, 2014, Casa Daros. Photo: Jessica Gogan

The Poetics of the Encounter – Contemporary Laboratory: Proposals and Discoveries of What Art Is (or Could Be)

Diana Kolker Carneiro da Cunha with Lab Collage (fragments, edits and texts written by and for Instituto MESA and Coletivo E)

The viability of an art school lies in its capacity to consider each student as an individual thinker, consequently, a proposer, a discoverer of what art is.”

Rubens Gerchman¹

The Contemporary Laboratory: Proposals and Discoveries of What Art Is (or Could be) was created by Instituto MESA and Coletivo E at the invitation of Rio de Janeiro’s Casa Daros on the occasion of the exhibition Rubens Gerchman: With the Resignation Letter in My Pocket. The exhibition explored the history of the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage (1975 – 1979) inaugurated and led by the Brazilian vanguard artist Rubens Gerchman. Inspired by the experimental and “pluridimensional” legacy of this time period, the Contemporary Laboratory was designed for young artists working in different media and took place from October to December 2014. The artists were selected through the recommendation of diverse citywide organizations, universities and collaborators.

The Laboratory was a fold in the fabric of time, bringing together the edges of counterculture and the genealogies of the experimental practices of the 70s with the artistic and sociopolitical context of our current scenario. The goal was to activate the musculature of the eyes and ears as well as that of the individual and collective body and to foster experimentations across practices and languages.

The Contemporary Laboratory was made up of a series of encounters – a space where poetic and transdisciplinary experimentation was developed amidst an interchange of multiple languages and thinking. The encounters drew on the presence of Jessica Gogan and Guilherme Vergara (Instituto MESA), Diana Kolker and Rafa Éis (Coletivo E), Vicente (Diana and Rafa’s baby son), Casa Daros and its team, the legacy of Gerchman, Rio’s political context, invited speakers/lecturers and, especially, the young artists themselves. It is more apt to describe it as a program with young artists, and not for young artists.

Gerchman’s proposal for Parque Lage comprised “a creative immersion, a constant questioning.” Drawing on this questioning, the Laboratory constantly evolved and changed in accordance with the artists’ creative ideas. It was a cartographic process in which the path was made by walking. Quoting Antonio Amador, one of the artists in the Laboratory:

The encounters were a place for exchange, for experimentation, for sharing. They had a specific goal: proposals and discoveries of what art is (or could be). But at the same time it was wide and diffuse, for this specific goal could lead to various paths. Many practices of art were proposed in that space. The participants would work them according to their poetics and research and there was a focus on collective creation. The space became a space of relationships.”²

Contemporary Laboratory. Encounter with Barbara Szaniecki, November 7, 2014, Casa Daros. Photo: Felipe Moreno.

Activities took place on Wednesdays and Fridays. Every Friday, invited artists and researchers from different disciplines (literature, music, theater, performance, video, social movements, visual arts, and public art) active in Rio de Janeiro’s contemporary scene presented a laboratory drawing on current themes and different experimental formats. Each also contributed a generative and provocative question relevant to the artist of the 21st century along with various bibliographic as well as idiosyncratic references (articles, essays, books, manifestos, poems, works, music, images, etc).

Wednesdays were dedicated to experimentation and debate, responding to what was affecting the group through the process. And because of that, we were open to changes and to the proposals of all participants. In October, we occupied two Casa Daros gallery spaces (known internally as Gallery 17 and 18) adjacent to the exhibition Rubens Gerchman: With the Resignation Letter in My Pocket. Closed to the public and reserved for the group, the interconnected galleries became a place of encounter, a shelter for traces of the process and a space for brainstorming and experimentation. One particular Wednesday (October 29) featured an experiment that would prove a rich collective turning point for the group; it was based on a Theater of the Oppressed exercise and followed the encounter with the theater’s director Geo Britto.³ The focus was to encourage an exchange of practices and languages:

The Multimedia Machine Exercise [Activity Description]
This activity happens in the encounter between the different languages with which the artists work – in a series of non-verbalized conversations. What is crucial for this encounter: your tools, your brushes, your stamps, your chords, your elastic bands, your body, your camera, your words, your verses, your fabrics, your costumes, your movements, your shades and nuances, etc. It is important to be alert, to listen, to see, to feel the effect on your body. How to affect? How to be affected? How does the music dance with this drawing? How does my body relocate your words? How does your voice produce an image?

The exercise lasted about two hours, but its impact reverberated in many directions, generating new meanings in relation to previous experiences and producing new effects on what was yet to come. It was an alchemical happening, a good mixture, as the Stoics might have said. The artists were in the room with their bodies in permanent relation, fulfilled with the power of affecting other bodies and being affected by them. “When do we become spectators of ourselves?” That question emerged from a virtual group created by the Laboratory participants and it deepened the discussion about the experience with the multimedia machine. Other questions emerged from the previous one: Did the experience happen only to the people who abandoned their position as spectators? Would the experience be potent enough to create ruptures in the notion of time of whoever observed it or only to the participants who acted within it? Was it possible to act and to observe at the same time? Is the role of the spectator, in this case, as powerful as the role of the artist? In the same conversation, the dancer Henrique Castro made our thoughts dance, contributing a reflection that asked a new question: “To be the spectator of one self is to give one’s self time. Inside and outside. And I insist in the figure that witnesses as a body that is powerful and thinks inside and out. Isn’t the problem about what is inside and what is outside?”

Contemporary Laboratory: experimentations in the internal patio of Casa Daros. November 5, 2014, Casa Daros. Photo: Jessica Gogan.

On the following Wednesday, while our bodies still breathed and felt touched by the experience of the laboratory created by the artist and choreographer Gustavo Ciríaco, we talked about some of the themes that were present in our creation process: the spectator (from diverse perspectives), the conditions of rituality, and the context of the work of art. The artists were then divided into three groups according to different locations: the internal patio of Casa Daros, Gallery 17, and the external surroundings of Casa Daros. The groups were to create a collective response and devise strategies that took into consideration ways to interfere with the space, questions which might arise in the process, the visibility/invisibility of particular places/spaces, and the relations to “the other.” Once the experimentation began, the strategies shifted from being conceptual plans to concrete tactics.

Contemporary Laboratory: The Island. November 5, 2014, Casa Daros. Photo: Tathiana Peixoto.

During this laboratory we watched bodies and objects being carried around the internal patio of Casa Daros. Without notice or choice, we stopped watching and instead got carried around. The ones who carried us were bodies too, but they were transfigured into machine-bodies, possessed by the violent efficiency of just meeting the demand: displacement. With the same accuracy and with the same emotion that they carried waste bins and chairs, they carried our bodies. In the meantime, one of the Lab’s participating artists, Lucas Bueno, embodied some sort of guide who seemed to ignore all these movements around him and just amused us with very dubious information about the history of Casa Daros. Until he himself got displaced.

Then someone led us outside Casa Daros. We crossed the street and stopped at a triangular-shaped sidewalk made out of Portuguese cobble stones and surrounded by asphalt. An island. In the middle of the island there was a public telephone; it seemed obsolete. Then it rang. When we answered the phone we found out that the other artists, who we were expecting to see outside, were actually in Gallery 17. They watched us from the gallery, asked what we could see from that perspective and encouraged us to create routes and strategies to get out of that place. We jumped aboard their metaphor and were transported to this island.

Contemporary Laboratory: experimentation outside the entrance gate of Casa Daros. November 5, 2014, Casa Daros. Photo: Jessica Gogan.

Themes and concepts that turned out to be important emerged from these experiences and from the encounters with invited guests, the context of Casa Daros, the group itself and importantly, amongst the young artists themselves outside of the Lab meet-up times. The darkness of our time, as the philosopher Giorgio Agamben describes, was tapped into by these young artists.⁴ How could we not link the machine-bodies that displaced people as if they were things to the thousands of displacements that were happening throughout the city and country?⁵

During her laboratory, invitee Barbara Szaniecki reactivated Rubens Gerchman’s idea of a ‘communicant network’ – the interwoven net of relations between artists, activists and students of Parque Lage in the 1970s – and made us all think about the communicant networks of our time. Contemporary times have experienced a growth in virtual relations over physical presence. The tools for connecting and communicating are more and more numerous and sophisticated. If we chose not to be a part of these virtual networks would we be isolating ourselves? Does that make us castaways? Or is it the opposite?

As social networks allow the world to know more about the situation of victims of police brutality like Rafael Braga, Amarildo, Claudia Silva Ferreira, and the indigenous Guarani-Kaiowa, they also have the ability to scatter us in this overflow of information, self-publicity and lack of connection with life and its forces.⁶ How can we maintain the affection, sense of touch, the bond, the presence, and point of view? How can we move from the island (considering it as a lack of communication and isolation) to a network of affections, communication and action?

Contemporary Laboratory: experimentations in the internal patio of Casa Daros. November 5, 2014, Casa Daros. Photo: Jessica Gogan.

On December 12, 2014, the Laboratory ended with a celebration between artists and publics. As a means of sharing the processes that they had both lived and created collectively, the artists presented an exhibition in Gallery 17 mapping the affections of the Lab’s process including: an idiosyncratic timeline; artist books made of drawings, preparatory sketches and email exchanges; videos made by the artists and clips from the individual labs with invited guests; and a large ‘affective’ wall drawing. The exhibition continued until February 2015 in conjunction with the dates of Rubens Gerchman: With the Resignation Letter in My Pocket. Additionally, the artists carried out a free appropriation of the spectacle conference – an experimental practice featuring a mix of performance and workshops developed by the renowned set designer Hélio Eichbauer during the 70s, when he was a teacher at Parque Lage.⁷ The Contemporary Laboratory’s spectacle conference “Look, Imagine, Listen, Feel” featured multiple “micro performances”: a provocation that transformed a traffic island outside the entrance to Caso Daros into an imaginary one – a curiously ironic, embodied and experimental institutional critique; responsive poetic performances; Butoh; relational clothes; video projections; street vendors selling peanuts; displacements… It was rather an ‘anti-event,’ or a ‘de-conference,’ more an open invitation to experience micro-situations and actions, a provocation, a catharsis, a celebration.

A video of the conference was produced by the documentarian Daniel Leão (also part of this case study). Each of the young artists contributed reflections on the process presented here in an accompanying essay as a series of “astrological” houses. A small editorial group drawn from the participants was involved in editing and compiling the four pieces that make up this case study – the interview, Lab description, video and the “houses” reflections. After the close of the Lab exhibition, the group formed a collective and in 2015 will present a performance piece at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói. In addition, many individual and collaborative creative projects are emerging from the rich array of experimentations, transdisciplinarity and collectivity of the Lab process.

Encounters with Invited Guests

Fred Coelho
“Nowadays, what are the cultures we should be ‘against’? For how long will art need museums?”

Description of the laboratory: A brilliant overview on (counter) culture of the 60s and 70s in the West. A great exploration of the ideals and questions of Brazilian counterculture and its resonance for contemporary thought and practices, followed by a lively conversation and debate.

Brief biography: Literature and theatrical arts professor of the Department of Literature at PUC-RIO. Published the following books: Conglomerados/Newyorkaises (with Cesar Oiticica Filho, Azougue, 2013), A semana sem fim: Celebrações e memória da Semana de Arte Moderna de 1922 (Casa da Palavra, 2012), Livro ou livro-me: os escritos babilônicos de Hélio Oiticica (2012, EdUERJ) and Eu, brasileiro, confesso minha culpa e meu pecado: cultura marginal no Brasil de 1960 e 1970 (Civilização Brasileira, 2010).

Geo Britto
“What revolution can an artist make in the 21st century?”

Description of the laboratory: The group engaged in theatrical games and exercises, the introductory techniques of the Theatre of the Oppressed; including the Forum Theatre technique. This comprises a theatrical question asked by the cast to the spect-actors: this turns the notion of the passive audience into an active role of participation where those watching/participating may potentially occupy the stage and act. At the end of the laboratory, we discussed the experience while thinking about the concepts of spectacle/show/spectator, revolution and the potential role of the artist in the 21st century.

Brief biography: Political-artistic coordinator of the Theatre of the Oppressed Centre (CTO). Britto has worked at CTO, since 1990; coordinated the following projects: The Theatre of the Oppressed for Mental Health Professionals 2005/2010 (São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro and Sergipe); Ponto de Cultura 2005/2008 (Rio de Janeiro); Mudança de Cena (Theater of the oppressed at Degase, Rio de Janeiro, 2002); Theatre of the Oppressed in Prisons 2003/2007 (Rio Grande do Sul and Rio Grande do Norte) and Pontão de Cultura 2006/2009 (Distrito Federal, Goiás, Bahia). Nowadays, he coordinates the project Theatre of the Oppressed at Maré. He has given workshops and lectures in many different countries such as Palestine, Mozambique, South Africa, Mexico, Guatemala, Argentina, Bolivia, Uruguay, Colombia, Egypt, India, Poland, Portugal, Spain, Scotland, Canada, France, Germany, England, and The United States. At present, he is a master’s student in Contemporary Studies of Art, at UFF (Fluminense Federal University).

Rafucko
“What is natural to you?”

Description of the laboratory: In the first part of the meeting, Rafucko showed some of his work, explained his creative methodology and shared critical references. In the second part, the young artists were divided into groups where each had to develop a proposal for an intervention project that combined art and politics. The goal of this activity was to outline a sketch of an idea that could realistically be produced with few resources and to present this as a pilot project to the other groups, reflecting upon the difficulties and real necessities to make them happen.

Brief biography: Rafucko graduated in Radio and TV from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). He makes political satire videos and performances. At the beginning of 2014 he succeeded in crowd funding a campaign and was able to produce a series of interviews for the web talk show (Talk-show do Rafucko/Rafucko’s talkshow).

Gustavo Ciríaco
“How can we create a place of innocence?”

Description of the laboratory: Two weeks before the encounter with Ciríaco, the artist/choreographer requested the group do the following exercise on two separate occasions: participants were to choose a place at Casa Daros (internal, external, in the galleries, café, patio, etc.) and stay there for 30 minutes. The focus was to take notes of everything they could observe from the chosen point of view without interjecting judgments or developing an interpretation. The idea was to ground the particular participant’s points of view in focused description of the context, time and place. Bringing their observations to Ciríaco’s lab, the young artists engaged in a debate around the conditions of visibility and invisibility in the exhibition spaces, as well as in public space in general.

Brief biography: The choreographer and contextual artist Gustavo Ciríaco is from Rio de Janeiro but works in Latin America, Europe, Asia, and Middle East in transversal projects and collaborations involving architecture, visual arts and art of the spectacle. His projects are oriented by the context in which they happen and by the poetry of the materiality within each situation. He has acted in projects in urban space and in landscapes, in conversational plays, in performances and, more recently, in museum projects. His work has been presented in festivals, galleries, museums, and institutions such as Casa Encendida (Madrid), Serralves Museum (Porto), Alkantara (Lisbon), Paris Quartier D’Été (Paris), Tanz im August (Berlin), Al Mamal Foundation (Jerusalem), TWS (Tokyo), Digital Art Center (Taipei), Cenart (Mexico City), Panorama, Oi Futuro (Rio de Janeiro), SESC-SP and Itaú Cultural (Sao Paulo), and London Festival (London). (For more information: gustavociria.co)

Barbara Szaniecki
“From a contemporary perspective, is it possible to consider the [Brazilian 2013-2014] protests an amplified field of art?”

Description of the laboratory: The activity combined Szaniecki’s reflections on the exhibition Rubens Gerchman: With the Resignation Letter in My Pocket with critical questions raised by the broad public protests that started in early 2013 in Brazil and continued albeit on a smaller scale until June 2014, when the World Cup started. As director of Parque Lage (School of Visual Arts) from 1975 to 1979, Gerchman transformed the former more traditional and academic Instituto de Belas Artes – IBA (Fine Arts Institute) into a space of pedagogical and artistic experimentation and political resistance during the military dictatorship. He succeeded in making the school less conventional thanks to the notion of a “communicant network” that he wove with the students and the artist-teachers Celeida Tostes, Dinah Guimaraens, Helio Eichbauer, Lélia Gonzalez, Lina Bo Bardi, Lygia Pape, Marcos Flaksman, and Xico Chaves.

Szaniecki was interested in exploring with the group how the protests of 2013-2014 – politically and artistically speaking – might be similar to this “communicant network” woven by Rubens Gerchman at Parque Lage? The political aspect of the protests of 2013-2014 is clear. What this laboratory wished to explore was their artistic dimension.

Brief biography: Barbara Szaniecki graduated in Visual Communications from the École Nationale Supérieure des Arts Décoratifs in Paris and received her MA and Ph.D. in Design from the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro. She has extensive practical experience in the field of graphic design and is currently co-editor of the magazines Lugar Comum (media studies, communication and culture), Re-Dobra and Multitudes. Professor and researcher at the Industrial School of Design at Universidade de Estado de Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), her research interests focus on the relationships between graphic design (in particular the poster) and political concepts like the multitude, power, protest, and representation. She is part of the Nomadic University Network and the author of Estetico Multidão (Aesthetics of the Multitude), 2007 and Disforme Contemporâneo e Design Encarnado: Outros Monstros Possíveis (Formless and Contemporary Design Incarnate: Other Possible Monsters), 2014.

Ricardo Basbaum
“How can we indicate what exists between ‘me’ and ‘me as an artist’? Are there convergences and divergences in these demands?”

Description of the laboratory: From the questions outlined in his book Manual do artista-etc (Artist etc. Manual)(Azougue, 2013), Basbaum suggested a debate about the problems and themes related to the “processes of self-construction as an artist.” The following paragraph was used as reference in the debate:

“To occupy a place, as an artist, in the social fabric is to experience and to manage a ‘gap’ between ‘self-construction’ and ‘self-construction as an artist’ – in the terms of the production of a collective subject but above all, it’s about letting oneself be formed by a social alterity and its games of legitimization of the figure of the artist. The production of a ‘figure of the artist’ – the one you are or the one you want to be, the one who catches us, or makes us run away – is in permanent negotiation. How can we indicate what exists between ‘me’ and ‘me as an artist’ – are there convergences and divergences in these demands? Is it possible to think about ‘what kind of artist one wants to be’ or is this dynamic a ‘capture’ to which there is no reaction? It is important to understand that there are different models of artists working at each moment.”

Brief biography: Ricardo Basbaum (São Paulo, 1961) is an artist and writer who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. He has been actively exhibiting and doing projects since 1981. He investigates art as a tool of relation and articulation between sensorial experiences, sociability, and language. His actions happen at the limit of a communicative approach that wishes to propel the circulation of actions and forms. He has developed a specific vocabulary for his work that is applied in a special way in each new project. By using charts, drawings, texts, audio works, and installations, Basbaum creates a mechanism in which the personal and individual experience of the agents and the viewers play a relevant role. His recent individual exhibitions are: nbp-etc: escolher linhas de repetição (Galeria Laura Alvim, Rio de Janeiro, 2014), The production of the artist as a collective conversation (Audain Gallery, Vancouver, 2014), Diagramas (Centro Galego de Arte Contemporânea, Santiago de Compostela, 2013), re-projecting (London) (The Showroom, London, 2013), Would you like to participate in an artistic experience? (Logan Center for the Arts, Chicago, 2012) and conjs., re-bancos*: exercícios & conversas (Museu de Arte da Pampulha, 2011). He participated in the 30th and 25th Bienal de São Paulo (2012, 2002) and in the Documenta 12 (2007). In 2012, he developed projects for ReaKt – Olhares e Processos (Guimarães, Portugual), Counter-Production (Generali Foundation, Vienna), Garden of Learning (Busan Bienal) and aberto fechado: caixa e livro na arte brasileira (Pinacoteca do Estado de SP). He wrote Manual do artista-etc (Azougue, 2013), Ouvido de corpo, ouvido de grupo (Universidade Nacional de Córdoba, 2010) and Além da pureza visual (Zouk, 2007). At present, he is a professor at Instituto de Artes da Universidade do Estado do Rio de Janeiro. In 2014, he was resident artist at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver and visiting professor at The University of Chicago between October and December 2013.

Vivian Caccuri
“How to deal with the impatience of the audience? Should we embrace or challenge it? How to take a stand on the amount of information that causes this impatience? Should we simplify the propositions or should we resist?”

Description of the laboratory: The silent walk is a performance in the format of an urban itinerary constituted by a group of 15-20 people. The original route lasts 8 hours and is done silently. During this time, the group walks by places with acoustic problems, sonorous activities and noises of different sources. The group finishes the walk with a dinner/picnic prepared specially for the activity; talking is again allowed. The walk that was specially planned for the Contemporary Laboratory lasted 3 hours and happened between Urca and the beginning of Leme. As a way of amplifying the experience for the artists, they were allowed to do any kind of intervention they wanted to do (performances, sound work, exhibitions, etc.), bearing in mind the importance of silence. Two places that were open to intervention included: the top floor of the parking lot at Shopping Rio Sul which one of the young artists, Luann Machado, performed Butoh and the main hall of the church Paróquia Santa Teresinha Menino Jesus (the church was to be open to the silent group, but on that day unfortunately it wasn’t possible). Other points along the route also were open for exploration.

Brief biography: Vivian Caccuri (São Paulo, 1986) is an artist who works and lives in Rio de Janeiro. Her work creates connections between the sound recording, the public space, the voice, and the imagination through performances, objects and installations. Since 2008 she has studied listening and sonority as a way of crossing borders and creating bonds between people or places that were isolated before. She holds a degree in Fine Arts (UNESP) and a master’s degree in Studies of Musical Sound (UFRJ and Princeton University). She recently collaborated with the musicians Arto Lindsay and Gilberto Gil, with whom she developed sound editing and performances. She was awarded with the Prêmio Funarte de Produção Crítica em Música 2013, Prêmio Sergio Motta 2011, Prêmio Rumos Itaú Cultural 2008, and she was nominated to Prêmio PIPA 2014. Her main exhibitions are: 330 Panorama da Arte Brasileira MAM-SP; VERBO 2012 and 2013 (Galeria Vermelho); Brasil ArteMúsica (Zacheta National Gallery in Warsow) and Sound Development City in Helsinque and Riga.

Laura Lima
“In 200 years, what will your work be like?”

Description of the laboratory: The last laboratory occurred on December 5th with the visual artist Laura Lima. Its focus was rehearsing elements of the spectacle conference with the group. The artist observed some of the experimentations and shared her critique with the focus of stimulating collective production. Her phrase “pessimists live longer” instigated the group. The sentence was written on the wall as part of the exhibition of the process of the Contemporary Laboratory.

Brief biography: Laura is from Minas Gerais, but currently lives in Rio de Janeiro. She graduated in Philosophy at the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro and studied at Parque Lage. In 2003, she opened the gallery A Gentil Carioca along with the artists Ernesto Neto and Márcio Botner. She participated in the following exhibitions: 24th and 27th São Paulo Biennial, 2nd and 3rd Mercosul Biennial (Porto Alegre), Instâncias to Age (Chapter Art Centre – Cardiff, Wales), A Little Bit of History Repeated (Kunst Werke – Berlin), Alegoria Barroca na Arte Contemporêanea (Centro Cultural Banco do Brasil – Rio de Janeiro), Panorama da Arte Brasileira 2001 and 2007, La Centrale (Monstreal – Canada), Alegoria Barroca (Casa França Brasil – Rio de Janeiro), 11th Lyon Bienal (France), Projeto Respiração (Fundação Eva Klabin – Rio de Janeiro), Migros Gegenwartskunst (Zurich – Switzerland). She was adjunct artist-curator at the 7th Mercosul Biennial: Grito e Escuta creating the Pavilhão Absurdo. Recently, she created The Abstraction, a museum of abstract art that is directed and curated by kids in the Lilith Performance Studio in Malmo. She was the first Brazilian artist whose art works in the “Performance” category were purchased by a Brazilian museum (Museu de Arte Moderna de São Paulo). She was nominated to the Francophone prize (France, 2011) and to the HansNefkens (2012). She won the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum residence prize (Boston, 2010), the Marcantônio Vilaça prize (2006) and the Baca Laureate, Bonnefantenmuseum (2014).

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¹ Rubens Gerchman. Text on the conception of the School of Visual Arts of Parque Lage cited in the exhibition Rubens Gerchman: With the Resignation Letter in My Pocket, August 2014 – February 2015, Casa Daros.

² Available at http://www.antonio-amador.com/#!ha-formao-de-artista-hoje/c1ap7

³ “Máquina rítmica” (rhythmic machine) is one of the theatrical exercises created by Augusto Boal, founder of The Theatre of the Oppressed. In the exercise, an actress or actor starts the action by repeating a movement and a rhythmic sound. The following participants should consecutively integrate themselves to it, each one with their own movement and sound.

⁴ Giorgio Agambem. O que é o contemporâneo e outros ensaios. Chapecó: Editora Argos, 2009.

⁵ Between 2009 and 2013, when Eduardo Paes was the mayor of Rio de Janeiro, more than 65 thousand people were removed from their houses and communities by the Secretaria Municipal de Habitação da cidade do Rio de Janeiro. (Lena Azevedo e Lucas Faulhaber, 2015). The compulsory removals are still happening under the pretext of the execution of the infrastructure plan for the city. The backdrop context: the mega-events that took and will take place in Brazil. In 2014, Brazil hosted the FIFA World Cup and in 2016 it will host the Olympic Games.

⁶ All the people mentioned are victims of the violence of the Brazilian State. These cases raised public awareness via the dissemination of independent media and the social networks.

⁷ The spectacle conference could be defined as a kind of event-class – a mixture of lectures, debates and creative actions and the practice of thematic exercises and collaborations that involve various forms of artistic expression.