Nº6 VIDAS ESCONDIDAS

Glossary

Arbitrariness: Direct Provision, Ireland’s political refugee program, like many institutional and state responses to migrants and asylum seekers worldwide, is a deeply racist system whose key priority is to refuse as many people as possible, whether at the border or within the legal labyrinth of the “protection” process. The system is not designed to assist those seeking protection as much as possible, but rather to catch out as many people as possible. Part of the hostility that is written into the asylum system is its radically uncertain temporality. The person at the centre of the process has no timetable for when the interview will happen or when a decision will be made on his or her case. Rather than any clearly announced amnesty, a knife-edge arbitrariness is deployed that keeps people in a space of paralysis between hope and fear, not knowing whether they will get residency, hopeful that they will, terrified that they might not. Arbitrariness is not an accidental by-product of systemic incompetence but a crucial mechanism of control at the core of the asylum and deportation regime. It orchestrates a suspended space that people describe as a kind of living death. – Anne Mulhall.

Bringing to light: There is a tradition in both Chile and Argentina, of families of the disappeared using the photograph as a form of protest – displaying images of their missing relatives in public space, or bearing their faces on their chests or on banners. At the time, it was a way of visually sustaining the identity of those who had both lost their rights as citizens and their existence. Photography replaced the absent body. Even official ID photos were used: faces looking at the camera with their full names and identification numbers included at the bottom. The name-face-number triad is a guarantee of the victim’s being, denied by the nefarious practice of disappearance. The performative use of the photo in these acts of public denunciation testifies and exposes the absence of the referent.1 Recent projects build on this protest practice and at the same time resignify it. Through photomontage, composite imagery or image projections, the emphasis is rather placed on survival, on the fact that these “hidden lives” – those of the victims and their relatives – continue to exist. Hence, we can read their meaning as a process of bringing to light, in a literal and figurative sense. Representation is used not only as a trace or imprint of someone who is no longer there, but also as material evidence of their presence. – Carolina Pizarro Cortés

Clandestinity: is understood as “the boldness of being other and oneself,”2, a losing of oneself to exist again in the collective.  When at a crossroads, the clandestine being chooses to say goodbye to him or herself. They leave behind their affections, objects, and memories –ones that they may never again recuperate. This loss is part of the choice for life, not only theirs, but also of the possibility of the common good. The clandestine experience is singular – a world of nomadism, little baggage, and few objects. Nothing that weighs and can’t be left behind. The opposite of accumulations, clandestinity dedicates itself to the world without borders, where nationality is lost. Experiential but nevertheless marking profound modes of being and acting, producing permanence. Between investigation and performance, the clandestine artist produces actions in the urgent present, with their own logic, producing subjectivities that only clandestine experience enables, creating multiple marks. Ones conceived in a web of relationships with the “other”, understood in the broadest sense, from the other people with whom the clandestine artist lives to the environment where daily life intervenes, and the changes, choices, preferences, and memories produced in this context. By a means of connecting these paths, testimony becomes a fundamental part of this practice, traveling between places of memory and the archive, putting in motion the exercise of telling something, and creating diverse dynamics between image and writing. – Anita Sobar

Democratizing literature: We need to find ways of thinking that make it difficult to distinguish between democracy and literature. A democratic education, according to the American philosopher Martha Nussbaum, needs to act against narcissistic and, therefore, prejudiced behaviors. So in addition to providing the basic conditions to ensure access to literature (literacy, public libraries, and freedom of expression), its democratization implies participation in collective readings where readers’ impressions are mediated with a view to exploring democratic affects, against the infantile narcissism that is the foundation of totalitarian representations. – Luiz Guilherme Ribeiro Barbosa 

Ebó-Rapsódia [Ritual Afro-Brazilian Offering /Rhapsody]: There remained a photo and a letter from the social worker at the asylum sent to Jéssica’s older aunt relating her grandmother Judith’s death [committed shortly after the birth of Jéssica’s father]. In addition to this, there were versions, stories, second or third hand reports, riddled with interpretation or prejudice, made true by repetition or the need for meaning. A well-known phrase by Walter Benjamin (who is cited at the opening of the second act of In Search of Judith) became a kind of north for us: “Articulating the past historically does not mean recognizing ‘the way it really was.’ It means appropriating a memory as it flashes up in the moment of danger.”3 So, the meaning would need not to be grounded in what was, but rather in what is. The result is necessarily fragmentary. And we think it’s good that way. French theorist Jean-Pierre Sarrazac proposes the concept of rhapsody to describe contemporary theater.4  According to the etymology of the word, rhaptein, the rhapsode (or in more modern usage rhapsodist) is the person that weaves, adjusting songs, passages, and disparate and heterogeneous elements. There is no illusion of impartiality or transparency, there is no search for absorption or absolute enchantment, but reflection, questioning, and shared action. As in a ritual, there is no audience; everyone is a participant. And Jéssica, after repeated confrontations, during rehearsals, with the frightening and destabilizing aspect of the presence of Judith and so many Judiths from yesterday and today, came to the conclusion that the only viable way to undertake the crossing would be to live it as a ritual. Pay due respect, in an alert and disciplined manner, to the spirits that pass through us and are the very consistency of our social and individual reality in their subconscious strategies. “It’s an ebó,” Jéssica said. [Ébo is a ritual offering to Afro Brazilian deities]. What we are doing is an offering for my grandmother, for my great-grandmother Francisca, for all Judiths, it is an Ebó. – Jéssica Barbosa e Pedro Sá Moraes

Fringe: Historically, in all places on the fringe you find people who had to flee from oppression and who developed a certain spirit and creativity to survive. When living “on the fringe” in a houseboat in the Netherlands, we met people from all walks of life – wonderful, interesting, and creative people. We loved the fringe, and still do. You can draw on what’s best of both sides of a border and build a bridge between worlds. Here in Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland, the landscape is very harsh indeed, but being confronted by its beauty, it opens up possibilities that you never dreamed of being possible or even likeable. Taking this remoteness even further, the small church with which we are involved is on the fringe of the island and the larger community.  It is on the edge of disappearing and maybe the struggle to keep it going is the intriguing part of living on the fringe. It generates an authenticity that captivates and makes things possible. So, you are able to overcome and even cherish the challenges. – Doutsje Nauta / Willem Van Goor

Hidden Place as Form: There is a difference that is paramount between minds, situations or people that may be hidden, and hidden places. In our work we deal with a lot of people who are in a marginal situation – on the margins of reason – and are treated as such. Like, for example, psychiatric patients, who have to take a lot of medicine, often shocks, and are often treated in isolation. These people are not hiding out. The asylum is a hidden place. Psychiatry itself, the concept of psychiatry, is perhaps a hidden place, because it is a place of separation. It separates a certain group, or certain issues from the social body. In our work, we have several pieces that use hidden places (separation) as a strategy. It is not the act of hiding, but defending the hidden place as a possible existence. This is where we can go with the concept of the hidden or of hiding in our work. It is not that we work with hidden people or hidden forms of life; it is not exactly that – we work with hidden places that are a form of survival, a form of intelligence, and a form of social interaction. – Mauricio Dias & Walter Riedweg

Incarceration: “Being ‘inside’ is the euphemism for being in prison. Inside spaces are mostly small, enveloped, sometimes pushing against their walls, other times a refuge from all that is outside.” The eloquent words of Professor Ciarán Benson here reflect on the interconnected and contained worlds of prison and private identity as expressed in my piece created in collaboration with male prisoners in the Irish Prison System entitled Incarceration Altars.  My work focuses on increasing the visibility of a disenfranchised group within our community while fostering civic engagement and inclusiveness. As an artist I feel this as a responsibility and try to respond appropriately through the platform of the arts in order to affect positive change and challenge the negative stereotypical assumption of the prisoner. Countering incarceration and at the same time recognizing its realities, art making in the prison context is a tool for human development and self-encounter while substantiating the prison community as an integral part of the wider community. – Bernie Masterson

Infantophobia / Keep the Children in the Room: That we no longer live in community (something relatively recent in the history of mankind) means that many people have never lived with children and this generates an irrational aversion to the presence and lack of control that a child generates. Not having been able to live one’s own childhood also contributes to such aversions. Having your inner child repressed, it is common not to tolerate the presence of children who express themselves fully as children: making a mess, shouting or crying. Infantophobia is a fear for children, that becomes, fear of children. It is the underestimation of children’s wisdom, their kindness, their connection with truth, and the amazing depth of their perception. It is the fear of childhood, the fear of what children can reveal. Especially if they are allowed to run free as much as they like or need and if they get to taste the earth and each other early on. But infantophobia is not only this aversion to children. For the hyper-productivity of the capitalist system it is convenient to keep motherhood submissive, isolated, and in a precarious situation while we are actually offering free work that is crucial to maintaining the system. Calling out this hidden labor and infantophobia is key to a more communal life. It means creating networks of trust and support, ones that do not marginalize and ostracize in the name of safety, security, health/cleanliness or propriety. It means to make continuous choices of respect and connection with the rhythms of human nature and to recognize our need for unobserved time and risky play. It means to embrace life, death, injury, and disability and to cultivate our wonder for the depth of the human experience.  It means more humane policy making.  It means to undo the separation of life and work. Like the indigenous leader Alton Krenak has suggested, we need to embrace the natural flow of life and relearn how to keep the children in the room.  Chrystalleni Loizidou and Lívia Moura

Insidious Silence: In so far as it makes sense to recall a personal memory, I carry a mark on my body and in my mind, the memory of a feeling of impediment, a long and strong no. I was born in Lisbon and lived under the dictatorship overthrown in April 1974 when I was 14. In the case of my family, friends, and acquaintances, the dictatorship did not manifest itself through political repression and confinement, but rather through a deep and insidious silence manifested in the feeling of impossibility and the absence of horizon. Destinations were marked from an early age. There was no right to choose, to change, or to want. The memory of a dialogue repeatedly heard when we were children is vivid: I want…! You want…? But you cannot want! In addition to families, the church, and the school were the other essential pillars maintaining control and propagating a closed and guilty mentality. The religious school, don’t even mention it. Anyone who dared to be different paid a high price in guilt and loneliness. This state of affairs killed, sickened, and depressed people close to me, irrevocably. – Madalena Vaz Pinto

Micro community of destiny: For Edgar Morin “community of destiny” is above all an awareness of belonging that connects each being to multiplicity, to the whole, to the planet Earth, linking their destinies.5 In mobilizing micro-actions, inspired by an inventor, poet, sage, and prophet – the 92 year old Hernandes, a resident of the Bumba favela whose home built out of recycled materials and garbage has become our center – and activating actions in a network of care with others and the surrounding environment, Casa Museu Rancho Verde [Green Ranch House Museum] unveils and illuminates this awareness. Hidden, dormant, a systemic “cellular” practice fosters this awareness nourishing and catalyzing the potential that already exists in these locales, inspiring thoughts and attitudes toward transformations – aimed at ordinary people, in common places, especially in the peripheries, as is our case in Morro do Bumba in Niterói – a micro community of destiny. – Ignês Albuquerque and Priscila Grimberg

Non-being: An ontological ambiguity: to be and not to be. Between life and death. Without entirely being, the complete non-being escapes from it. It is unknown if they live, or if they have died. Death, then, does not reach reality, it is only a conjecture: there is no evidence, there is no record, there is no body. Family members “will never accept death; and if they accept it, it will be a hidden death, unknown, without a thing, without a corpse, without remains, without places, without dates, without time.”6 To hide death is to hold in life, or rather, to hold in the non-death. The ontological condition of the disappeared is the paradox: a paradoxical absence. The disappeared are and are-not at the same time and with respect to the same: they are and are not alive; they are and are not dead. – José Santos

Objective Reading: The experience of reading “hidden” is fundamental to the learning of many readers. However, in terms of democratic relations, between [solitary and possibly] transgressive reading and collective reading, there should not be mere opposition. Considering the students’ reading experience from a community perspective, encouraging listening to each other in the classroom, implies recognizing subjectivities and working with them (personal history, reasons for suffering, family knowledge) – tensioning a commonplace position that advocates that “teacher is not a psychologist.” Dealing with subjective readings in the classroom, however, is not a matter of changing professions, but rather where teachers are interested in understanding the potential in reading texts and objectifying it, both taking care of what was written and spoken by each reader present. – Luiz Guilherme Ribeiro Barbosa

Propagules: Amalgam, fruit, and seed. Clinging to the “mother’s” bosom. The mouth sucks food to nourish goodbye. Feet like pores, to stick to the ground and feed on the earth’s vein. Drill, fall to your feet, find the ground. Germinate, flower in the corner. Prolong hope. They are agents of the possible, fertilized in a bunch. They act on realities considered to be finite and condemned. Driven by their positions, they understand that believing and being conscious demands articulating responsibility, but not with the weight of the pointed arrow, as here there is no hope (hope as a verb to be lived), the charged soul is that of: How to incen(diar)ize action? As caring for a struggle? Did you know that there are futures in experimental experiences? Propagules are interested in corners, in territories that seek to listen and yearn for an echo of their matrices. – Gabriela Bandeira

Reading out loud: The Figueiredo Report was compiled as a result of an investigation of a parliamentary inquiry commission conducted in 1967 by the attorney Jader Figueiredo Correia. The 7000 page report chronicles crimes against the Brazilian State committed by employees of the extinct governmental division known as the Indian Protection Service (SPI) against indigenous populations. The Public Reading of the Figueiredo Report – a proposal of Escola da Floresta [Forest School] an alternative school initiative in São Paulo led by the artist Fábio Tremonte – combines two important elements familiar to the school universe: the historical narrative and reading aloud. These two procedures are put into play in the public space of a cultural institution with the desire to provide another corporeal-intellectual-affective relationship within official history, twisting it to show that history is not a one-way street. Here we propose to “brush history against the grain” as Walter Benjamin says.7 Firstly by reading aloud. When a participant engages and decides to read the text of the report into the microphone, they not only participate in an artistic proposal, staging or performance, but also, they primarily give voice to air a text of denunciation. Reading aloud is another development in an evolving fabric of witnessing that began with the investigation of SPI officials in the 1960s, followed by the establishment of the parliamentary inquiry commission, the writing of the document’s text, the digitization of the report after it was found in 2013, and now its public presence on the internet. To read aloud is to bear witness to this barbaric history and to what the original peoples have suffered and to understand that it has been this way since the arrival of the European in this land called Brazil. As the researcher Kamilla Nunes notes “People eat their speech. They swallow it dry.8Fábio Tremonte

Rescue poetics: There is a need for a curatorship of care to bring a “spark to erased beings”, as the Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros wrote. What to rescue, what to let go? Discard or transform how we see and rediscover creative playfulness? A process that flows in solitude or in the collective? Happening in the face of necessity or as a conscious option that throwing out does not exist? Recycling of objects or humanities? Art, despair or transcendence? Certain beings and movements seem invented and inhabit other logics and gestures, recreating themselves and their environment. An exquisite example of rescue poetics is the Casa Museu Rancho Verde [Green Ranch House Museum] inspired by José Hernandes – the 92 year old resident of the Bumba favela whose home built out of recycled materials and garbage is its vibrant center – and all the projects that orbit around this prophet of affection. – Cris Seixas

Resistant women: Activists who fight the darkness of sexism by shedding light on the lives of women affected by violence and social ills. To confront gender inequalities collectively, they continuously foster connections and promote reflections amongst themselves, offering actions of solidarity and fighting for demands generated by the oppression of women. Working to unhide domestic and social violence, they organize themselves in networks to demand policies of confrontation, reception, and justice. The city of São Gonçalo in the state of Rio de Janeiro offers an example of such courageous work of resistance in their Service Network for Women in Situations of Violence. Yet, public policies oscillate between advances and setbacks and as the efforts of the struggle continue, particularly with regard to the treatment of black women, the reality of situations attenuated by racism is evident. In the dispute over the power of survival and overcoming oppression, one of the key modes of this resistance is via arts. We can see this expressed on city walls through graffiti that transmit subjectivities, anxieties, screams, needs, emergencies, as well as a possible path toward harmony, healing, and self-healing amidst the arbitrariness of life. – Renata Bazilia

Rewrite: The act of writing again. An action that has two parts: rereading and rewriting. To actualize a reading of a text: equip it to find its current metaphorical potential. To modify certain elements so that all lives, visible or invisible, at the center or at the periphery, can find meaning in it. To include: to add to those readings that nourished our education – often [in the name of] a “universal” literature but that were rather mostly white, male, and Euro-American – [drawing material from] our lives, our experiences, from here or elsewhere, visible or invisible, human or non-human. It is also to fabulate together, to confabulate, to make the limits between fiction and reality porous, to build a writing of possible worlds from the writings that have built us or that have left us. To dream, to fabulate, to write possible worlds. – Sandrine Teixeido

Stigma: “Sign of social unacceptability: the shame or disgrace attached to something regarded as socially unacceptable” (Oxford English Dictionary). Cloth and the human body have a very shared materiality: you can cut cloth, you can cut skin, you can stitch cloth, you can stitch skin, you stain cloth, and you can also stain humans.  If you stain cloth it’s quite visible, yet if you look at stigma as a stain on society, it is invisible to the eye, you can’t see stigma. Stigma is felt more than seen. Where stigma and shame operate silence is perpetuated. So while suicide is heartbreakingly present, it is nevertheless cloaked in secrecy and hidden from public conversation. Increasing statistics worldwide, especially amongst young people, render this an urgent subject. Yet how to broach such painful memories and necessary conversations amidst challenging social stigmas? In a process of sharing and mutual respect, without judgment, my work strives to make stigma visible, to create contexts for conversations, to recognize people with mental health problems and their impact on families and communities, and to try and understand the beauty and power of that fragility. – Seamus McGuinness

Stumble: A kind of failure. And – at the moment of failure – the abandonment of the idea of ​​correctness, of the linear trace to be covered, of the solid path, of the point of arrival, of the firm ground. Stumbling is a kind of exercise in failure, the will to failure, the unveiling of failure. To stumble is to trip in the middle of the street and like the way the body turns in the moment of the act. To stumble is to fall in love with movement, the erratic, physical, fragmented. Movement. – Cintya Ferreira and Mariana de Lima

The Angel in the House: In a piece featured in a compilation of contemporary art practices organized around forms of hospitality and food offerings, entitled Feast: Radical Hospitality in Contemporary Art, curator Jan Verwoert comments on organizing as an “offstage” temporality and labor increasingly performed by artists engaged in social practices.9 In the essay Verwoert describes a “temporal horizon” that is a labor of “constant care” involving “sustained social communication, preparation, administration, and maintenance” that is long term, durational, and unspectacular. He uses Virginia Woolf’s fiction as a focus describing how, through the figure of Mrs Ramsey and in her own writing, Woolf lays out “a scenario for exemplary hospitality” in To the Lighthouse. In Woolf’s fiction Mrs Ramsey is the angel of the house holding the very fabric of the social together through a “constant invisible labor” that “renders the inspired conviviality possible.” Woolf’s plot reveals a significant paradox. Being everywhere, extending her care ceaselessly to every social detail, Mrs Ramsey is also nowhere. Hospitality, it seems, is like the host, invisible to the cast it supports. Absent by being present in every aspect, it performs a deception, masking its own labor in social engineering so that interaction appears effortless. It is in this aspect, painted as self-sacrificing altruism, that Verwoert reads ambivalence on the part of Woolf who simultaneously honors the beating heart of the household, mother, and host, and also, betrays her, making her labors visible. – Caroline Gausden

The Good Story: Nothing I have seen in visual representation has captured the nature of Direct Provision – Ireland’s political refugee program – and the truth of the description “open prison,” as effectively or directly as Vukašin Nedeljković’s Asylum Archive. As many critics and commentators have noted, the absence of any human figures in Asylum Archive’s photographic account of the Direct Provision and Dispersal system refuses what Charlotte McIvor describes as “the demand for the bureaucratic performance of refugeeness” that extends from the legal labyrinth of the application process to NGO advocacy strategies and artistic practice and representation.10  Nedeljković’s refusal to use individual asylum seekers’ images or narratives in Asylum Archive is informed by his critique of the conversion of human beings into good stories for circulation by NGOs, by the media, and indeed within creative arts practice, and is an implicit and sometimes explicit rejection of the tokenistic use that is sometimes made of asylum seekers within the advocacy sector. Instead, as scholars McIvor and Ronit Lentin point out, Asylum Archive redirects our gaze to the architecture of systematic racialized segregration, dereliction, and deportability called Direct Provision. The development of a radically critical politics of representation, of the aesthetic, and of narrative (the good story) is central to Nedeljković’s project and to the political and representational work that Asylum Archive does. – Anne Mulhall / Vukašin Nedeljković.

To be hidden, to be found: “It is a joy to be hidden, but a disaster not to be found …”. This striking phrase by Winnicott captures in a nutshell the complexity of psychic operations related to whether or not they are within the perceptive reach of the other. Although we are used to ratifying the relatively stable separation between our internal world and external reality, it is in an indeterminate, fluid, potential, and “neither internal nor external” space that we live our most important experiences. Having the right of access to a range of feelings, affects, thoughts, and impulses, which we imagine to be sheltered from the perception of the other, is a condition for our existence. This shelter, however, is in danger of becoming a prison, if these same components are unable to find ways to flow into the world and be recognized. Working with subjects in a serious state of psychological suffering acutely emphasizes this problem. Such subjects challenge us with the deadlock of being found and not experiencing any pleasure in being hidden. It takes a non-invasive insistence on the part of the other for an encounter to take place. It was exactly this type of encounter that the works of the artists Dias & Riedweg in the context of mental health provided. – Julio Sergio Verztman

Transgenerational effects: It is difficult to grasp the meaning and hidden echo of the transgenerational effect of state violence, as it is a fragmented and buried memory, affected by silencing and forgetting. We can understand here, the efficiency of oppression in states of exception where the transfer of emotional, physical, and social pain suffered by family members affects new generations. – Anita Sobar / Kênia Maia

(Un)hiding: Act of making visible, perceptible, present again; as opposed to hiding. Suggests the idea of ​​something that was previously accessible and has been hidden and / or just made invisible. It is the event that newly regains visibility, is highlighted, given exposure and commented. To unhide something is to present it in instances beyond the intimate; it is to promote interactions, connections, and readings with a view to promoting encounters, ways of seeing, and perceptions. It might be what [in fact] was never hidden, but [at the time] did not match the tenuous line of existent communicative action. It might be something new, but also, just a provocation. Unhiding is synonymous with revealing, unveiling, appearing, showing, presenting, highlighting, manifesting, and showing; among other terms, the experience of exaltation and sharing. – Leandro Almeida

Unveiling the Hidden: In spite of the recent opening up of Irish society to embrace more liberal social changes, Ireland in 2020 is still grappling with a very complex postcolonial history. It is less than one hundred years since we became an Independent State and the last century was marked by revolution, independence, civil war, partition, economic underdevelopment, and emigration. The social life of this new independent state was shaped by the close alliance of a conservative political class and an equally conservative doctrinaire Catholic hierarchy.  These forces had effects on all aspects of social, educational, and economic life. In spite of the radical changes that the electorate has brought about in recent referenda, (expressed most publicly through recognizing women’s rights to autonomy over their bodies in 2018 and same sex marriage equality in 2015), there is still nevertheless an enduring legacy of the early 20th century’s repressive institutional systems. In today’s Ireland many socially engaged artists grapple with this legacy and its related impact and their work draws attention to previously hidden social issues and voices, bringing them out into the open. Over the past thirty years socially engaged arts practice has grown in its complexity to engage, support, and advocate for change – Helen O’Donoghue

You are crazy: What woman has not heard that phrase? The term gaslighting describes psychological abuse directed at women, with the goal of manipulating, controlling or distorting reality to the point where the victim questions their sanity. A form of abuse that is a continuation of practices frequently deployed in a not-too-distant Brazil and indeed is still present. In Brazil, until the middle of the last century, before the implementation of psychiatric reform, many women were called crazy and committed to asylums. Previously run by religious orders, these asylums became medical institutions in turn driven by science. An entire medical vocabulary was created with the goal of attributing a clinical diagnosis to questions of a moral order or those of social conduct. In the name of progress and modernization the country institutions’ – beginning with the familial institution of patriarchy – invested their power in disciplining the population. Women that did not fit within socially determined roles were pathologized. In this way, asylums were a fundamental part of the hygienist and eugenicist project that guided urban reforms and the ideal of a modern Brazil at the beginning of the 20th century. The historian Maria Clementina da Cunha, analyzing cases of women who were institutionalized in the early 20th century, points out that the symptoms presented as indicators of madness coincided with: independence, “intellectual hyperexcitation”, extreme dedication to their professions to the detriment of “natural inclinations.”11 The author also notes different patterns of institutionalization and treatment dependent on race, social class, and sexuality. Black women were the most affected in quantitative terms by the asylum institution and also in terms of “treatments” aimed at them. A situation informed by theories of social degeneration, very much in vogue in the country, with black women being three times more vulnerable due to their gender, race, and class.  – Diana Kolker

When Fragments are Unity: I’m Ulysses! I talk to the sun, to nature, to oxygen. My pieces don’t mix. They are my stuff, I don’t copy, I invent. They go away with whoever buys them, but I go with them. They talk to me. I speak to them wherever they are. I have vision. The first image that strikes you, arriving at Ulysses’ home, is the wooden fence that surrounds the property, marking the entrance to where he lives.12 At the top of each post, there is a spiked head, a half of a broken face, or piece of a broken limb, “popped” during the firing of the pottery. Together they make up quite a dramatic, indeed bleak, scenario. Whether it’s the broken bodies, or the evocation of lack, something is no longer whole. Or, perhaps, they conjure ideas of ruin and deterioration.  But it is not only that. They also seem to bring shards back to nature, in a process where nothing is leftover. In a new context it is as if the broken works received some type of restoration.  By displaying the pieces in a new configuration, Ulysses recreates a new totality, underlining the completeness of his creation, regardless of whether something was broken or not. There, his works take on new meanings, remain active. Living matter, whose amalgam is determined not only by the action of fire, but also by its cosmic nature. – Angela Mascelani

Witnessing: What happens when someone comes forward as a witness to a practice of torture? What happens when what is silenced and has remained without social inscription becomes public? What movements are triggered in those who witness a testimony, that moment of expelling the forces of death that had appropriated the vital energy of the victim of torture, turning them against themselves?13 The act of making public such events can trigger a process capable of transforming listeners into witnesses and of establishing conditions that ensure that the transmission of this legacy no longer takes place as a trauma, but rather as part of a struggle. In this sense, witnessing is not limited to presenting a factual account of torture. Witnessing here is a performative process that both illuminates what happened and also triggers new processes of subjectification. The experience of becoming a witness both accesses what has been suspended in time and without place in history, and implies a transit from being a victim to a witness and a call for the ethical repositioning of those who are witnesses to this testimony.14 These truly autopoietic moments impact both what is possible to see and say and the very potency of self-production. They are moments with an intense potential to resonate, capable of increasing our possibility of acting collectively and of liberating life from its subjective prison, tied to the terror of the past. – Tania Kolker

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Anita Sobar
Anita Sobar is an artist, researcher, and educator. She graduated with a degree in fine arts from Universidade Federal de Rio de Janerio (EBA – UFRJ) with a specialization in graphic design from the British School of Creative Arts in São Paulo. She holds a masters degree in Contemporary Studies of Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense (PPGCA – UFF).

Anne Mulhall
Anne Mulhall is a lecturer in the School of English, Drama & Film at University College Dublin and co-director of the UCD Centre for Gender, Feminisms & Sexualities.

Bernie Masterson
Bernie Masterson was born in Ballymoney, Co. Antrim, Northern Ireland.  She lives and works in Dublin. She qualified from the National College of Art and Design (NCAD) with a first class MFA honor. She has extensive experience with educational services to prisons in Ireland as both teacher and artist. She is also the recipient of the inaugural Janet Mullarney Prize 2020 for her video work Flight.

Chrystalleni Loizidou
Loizidou’s past work sought meaning in academic research regarding conflict transformation in relation to art and media history and efforts for recovering the commons (PhD Cultural Studies with the London Consortium). She worked with a number of universities, art-centers, and internationally funded programs with increasing focus on free and open source technology, until a child reactivated her connection with a circle of heart-giving art educators in Brazil and helped her see what the Situationists’ meant with their rejection of alienated labor. Together they have begun to map the bravest and most meaningful art-educational initiatives around the world and focus on holding space and community for free play, towards what Silvia Federici describes as a re-enchantment. neeii.info

Cintya Ferreira
Cintya Ferreira is a resident of Tribobó São Gonçalo in the state of Rio de Janeiro. Cintya is studying cinema at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and is interested in archival imagery and sound experimentation. 

Dias & Riedweg
Since 1993, Maurício Dias (Rio de Janeiro, 1964) and Walter Riedweg (Lucerna, 1955) have worked together on projects that investigate the ways in which private psychologies affect, build, and deconstruct public space, and vice versa. In projects in which alterity and perception are central issues, Dias & Riedweg often start from interactive processes to produce encounters and exchanges among particular groups in society, which focus on the identity and involvement of participants. Dias & Riedweg’s work has been included in important international exhibitions such as: Conversations at the Castle, by Homi Bhabha and Mary Jane Jacob, in the United States; L’État des Choses by Catherine David at Kunst-Werke Berlin; the 2007 Documenta; and the Venice (1999) and São Paulo biennials (1998) curated respectively by Harald Szeemann and Paulo Herkenhoff.  Their work is included in the collections of major museums such as the Center Georges Pompidou in Paris, MACBA in Barcelona, ​​KIASMA in Helsinki, Reina Sofia Madrid, at MAR, MNBA and MAM in Rio, MAM in S.Paulo and Bahia, at MFA Houston and MUAC, Museum of Contemporary Art of Mexico, the duo also received the awards from Video Brasil, the Guggenheim of New York, the Bolsa Vitae of S. Paulo and of the Pro Helvetia Foundation. https://vimeo.com/diasriedweg

Doutsje Nauta
Doutsje Nauta was born on a stormy night on January 31st 1953 in IJsbrechtum, The Netherlands as the second child and first daughter.  Reviewing her working life, she has spent most of the time organizing and writing in (semi-) governmental institutes. Innovation has been the common thread in her work. She has been living on Achill Island since 1997, a place that while isolated from major world events is nevertheless an integral part of them. This positioning feels characteristic for how she sees herself in society. She is a long-time member of the Achill Writers’ Group and has been studying to play the cello since autumn 2017.

Helen O’Donoghue
O’Donoghue is Senior Curator, Head of Engagement & Learning at the Irish Museum of Modern Art since 1991. Recently awarded a Fulbright Scholarship she spent three months at the MoMA. Trained as a fine artist, she is committed to socially engaged practices and critical pedagogy both of which inform her curatorial work and writing.

José Santos Herceg
José Santos holds a graduate degree in philosophy from Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Chile and a doctorate in philosophy from Universität Konstanz, Germany. Currently he is a researcher at the Instituto de Estudos Avançados (IDEA), Universidade de Santiago do Chile. He is author of the following publications: Conflicto de Representaciones. América Latina como lugar para la filosofía (2010), Cartografía Crítica. El quehacer profesional de la filosofía en Chile (2015), Lugares espectrales. Topología testimonial de la prisión política en Chile, (2019), and La Tiranía del paper: de lamercantilización a la normalización de las textualidades (2020).

Julio Sergio Verztman
Psychiatrist, psychoanalyst, and professor in the graduate program in psychoanalytic theory at the Federal University of (PPGTP-UFRJ) and the professional masters degree in clinical social psychology (MEPPSO-IPUB-UFRJ).

Kenia Maia
Kenia Soares Maia is a professor of psychology at Federal University of Tocantins (UFT). She has a masters degree in clinical psychology from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and a doctorate in clinical psychology from PUC (Pontifical Catholic University) Rio de Janeiro.

Lívia Moura
Works in diverse artistic languages and has participated in numerous exhibitions and contemporary art fairs in Brazil. She is the author of the didactic material Raiz do Afeto aimed at building socio-emotional competences for primary education (2019, ed. Raiz Educação). In 2013 she co-created VAV (Vendo Ações Virtuosas – Seeling Virtuous Actions), a contemporary art platform that bridges and works across economy, pedagogy, and social engagement. In 2020-2021 VAV developed and launched the social coin “Afeto” [Affect/Affection] and the “Stock Exchange of Ethical Values.”  She is currently studying for her doctorate at the Postgraduate Program in Contemporary Studies of the Arts at Universidade Federal Fluminense with professor Luiz Guilherme Vergara.

Madalena Vaz Pinto
Vaz Pinto is Portuguese and lives in Brazil. She studied literature at PUC-Rio where she received her doctorate with a dissertation on Portuguese and Brazilian modernisms. She is an adjunct professor at UERJ at the FFP-Faculty of Teacher Training of São Gonçalo and the Academic and Professional Masters in Literature of the same faculty. Her research focuses on modern and contemporary literature and on the training of teacher-readers based on a joint work of building reading scenes and inventing other ways of reading. She is the author of texts published in various periodicals and magazines in the field. She recently edited the book Gonçalo M. Tavares: ensaios, aproximações, entrevista published by Oficina Raquel.

Mariana de Lima
Mariana de Lima studies cinema at UFF. Experiments with exercises in montage, photography and criticism. In between the city of Goiás and Niterói.

Renata Bazilio da Silva
Renata Bazilio is a teacher and geographer, with degrees from the Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and Universidade Estadual de Rio de Janeiro (UERJ) including an undergraduate specialization in gender and sexuality studies and a masters degree in culture and territorialities. She has taught geography for elementary school and pre-university entrance exams. As a geographer, in addition to the Women’s Movement in São Gonçalo, she has worked in various NGOs and projects. Her master’s research focused on cartographies of graffiti in São Gonçalo, furthering her interest in urban art, which plans to develop further with a view to contributing interdisciplinary perspectives of practices in art and science.

Sandrine Teixido
Sandrine Teixido is an author, artist, and anthropologist. She teaches anthropology at the Jean Jaurès University in Toulouse, France. She created the project Story as a Tool with the Swiss artist Aurélien Gamboni in 2011 inspired by Edgar Allen Poe’s short story “Descent in to the Maelstrom.” In 2011 she published an ecofeminist rewrite of Poe’s story with Cambourakis Editions.

Seamus McGuinness 
McGuinness is an Irish artist, researcher, and educator. He lives and works in Co. Clare, on the West coast of Ireland and lectures in Contemporary Textiles at Galway-Mayo Institute of Technology. His practice is deeply rooted in life and cloth, encompassing trans-disciplinary research, durational social intervention, interactive installations, public conversations and collective democratic acts. In 2010 he was awarded a PhD for the Lived Lives Project, from the School of Medicine, University College Dublin. He has been awarded two Wellcome Trust Grants in 2015 and 2018 to continue this research.

Tania Kolker
Tania Kolker is a psychoanalyst. She holds a degree in medicine from Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) and a specialization in psychoanalysis and institutional analysis from the Brazilian Institute of Psychoanalysis, Groups and Institutions. Currently she is a master’s student in the graduate program in psychology at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF). She is coordinator of the Psychosocial Care Center for People Affected by State Violence (NAPAVE) and researcher at the National Observatory on Mental Health, Justice and Human Rights. Formerly she was coordinator and therapist of the Clinical Testimony Project (2016-2017), supervisor of the ISER-RJ Psychic Repair Study Center, therapist of the clinical project of Grupo Tortura Nunca Mais / RJ (until 2010), and consultant for the Association for the Prevention of Torture in Brazil (2007-2013).

Vukašin Nedeljković
Nedeljkovićis a visual artist and activist based in Ireland. He initiated the multidisciplinary platform, Asylum Archive as an online resource, critically foregrounding accounts of exile, displacement, trauma and memory, complemented by the recent parallel platform of resistance, Fortress Europe https://www.fortresseu.com/

Willem van Goor
Van Goor was born the 4th of November 1948 in Zwolle, The Netherlands. After secondary school he studied for five years at the Art Academy in Groningen and specialized thereafter in lyric abstract painting. His work has developed since and become more diverse, comprising botanical art as well as landscape painting.  His botanical work is grounded in a lifelong love for nature. The landscape work, with its focus on hidden structures, parallels the rhythm and chords found in music, another lifelong passion, improvising and playing both piano and organ.



1 Ludmila da Silva explains the meaning of these photographs used by relatives during the Argentine dictatorship. At first, “The photo with the face of the disappeared became […] a search tool, a hope in the face of uncertainty. […] It was a strategy to identify the loved one whose fate was unknown.” It then becomes, in the context of the trials, an indicative resource for the search for truth. Finally, it became part of the active protest in public spaces: “As the years passed, the creation of symbols and rituals accompanied this new form of politics instituted by the relatives of the disappeared and specifically by the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo” (Ludmila da Silva, “Re-velar el horror. Fotografía y memoria frente a la desaparición de personas” in: Memorias, historia y derechos humanos eds. Isabel Piper and Belén Rojas (Santiago de Chile: Universidad de Chile, 2012) p. 160 and p.162. A similar development can be seen in the case of Chile.

2 M. A. A. C.,  Arantes, A clandestinidade, uma opção de resistência, Revista Princípios, Edição 31, NOV/DEZ/JAN, 1993-1994, pp. 65-69.

3 Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History” in Walter Benjamin. Selected Writings Vol. 4 (1938-1940) eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006) 389 – 400, 391.

4 Jean-Pierre Sarrazac et al., org., Léxico do drama moderno e contemporâneo (São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2012). 126-130.

5 Edgar Morin e Anne B. Kern, Terra-Pâtria (Porto Alegre: Editora Sulina, 2003) p.178.

6 Rojas, 105.

7 Benjamin notes that history sympathizes with victors and their heirs and that there is “no document of culture which is not at the same time a document of barbarism.” It is then the “historical materialist’s task “to brush history against the grain.” Walter Benjamn, “On the Concept of History” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings Vol. 4 (1938-1940) eds. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Boston: Harvard University Press, 2006) pp.389 – 400, 392.

8 Kamilla Nunes, Embarcação, Masters thesis in visual arts UDESC [Universidade Estadual de Santa Catarina] Kamilla Nunes, 2017. [T.N. The Portuguese “come-se a fala” is translated literally as “eat their speech” and should not be confused with the English “eat their words” which implies regretfulness or misplaced speech].

9 Jan Verwoert in Feast: radical hospitality in contemporary art, Stephanie S. Smith ed., (Chicago: Smart Gallery Chicago: SMART Museum of Art / University of Chicago, 2013) p.361

10 Charlotte McIvor, “The Power of the Everyday: Looking Away from Bodies and Towards Ephemera” in: Vukašin Nedeljković, Asylum Archive, (Dublin: Create/The Arts Council of Ireland, 2018) p.1

11 Maria Clementina Pereira Cunha, “Loucura, gênero feminino: As mulheres do Juquery na São Paulo do início do século XX” Revista Brasileira de História (São Paulo, v.9, nº18, ago./set., 1989)

12 Angela Mascelani, Caminhos da Arte Popular: o vale do Jequitinhonha (Rio de Janeiro: Museu Casa do Pontal, 2010).

13 Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Tempo de Ensaio (São Paulo: Companhia da Letras, 1989) p.13.

14 LOSICER, Eduardo. Potência do testemunho: Reflexões clínico-políticas. In C. Cardoso et al, Uma perspectiva clínico-política na reparação simbólica: Clínica do Testemunho do Rio de Janeiro (Brasília: Ministério da Justiça, Comissão de Anistia; Rio de Janeiro: Instituto Projetos Terapêuticos, 2015) p.31. [Available in Portuguese: https://www.justica.gov.br/central-de-conteudo_legado1/anistia/anexos/clinica-do-testemunho-rj-on-line.pdf]