{"id":2837,"date":"2021-03-25T18:30:55","date_gmt":"2021-03-25T21:30:55","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/editorial-vidas-escondidas\/"},"modified":"2021-06-17T15:05:16","modified_gmt":"2021-06-17T18:05:16","slug":"editorial-vidas-escondidas","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/editorial-vidas-escondidas\/?lang=en","title":{"rendered":"Editorial: Hidden Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Twenty Three. De(mock)racy<\/em>, Mexico City, Mexico 2018.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Editorial: Hidden Lives<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Jessica Gogan and Luiz Guilherme Vergara<\/h4>\n\n\n\n

To all hidden lives
In memory of the 300,000 Brazilians who have died from Covid 19 (as of 27th<\/sup> March 2021)
In solidarity with the families of all pandemic victims worldwide
To continued searching, questioning, and calls for equality and social justice
For an art that provokes and dwells<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

Hidden [Adj]. 1. Out of sight, not readily apparent, concealed, recondite, obscure, unexplained, undisclosed, secret. Hide [verb]. 1. Put in a hidden place, cover up, shield for protection. 2. Keep secret, hide the truth. 3. Screen from view, obscure. 4. Not to make manifest, disguise, cover up, dissemble. 5. Remain out of sight, seek protection. 6. Not reveal, not enunciate. 6. Avoid others’ views or being seen by. <\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

Focusing on the interfaces between art and contemporary socially engaged practices, the 6th issue of Revista MESA<\/em>, \u201cHidden Lives,\u201d explores the multiple meanings of the hidden in society. Throughout the quest to shed light on the issues that shape, inform, and threaten our existence is recurrent, as is a critical and (re)generative desire to question \u2013 what art can do in contemporary life? The issue comprises case studies, articles, interviews, dialogues, films, and photo essays that come together as a body of collective initiatives, counter narratives, and different poetic and political strategies. Art here is part of the struggles for: restorative justice, democracy, and social equality; recuperating memory and fighting repression; dealing with trauma; investigating hidden places and unraveling entangled silences; questioning school, religious, and psychiatric systems; generating other perspectives of what art can be, some not yet or beyond defining themselves as art; and inhabiting and transforming adversities as a catalyst for re-enchantment and imagining worlds otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a platform for documentation, collaboration, and reflection, MESA<\/em> functions as a magazine-as-commons, social sculpture, and school-in-process acting as a vital connective ground for learning and discussion and working with multiple organizations, collaborators, artists, researchers, institutions, universities, communities, and professors and students from diverse disciplines and backgrounds both in Brazil and internationally. These processes have been key to the singular cartography of the hidden that the issue aims to profile. Developed over the course of 2019-2021, inspired in part by the exhibition Guanabara Bay: Hidden Lives and Waters<\/em> held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niter\u00f3i, in 2016, this 6th<\/sup> MESA <\/em>issue moves from local initiatives in peripheral \u201chidden\u201d territories of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s outlying regions \u2013 the Bumba favela in Niter\u00f3i and the suburban region of S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo \u2013 to a web of connections with hidden lives in far flung places worldwide; from the Secret Garden in Achill Island, Ireland, to the hidden creative universe of Ulisses Pereira Chaves in Vale de Jequitinhonha in Brazil\u2019s center-east; from windows on religious territories and practices to democratic pedagogies that seek to un-silence the classroom; from the search for the hidden racist and sexist truths behind women committed to Brazilian asylums to grieving mothers of disappeared children in city of Ju\u00e1rez, Mexico; from the unveiling of abuse against indigenous peoples to the ever-present transgenerational legacy of political repression and loss of life during dictatorships in Brazil, Argentina, and Chile; and in turn from the merging of art and activism in Pequena \u00c1frica [Little Africa], a world of \u201chidden\u201d territories in the center of Rio de Janeiro, to socially situated practices in distinct geographic and socio-cultural contexts and organizations in Ireland, Scotland, and Cyprus.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Conversations, encounters, research-action initiatives, and experimental laboratories co-developed with contributors over the past two years have been vital to informing and forming the editorial project. This process reaffirms the emphasis established in previous MESA<\/em> issues on collaborative and collective practices and art as a generator of connectivity and social and affective bonds. As a \u201ctable\u201d MESA <\/em>both uses and reinvents the magazine format as an apparatus to initiate, investigate, and connect different worlds, conversations, research, and practices \u2013 mapping, documenting, and unpacking aesthetic and ethical resonances within and across differences. Each edition builds on and boomerangs back to the last. Operating as a constantly evolving membrane of micropolitics, contact, and reciprocity, many of the \u201cHidden Lives\u201d contributions are the result of longstanding ongoing conversations and collaborations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The following brief reflections weave together some of the themes and discursive threads suggested by the \u201cHidden Lives\u201d contributions. While organized here in specific topics, there are many shared questions, practices, and points of dialogue.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

On the Fringe: Artistic, Ecosystemic, and Social Acupressure Points<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The more we investigated geographic, political, and socio-cultural margins, the more hidden lives emerged together with examples of affective community and socially situated activisms in what might be termed as a micro-geography of critically and generatively applied social acupressure points.  Musician and former Brazilian Minister of Culture, Gilberto Gil, described these kinds of \u201ccellular\u201d actions using the concept of an \u201canthropological do-in.\u201d Drawing on the notion of acupressure points, Gil\u2019s \u201cdo-in\u201d describes a cultural policy that, in contrast to many center\/periphery models, where culture is brought to the periphery, rather aims to support the potential that already exists in those localities.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is the case of the \u201cdo-in\u201d of environmental art at Casa Museu Rancho Verde [Green Ranch House Museum] in the Bumba favela in Niter\u00f3i \u2013 a suburban town on the other side of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Guanabara Bay. Inspired by the home of Hernandes Jose Silva’s (HJS), a \u201c92 year-old young man\u201d as he is affectionately known, and his recycling of garbage and found objects, the project is in a constant process of mutation and expansion in dialogue with HJS\u2019s vision and creative fluency. Hernandes\u2019 poetic and existential state of an immersive, transformative, and spiritual craftsmanship could be connected to that of Bispo de Rosario [Brazilian \u201coutsider\u201d artist and asylum intern for almost 50 years now well known in contemporary art circuits]. Not only because of Hernandes\u2019 practices of appropriation \/ recycling, but also in his metaphysical relationships between voices, systems, and dreams. HJS\u2019s personality, home, and recycling practice led to the creation of Casa Museu Rancho Verde as a network of support, preservation, and environmental action, mobilizing a very singular \u201cdo-in\u201d that is the focus of one of this issue\u2019s case studies.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their essay Maria Ign\u00eas Albuquerque and Priscila Grimberg, coordinators and caregivers of the Casa Museu Rancho Verde project, tell the story of how the Casa Museu\u2019s collaborative network came about. The genealogy of this project is grounded in both tragedy and regeneration. In 2010 the Bumba favela was overcome by landslides as a result of houses being built over a former city dump with a tragic loss of life. This devastating community event coincided with Hernandes\u2019 beginning to collect, recycle, and transform found objects and garbage and Ign\u00eas\u2019 work with the experimental restorative justice program CPMA (Center for Alternative Penalties and Measures), an initiative that led her to visit the Rancho Verde and hold gatherings there. In their essay Ign\u00eas and Priscila address the restorative importance of solidarity networks, combining artistic, ecosystemic, and clinical practices within a process of existential and environmental transformation \u2013 \u201cinspiring practices for transitions aimed at ordinary people, in common places, especially in peripheries, as is our case, in Morro do Bumba, Niter\u00f3i.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Navigating a Haunted Landscape: A Tale as a Tool at Morro do Bumba<\/em> the artist Sandrine Teixido reflects on the Bumba tragedy and her artistic practice dedicated to community organizing and memory-sharing in places marked by catastrophe. Key to this practice is Edgar Allan Poe’s short story \u201cA Descent into the Maelstrom,\u201d adopted as an e\/affective tool in dealing with the emotional, traumatic, and ecopsychological impact on survivors of a tragedy. As part of this case study and as a Casa Museu Rancho Verde collaborator, Sandrine offers her reflection on how such community organizing around tragic events has the potential to generate \u201cart forms that explore and question the possibilities of a \u2018common art.\u2019\u201d The Bumba tragedy, Hernandes\u2019 restaurative recycling, and the Casa Museu Rancho Verde\u2019s transformative network of community solidarity, provide us with critical and generative examples of what Sandrine sees as the potential for art to offer coping mechanisms to navigate life\u2019s daily collapses and pending environmental disasters.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

So Said H.J.S<\/em> is a video documentary in process by documentary filmmaker and educator Leandro Almeida that lovingly captures the world of Hernandes and the mutual transformations that is Casa Museu Rancho Verde. Here presented as a photo essay for the \u201cHidden Lives\u201d issue case study. Over the course of the project\u2019s ten-year history, Leandro has followed many of its phases and collaborations and sees the videomaking process as an instrument to both register the artistic, cultural, and socio-environmental work at Casa Museu Rancho Verde together with Hernandes\u2019 practices and philosophy of life. He notes: \u201cThe documentary will not only be a work about an interesting character, but will also shine a light on a figure of cultural heritage, of a material and immaterial nature from the city of Niter\u00f3i, a treasure from hidden worlds, and draw attention to the practices developed at the Casa Museu also as a way of expanding possible connections.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In another and final contribution to this case study, the writer and bibliophile Cris Seixas offers an expansive reading of the Casa Museu Rancho Verde project and Hernandes\u2019 recycling practices, in what she describes as a poetics of salvaging and rescue, pointing to an intuitive resonance between HJS\u2019s writings and the work of Brazilian poet Manoel de Barros.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Such a socio-cultural \u201cdo-in\u201d can radiate its affective and ecosystemic potential to its immediate surroundings, catalyzing resonances and forms of socio-cultural healing. The restorative dimensions of such practices can also be seen in the remote periphery of Achill Island, Ireland, a small island off the country\u2019s Atlantic west coast.  In one of the four dialogues in this issue, the artist Willem Van Goor, his wife Doutsje Nauta, and the Reverend Val Rodgers, reflect on a religious interdenominational reconciliation ceremony held on September 24, 2011, St. Thomas Church, in Dugort, at the northern end of the island. The ceremony featured interfaith readings and music played by Van Goor on the church organ and a tribute to the unmarked graves of Catholics and Protestants buried on the church grounds. Telling the story of St. Thomas, a former evangelical Protestant mission dating from the time of the Great Famine, means revisiting the history of the conflict between Protestants and Catholics in Ireland, that, despite the radical transformations in the country in recent decades, is long and painful, rooted in colonial politics, poverty, struggles against British rule, and civil war.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The potency of a \u201cdo-in\u201d poetics here effectively operates as a set of ethical and aesthetic pressure points on long-held historical and socio-political wounds and scars. Such practices can be seen in various parts of the world as a striving, in Silvia Federici words, for a \u201creenchantment\u201d that runs counter to capitalist systems and colonial legacies of injustice and inequality. The case study Talking Across the Cypriot Buffer Zone: Making the Invisible Visible <\/em>maps such critical and generative efforts in the context of the island of Cyprus, seen both through its peripheral geography and its unresolved political conflict between two of the main ethnic groups that live there, Turkish Cypriots and Greek Cypriots. Here, we can see the potential of a practice of socially situated “do-in” that invests in specific locales, mobilizes collective action, and creates bridges between art and activism. As art historians Esra Plumer-Bardas and Evanthia Tselika, co-editors of the case study note, art insists \u201cin creating flows through division and in shaping yet more points in common between us.\u201d The \u201cpolivocal\u201d case study offers a mapping of these practices embracing a variety of methodologies and actions including public interventions, artistic residencies, collective projects, and community-run spaces. The following organizations and initiatives contributed: AA&U, European Association of Mediterranean Art (EMAA), Free School, Hands on Famagusta Initiative, NeMe, Pikadilly, Re Aphrodite, Rooftop Theater Group, Sidestreets Culture, Studio 21, Urban Guerillas, Visual Voices, and Xarkis. As organizations, they focus not only on issues related to inter-ethnic issues and conflict transformation, but also on topics of universal human rights, feminist platforms, LGBTQI and union activism, as well as on building dialogues between Cypriots, second and third generations of migrants, and other communities living in Cyprus. The case study also highlights some specific artistic contributions. Videos of the artist Alev Advil are presented in the audiovisual essay Architecture of Forgetting: Journeys into the Dead Zone <\/em>andTwenty Three’s interventions and the drawings of H\u00fcseyin \u00d6zinal are juxtaposed in the section Artists and Activism <\/em>in order to point toward, as the co-editors observe, \u201cthe common experiences of how artists create works about \u2013 and with \u2013 those who are not seen and are not represented, transforming hidden voices into a realm of visibility.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Giving Back the World to the World<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

S<\/em>\u00e3o Gon<\/em>\u00e7alo ahead<\/em>! is the title of the visual essay of Renata Baz\u00edlio and Laura Lima, shedding light on the vital social activism of women\u2019s movements in S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo and their striving to unveil and combat domestic violence in the city. The essay documents the history of these movements and presents interviews and photographic portraits of women activists: the graffiti artist Aila Ailita, and Marisa Chaves, Oscarina Siqueira, and Cristhiane Malungo from the S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo Women’s Movement and the Rio de Janeiro State Forum of Black Women. While struggling amidst hidden political repressions and distortions, many women in S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo have been supported by the heroic solidarity of this movement, now facing new challenges with the Covid-19 pandemic. Where \u201ca peripheral reality\u201d is evidenced on the ground due to the \u201cabsence and neglect of public power\u201d these movements and their networks of solidarity \u201ccombat terror with open arms and disinformation with public presence\u201d as they strive to support victims of domestic and family violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artist and researcher Gabriela Bandeira recovers local stories and memories as a strategy of ecosystemic resistance focusing on creating an inventory of the knowledge and practices of the threatened artisanal fishing community of Gradim \u2013 on the other side of Rio de Janeiro\u2019s Guanabara Bay. Gabriela has been discovering in the mangrove biome a cosmos of different modes of existence and hidden ancestry. She aims to “give visibility to the Cai\u00e7ara community\u201d [traditionally indigenous fisherman that inhabited the Brazilian coast] and to highlight their \u201cstruggles and demands.\u201d In her visual essay Pay Attention to Your Networks\/Nets<\/em> <\/em>Gabriela affirms: “I am the daughter of a fisherman, born and raised in an urban fishing region, in S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo, which suffers from the legacies of industrialization.\u201d She aims to transform inhabiting \/ dwelling as a radical practice of co-existence. Understanding her role as an artist as an \u201cagent of the sensible\u201d Gabriela asks: \u201chow to fabricate ideas that make us act?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Jeff Medeiros, an artist also born in S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo, points to this poetics of dwelling and transformation in the title of his essay: Who Will Unveil Us If Not Us? <\/em>He describes the friction between the city seen, on the one hand, as a place of service and, on the other, hidden from outsider viewpoints, as a place of life. Jeff\u2019s artistic production stems from his engagement in the history and complexity of S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo, where he grew up and witnesses so much daily violence. In his pieces, he draws attention to the condition of service work common to many residents of S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo, and at the same time, captures their vital resistance.  Inhabiting-dwelling-living is the critical and generative mortar for his ethical-aesthetic and pedagogical activism. “What I condemn is the exploration and the understanding that certain places only have a workforce to be subdued, having their epistemologies and their production of life denied.” <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Start in the Middle: For a School That Doesn’t Fit<\/em> is what we collaboratively named the special focus on education in this case study of S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo Cartographies<\/em>. Here, democratic pedagogies seek to un-silence the classroom and break the moulds of what fits and doesn\u2019t. As Madalena Vaz Pinto, Portuguese language and literature professor in the Teacher Training program of the Rio de Janeiro State University (UERJ) in S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo, observes: \u201cthere is life out there. this cannot be denied. there is life in those beings that inhabit the room, who speak to you, survey you with their eyes. then? what do we do?” The concern for the wealth of hidden lives \u201cout there\u201d prompted a rich collaborative project with Madalena and her former students, teachers from the Rio de Janeiro state public schools, Raquel Danielli and Renata Targino, and their pupils, together with students from the Federal Fluminense University\u2019s cinema program: Mariana da Lima Silva, Cintya Ferreira, and Gabriel de Souza Vieira, the later two also residents of S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo. Start in the Middle<\/em> includes three brief essays by Madalena, Raquel, and Renata, respectively: One Text, Three Temporalities<\/em>; We are Tree: Writing Experiences and (De)construction<\/em>; and Reading and Thinking Out Loud: Exercises in \u201cVoices of the South<\/em>\u201d Civic Rights. <\/em>Each essay reflects on the need for more democratic and plural pedagogical practices in the classroom and are further complemented by the short film A brief inventory of small stumbles<\/em>, created in collaboration with all those involved and edited during the pandemic drawing on footage, images, and audios shared via Whatsapp. There is hidden life out there.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Hiding, the Hidden, and Hidden Places<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The hidden also offers portals to other imaginaries, marginalities, and creative worlds.  Literature, writing, and adolescence are explored in their transformative or repressive hidden possibilities in a dialogue between the public school teacher Luiz Guilherme Barbosa and high school student Joyce Maravilha. In their interview, the artists Maur\u00edcio Dias and Walter Riedweg discuss hidden places as a form of intelligence, social interaction, and mode of art making, concomitant with the potentially dangerous and conflicting territories of the hidden places of the mind, particularly when it comes to religion and faith. Curator and researcher Angela Mascelani\u2019s article explores the imaginary universe of the Brazilian popular artist Ulisses Pereira Chaves who spent his life hiding and creating in the remoteness of the Jequitinhonha Valley in the country\u2019s center-east. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In their dialogue Do not Write Hidden<\/em> Luiz Guilherme Barbosa and Joyce Maravilha present a sense of hidden through the lens of literature and the passage of adolescence. Literature is here an instrument of “resistance to the erosion of lasting attention, reflective concentration, silent reading” and a refuge against the “psychotizing tendency” of the dominant technical imagination. In creating enigmas and hidden places for her detective stories, Joyce pays attention to the folds of reality and fiction in her short story, \u201cMystery at School\u201d set in the context of the school environment where the main \u201cmissing\u201d protagonist is a teacher. A subject looked upon with some strangeness by the students, who often imagine the teacher as just there, almost invisible outside the school context. As with the young students in S\u00e3o Gon\u00e7alo, adolescence opens itself up as a hidden place and fluid creative form between childhood and adult life, a rich existential world that is also threatened.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Our interview with the artists Maur\u00edcio Dias and Walter Riedweg centers on a work-in-progress exploring questions of religion and faith. The discussion also draws on reflections on their practice over the past three decades and their work with marginalized populations \u2013 homeless youth, psychiatric patients, prisoners to name a few. The artists generously shared some of their in-process ideas for a project that \u201cis not hidden\u201d but is rather \u201can embryo,\u201d a work that is still in gestation, and indeed now suspended due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Critical threads of their trajectory are explored with a particular focus on works developed with psychiatric patients for whom the \u201chospice is a hidden place\u201d where indeed, psychiatry itself, \u201cthe concept of psychiatry, is perhaps a hidden place, because it is a place of separation.\u201d In the \u201cuniverse of psychiatry\u201d countless \u201chidden places of the mind\u201d reveal themselves and the artists note that, \u201creligion is an omnipresent theme among them.\u201d For their work in progress they are planning to film\/evoke diverse contemporary experiences drawing on the differences between religion and faith. These will form several visual and conceptual \u201cwindows\u201d \u2013 a multi channeled video piece and installation that will explore \u201cterritorial issues of belief and religion\u201d in Brazil and in the world. These open windows on the worlds of religion and faith reveal how \u201chidden places are forms of survival\u201d and are configured as \u201ca form of intelligence and a form of social interaction.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her article Angela Mascelani describes the world of Ulisses Pereira Chaves whose home and place of creation in Jequitinhonha Valley reveals not only a hidden life, but also a hidden ecosystem \u2013 a habitat as hideout and portal to other imaginaries and cosmogonies. In addressing the complex dimensions of what is hidden and what is shown, Angela also questions art world value systems and elitism governing notions of \u201cBrazilian popular art,\u201d arguing for a more inclusive and porous discursivity with respect to the appreciation of popular artists within contemporary canons. At the same time, she draws attention to the metaphysical complexities that permeate the relationship between Ulysses and his hidden place. The hideout from civilization positions the artist, like a demiurge, closer to the portal of the visible and the invisible, to visions of immemorial roots of cosmic and ancestral origins that inhabit and transit his creation and relationship with Nature. I’m Ulysses! I talk to the sun, to nature, (…) I have vision<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Shedding Light on Social Stigma and Institutional Abuse<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The case study Unveiling the Hidden: Socially Engaged Art Practice in Ireland,<\/em> co-edited with Helen O’Donoghue, senior curator and Head of Engagement & Learning, Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin, Ireland, outlines a genealogy of socially engaged art practice in Ireland together with a deeper exploration of the work of three artists via interviews and essays exploring their practices and different dimensions of the hidden.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artist and educator Bernie Masterson has worked with prisoners in the Irish prison service for over thirty years. Her work tells their stories of marginalization and reveals situations of institutional abuse, drawing attention to the \u201creality of others who have been displaced\u201d and to \u201cthose who at the margins of society that are not seen or heard.\u201d Interweaving artistic and pedagogical practices with deeply sensitive listening, Bernie both encourages the prisoners\u2019 expression, resulting in several exhibitions of their works, and incorporates their narratives and perspectives as an advocate for social justice in her artistic production.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Artist Seamus McGuinness sheds light on painful social stigmas through his collaborations with the families of young suicide victims. His Lived Lives<\/em> project started as an interdisciplinary research platform in 2005 with Kevin Malone, professor of psychiatry at St. Vincent’s University Hospital \/ University College Dublin (UCD), resulting in Seamus earning a PhD from the Faculty of Medicine, UCD, in 2010. Since then, the project has unfolded into a series of exhibitions, dialogue programs, audiovisual documentation, and an archive of personal objects belonging to the victims donated by their families and continues to generate important debate on the tragic yet mostly veiled and stigmatized subject of suicide.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Vuka\u0161in Nedeljkovi\u0107 documents the experience of refugees and asylum seekers in Ireland. His project Asylum Archive<\/em> is presented in this issue by a visual essay by the artist and a text by Anne Mulhall, co-director of the Center for Gender, Feminisms & Sexualities, UCD. In 1999, the Irish state instituted the Direct Provision system. Under this system, people are scattered throughout the country in accommodation centers, usually in remote locations. Rather than shelter and integrate people, more often than not these centers effectively imprison and cordon off asylum seekers from community life. As a refugee himself Nedeljkovi\u0107 started photographing his environment and organizing an archive that unfolded into Asylum Archive \u2013 a collaborative project comprising texts, photographs, and testimonies of those impacted. In her accompanying essay, Mulhall traces a narrative of institutional abuse, often veiled by a bureaucratic and strategic arbitrariness. A narrative that she connects to a long history of incarceration of marginalized groups by the Irish nation-state and the devastating responses by governments to migrant populations worldwide in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

For these artists, art does not cure trauma, it rather offers, as Nedeljkovi\u0107 puts it, \u201ca coping mechanism,\u201d a device for exposing the unspoken and the unseen and, as McGuinness observes, a \u201ccatalyst\u201d for conversations, unveiling experiences that are often stigmatized or omitted from our daily lives, official stories, and public policies. The long-term commitment to specific communities and contexts of each of the three artists points to a socially engaged art practice grounded in ethics, the building of social and affective bonds, and complex forms of inhabiting and coexisting together.  It is a critical as well as a restorative practice \u2013 creating spaces for listening, documenting experiences and abuses, most of the time hidden from social life, and constructing archives that run counter to official histories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

From the Invisible to the Visible: Counter Narratives and Calls for Community<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The development of socially engaged art practice in Ireland might be attributed, in part, to the country\u2019s peripheral condition, or rather, being at once remove from the often centralizing discourses of international art scenes, however much they proclaim their decoloniality. Such limitations, misconceptions, and social geographies are also operative in major city centers. In Rio de Janeiro, art and activism often merge where the social ills and inequalities of a divided city and a city full of vitality pulsate simultaneously. Hidden lives that Reveal Hidden Lives in Pequena \u00c1<\/em>frica<\/em> [Little Africa] is a dialogue between the artists Diego Zelota, Sandro Rodrigues and Thiago Haule, residents of Pequena \u00c1frica in the city’s port region, and the curator \/ researcher Izabela Pucu. Questioning old cartographies of center and periphery, the artists affirm their territory as one filled with creative potential and social resistance. In their practices of recovering histories, celebrating individuals, and collective mobilization, Diego, Sandro, and Thiago use photography, social organizing, and wheat pasted murals of local characters in their quest to highlight hidden lives that, as Izabela suggests, opens up \u201cpossibilities for people to change their conceptions about their place of origin and about themselves.\u201d Art operates as means of generating \u201ccounter narratives.\u201d Their practice points to how art making and modes of resistance and existence converge as ways to collectively struggle, live, and be together. As Diego notes: \u201cI want to revere people just like me, people from my territory.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The call for community in Keep the Children in the Room: On the Biopolitics of Single Mothering in the Time of Covid<\/em> is yet another regenerative demand for new models of the future. The dialogue between two single mothers, the Brazilian artist L\u00edvia Moura and the Cypriot researcher Chyrstalleni Loizidou, attributes the devaluation of women, mothers, and children as symptoms and inheritances of what is currently suffocating humanity in its path toward self-destruction dominated by patriarchy and globalized capitalism. Following residences in 2016 and 2019 in Cyprus and Brazil, the two exchanged emails over the course of 2020, pointing out what they see as the hidden violence of infantophobia in contemporary life, exacerbated by the conditions of isolation imposed by Covid-19 and its paradoxical social distancing directive that \u201cmarginalizes and oppresses children.\u201d They see that motherhood and children can be possible \u201cguides\u201d to help us get out of this crisis promoting more inclusive and communal ways of thinking and acting, (un)hiding and embracing the adversity and the natural flow of life \u2013 as the indigenous philosopher and leader Ailton Krenak says: \u201cDon\u2019t take the children out of the room.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Witnessing as Poetic Practice <\/h3>\n\n\n\n

In his article Hidden Lives \/ Deaths: Towards an Ontology of Forced Disappearance in Dictatorial Chile<\/em>, Jos\u00e9 Santos outlines the lived complexities and tragic legacy of the country\u2019s dictatorship where \u201chidden lives\u201d are not only lives that were stolen, unlived, and assassinated, but are also \u201chidden deaths,\u201d bodies that continue to be not found, in a never-ending search by relatives and loved ones. A paradoxical state of continuous absence\/presence, hovering between being and non-being, forever remembered, yet also not fully mourned. Santos richly weaves political and philosophical questions with the pain of loss and the social and emotional legacy of the dictatorship in the country’s history. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

How to deal with such infinite mourning? What artistic practices might mitigate these wounds in the recovery and transformation of memories and stories of pain, state violence, trauma, stigmas, and their familial and socio-cultural impacts? In parallel to the questions raised by Santos in the Chilean context, the case study Witnessing as Poetic Practice<\/em> draws on a number of recent projects in Brazil that merge aesthetic, ethical, political, and clinical practices. The four contributions draw attention to: the dictatorship in Brazil from 1964 to 1985 and its transgenerational legacy; the atrocities committed by the state against indigenous peoples; and the claim of madness as one of the greatest devices of the silencing, oppression, and erasure of women, especially black women, reaching its extreme with compulsory hospitalization in the asylum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her article Ethical-Aesthetic-Political Agency in Reparations for the Damage Caused by State Violence<\/em>, the psychoanalyst and institutional analyst Tania Kolker reports on the encounter between artistic, political, and clinical practices in the exhibition Destempos: Testimunho como po<\/em>\u00e9<\/em>tica pr<\/em>\u00e1<\/em>tica<\/em> [Out of Time: Witnessing as Poetic Practice] \u2013 the project that gives the title to this case study. The exhibition was proposed in the context of the Clinicas do Testemunho Project [Clinical Testimony Project], an initiative to “guarantee psychological care and produce subsidies for the construction of a public policy aimed at caring for those affected by State violence.” In her writing, richly intertwined with the experiences of those affected, Tania shows how \u201cbecoming witness,\u201d mobilized in fundamentally collective acts of \u201cwitnessing\u201d, offers \u201cthe possibility of giving meaning to experiences that have been silenced for so long,\u201d remaking \u201cthe bonds between words and the world,\u201d restoring \u201cthe ability to found new worlds.\u201d <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Destempos<\/em> was carried out in collaboration with the collective Filhos e Netos por Memoria, Verdade e Justi\u00e7a [Children and Grandchildren for Memory, Truth and Justice]. The artist Anita Sobar, the daughter of a former political prisoner and curator of Destempos<\/em>, together with K\u00eania Maia, a psychologist-teacher-activist and daughter of a disappeared activist, share their reflections dealing with the psychological transfer of emotional, physical, and social suffering of their fathers on their families.  Clandestine Becomings <Between Approximations and Deviations><\/em> is both a genealogy of this transgenerational pain and a story of the construction of the self as an artist through activism. In her attempts to transform the pain through aesthetic-political actions in urban contexts, Anita sees clandestinity as core to an ethical artistic and collective practice, where \u201ctestimony became a fundamental piece for the composition of this practice.\u201d The co-written essay was also a means of witnessing, of supporting one another, as they recognize themselves as being moved by the same transgenerational a\/effects and the desire to denounce “the silence” of the State\u2019s machinery of forgetfulness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Making the hidden public, giving form to the previously silenced, unspoken or unseen, and witnessing the legacy of state violence, and continuation thereof, could not be more urgent. Another essay in this case study explores the installation \/ performance [Public Reading of the Figueiredo Report] proposed by Escola da Floresta [Forest School], an alternative school in S\u00e3o Paulo led by the artist F\u00e1bio Tremonte. The Figueiredo Report was the result of a 1967 parliamentary investigation, conducted by the attorney Jader Figueiredo Correia, detailing crimes committed by governmental officials of the extinct Indian Protection Service (SPI) against indigenous populations. The artist\u2019s installations present us with a table, microphones, and the 7000 pages of the report and invite readings out loud, placing us in direct contact, in a raw way, with this material. Spectators\/readers are here brought to bear witness to the history of the atrocities committed by the State against the original peoples and the ever-present tragedy of ongoing State violence. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Navigating the complexities of the hidden, the known, and the unrecoverable, artists operate as agents of the sensible, mobilizing critical and regenerative forms of witnessing. In Search of Judith<\/em> is a one-woman musical-play and film directed by the musician Pedro S\u00e1 Moraes and featuring the actress J\u00e9ssica Barbosa. The piece traces the story of J\u00e9ssica\u2019s search for the true history of her grandmother Judith, committed to a mental institution shortly after the birth of J\u00e9ssica\u2019s father. The discovery of her grandmother, at the age of 32, after having her own son, became an existential search for the meaning of madness, lost fragments of her grandmother’s history, and restorative justice in exposing the silencing of and racism toward black women.  It was also a search to craft the very form of the \u201csearch,\u201d ultimately framed as an \u00e9bo [ritual Afro-Brazilian offering] musical rhapsody. The essay in this case study is written as a dialogue between J\u00e9ssica and Pedro and Diana Kolker, pedagogical curator at the Bispo do Rosario Museum of Contemporary Art, where the two artists were in residence and where In Search of Judith<\/em> was also filmed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Giving Form to the Hidden, Reconfiguring Memory, and Queering the Archive<\/h3>\n\n\n\n

The search for hidden lives and erased experiences, brings us closer to Benjamin’s well-known image of the \u201cscavengers\u201d of history, a frequently futile search for evidence and truth, sifting through detritus, fragments, found objects, and ephemera, a process that is often frustrated. A search that draws us into an ever-spiraling and infinite investigation of ourselves, familial and social relationships, and the world around us, often demanding that we give form to our attempted search and sense of loss \u2013 (re)constructing archives, gathering testimonies, and reconfiguring and reworking memory. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Identity Essay<\/em>: Mayra Martell – To miss: to be away from who inhabits<\/em> you<\/em>, photographer Mayra Martell documents young women who have gone missing, presumed dead, in the city of Ju\u00e1rez, Mexico. Through photographing the spaces and personal belongings of missing women and visiting with their bereaved mothers, Mayra gives form to the hidden \u2013 the eternal presence\/absence of being missing and not found and affective bonds of familial love. She began the project after seeing missing persons fliers posted in the streets: \u201cWhen I looked at them, even my soul was muted. From that time, I have not stopped feeling that emptiness.\u201d For MESA<\/em>, Curator and researcher Joana Mazza presents a selection of Mayra\u2019s work, contextualizing her practice within the context of vital strands of social photographic documentary activism in Latin America.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In her article Bringing to Light: Visual Testimonies of Survival<\/em>, Chilean researcher Maria Carolina Pizarro Cort\u00e9s explores artistic advocacy projects in Chile and Argentina that re-signify the \u201chidden lives\u201d of victims of the respective dictatorships by drawing attention to the loved ones left behind in a continuous state of mourning and struggle. Carolina discusses Julio Pantoja’s projects that gave rise to the photographic essay and exhibition entitled Los hijos. Tucum<\/em>\u00e1<\/em>n veinte a\u00f1os despu<\/em>\u00e9<\/em>s<\/em>; [Children: Tucum\u00e1n 20 Years Later] a Arqueolog<\/em>\u00ed<\/em>a de la aus<\/em>\u00ea<\/em>ncia<\/em> [The Archaeology of Absence], by the artist Lucila Quieto; and finally, the exhibition Vivos recuerdos<\/em> [Vivid Memories], commissioned by the Socialist Party of Chile. Through different techniques \u2013 digital manipulation, montage, and staged projections \u2013 projects start from a photograph, be it intimate or official, a portrait or scene and deploy a relational poetics with recreated and imagined encounters between loved ones and victims. Here instead of the absence of the disappeared detainee, what is emphasized is their ongoing lived relational presence.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The potential to reimagine and reconfigure archives, collections, and institutions themselves based on affective links and social bonds is the basis of Caroline Gausden’s article, Refusals, Resistance and Alternative Hosting: Artists, Queer Practices, and the Glasgow Women’s Library<\/em>. In thinking and acting affectively it becomes possible to counter the modus operandi of large institutions. Here, the institution is rather a kitchen table and social sculpture, hiding its hospitality practices in order to maintain a welcoming and creative space, while investigating and challenging them at the same time. Much more than a library, GWL organizes events with partners in several rural and urban, national and international locations. The article explores the genealogy of the organization and focuses on recent hospitality and queering initiatives drawing on the library\u2019s archival collections by three artists, Juliane Foronda, Kirsty Russell, and Tako Taal.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

***<\/p>\n\n\n\n

We offer this 6th issue of Revista MESA<\/em> as a micro constellation of the hidden in the search for possible ways of coping with the many silent, invisible, and nefarious worlds around us. The issue presents a mapping of diverse artistic, collective, and social initiatives that strive in micro ways to work toward re-enchantment and to continue the struggles against injustice and social inequalities. We understand that there are many more hidden lives and worlds, other stories to tell, memories to be recovered, lives and mourning to be restored and repaired, struggles to be regenerated, archives and political policies to be reconstituted and reconfigured. We hope that this unique cartography of the hidden might inspire other counter narratives, socio-cultural “do in<\/em>” initiatives, and the \u201cpolivocal\u201d giving back of the world to the world. Our deepest and heartfelt thanks to all the contributors, without their generosity and collaborative spirit this issue would never have been possible.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Editorial: Hidden Lives Jessica Gogan and Luiz Guilherme Vergara To all hidden livesIn memory of the 300,000 Brazilians who have died from Covid 19 (as of 27th March 2021)In solidarity […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2837\/?lang=en"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/?lang=en"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page\/?lang=en"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1\/?lang=en"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments\/?lang=en&post=2837"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2837\/revisions\/?lang=en"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3779,"href":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2837\/revisions\/3779\/?lang=en"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/institutomesa.org\/revistamesa\/edicoes\/6\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/?lang=en&parent=2837"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}