Editorial: Body Ground Heart
Editorial: Body Ground Heart
Guardian angel, sweet company, watch over us morning, noon and night,
but especially now!
Ritual offering sung by the Companhia de
Mystérios e Novidades before taking to
the streets in their processions
As we write this editorial, we hear the voices of the performers of the Grande Companhia Brasileira de Mystérios e Novidades, invoking gratitude and protection before taking to the streets in their marvelous processions. Perhaps this edition of Revista MESA might be similarly imagined – a gathering of multiple bodies and hearts on one ground, mobilizing, shouting, singing – something that might give us protection and strength in this (im)possible world.
Over the past ten years, MESA has structured itself as a hybrid platform—online and in-person—of “publication” and “public action” connecting art and society through an ongoing dynamic of research, experimentation, collaboration, and education. With national and international circulation, MESA seeks to bring visibility and critical depth to the multiple interfaces of artistic production in contemporary socioenvironmental contexts, exploring their different formats and situations, and investigating the ethical and aesthetic changes that permeate the fields of art, curation, and education. As a living platform for documentation, collaboration, and reflection, MESA mobilizes its continual process of becoming by acting as a “table” and social sculpture, bringing together and connecting artists, researchers, institutions, universities, and communities from diverse fields both within and outside Brazil.
For its seventh edition MESA as a thought-form and fabric of care and social justice interweaves with themes of body-ground-heart to become a body-world/world-body, emphasizing the potential of art as an apparatus of intersectionality, connectivity, and activism in a world marked by fragmentation.
Key to mobilizing this body-world/world-body has been the introduction of a new editorial approach inviting three resident artists/co-editors as a means of developing contributions in a more organic, poetic, and singular way. Anchored in these artists’ practices and research, MESA became a resident of their projects, accompanying and reinventing itself in dialogue with their creative processes.
Scottish LGBTQIAPN+ filmmaker Susan Thomson works across the boundaries of visual arts, film, and literature. In 2022, she completed a residency at MESA Institute, supported by the British Council’s Plural Programme, where she researched, developed, and directed the short film Tybyra and the Harlequin. A work of docufiction, the film explores the rights of nature together with issues of gender, racism, and colonialism told through dance, poetry, and documentary, featuring performance artist Ombá Yîàrá and cinematography by Guará do Vale and Isabella Moriconi (at the time students at the Federal Fluminense University, arts and film, respectively). The film tells two stories: that of Tybyra, an Indigenous person of non-binary gender, who, in 1613, was tried and convicted by French colonizers in Brazil, and subsequently thrown from a cannon into the sea; and the harlequin frog in Ecuador’s Intag Valley, considered extinct for over thirty years, until its rediscovery in 2016, where its special ecosystem protection status led it to prevent a copper mine project from going ahead. Fiction and reality converge, pointing toward ways to imagine new paths for intersectional activism. Mesa includes a poetic and visual essay on the film by Thomson and two specially edited video interviews conducted as part of the research process: Diosmar Filho, an Afro-Brazilian geographer and filmmaker, who discusses the problems of environmental racism together with the research projects of IYALETA: Research, Science and Humanities: “Amazônia Legal Urbana: Sociospatial Analyses of Climate Change” and “Inequalities and Climate Change”; and Mika Peck, a British ecologist and university professor, who discusses various themes of his research and socio-environmental activism, in particular highlighting processes of paraecology—a movement to engage communities in environmental protection.
For his residency the Brazilian artist and educator Jorge Menna Barreto, currently professor in the Department of Art and the Master’s Program in Environmental Art and Social Practice at the University of California, Santa Cruz, developed the podcast series Olho Seco (Dry Eye), an initiative that is part of his ongoing research project, Dehydrated Landguages. Spurred by the artist’s practice and research over the past 20 years focusing on site-specific projectsand agroecology, this investigation explores the relationship between art, literature, and the environmental crisis. Intersecting science, poetry, and visual arts, Olho Seco compares the globe of the eye to the globe of the Earth and investigates how the experience of dryness manifests itself in the body and in ecosystems. Through interviews with scientists, writers, artists, and curators and drawing in particular on the work of the Brazilian poet João Cabral de Melo Neto and artist Antonio Dias, the podcast speculates on how we might parse “dryness” as a language, method, and a response to environmental collapse. The audio of the podcasts and transcripts can be accessed here along with an overview of the research project Dehydrated Landguages and Menna Barreto’s eco-fiction text “One Mouth Less,” a new essay pointing to future directions for his research.
Meanwhile, the public art collective Grande Companhia Brasileira de Mystérios e Novidades (Great Brazilian Company of Mysteries and Novelties) operates in the port area of Rio de Janeiro, formerly the largest slave port in the Americas. The Grande Company develops their processions as social sculptures of public art. Each procession is conceived in dialogue with popular traditions, religious festivities, songs, and Afro-Brazilian syncretism that activate contemporary historical and political intersections, restoring forms of re-enchantment to a territory threatened by increasing gentrification. Through various editorial contributions MESA highlights their processional practice and mobilization of organizations, spiritual leaders, researchers, artists, and educators. These include: an interview with artistic director Lígia Veiga and coordinator Marília Felipe; a collection of testimonies with the Company’s performers and collaborators; and a conversation circle on the arts, sciences, and spiritualities with the Company’s director and MESA editors as well as Anna Dantes, Fabio Scarano, Mãe Sara, Marcia Brandão, and Iazana Guizzo. Architect and coordinator of the Floresta Cidade (UFRJ) outreach project and Company collaborator, Guizzo also contributed the essay “Despertar a Guanabara” (Awakening Guanabara), photographed by César Oiticica Filho, filmmaker and artistic director of the Hélio Oiticica Municipal Art Center and the Hélio Oiticica Project. The beauty of the Company’s processional practice is highlighted by the entities and deities embodied by the actors on stilts, like suspended giants, as they walk the streets, they bring a symbolic forest to the street, embracing total presence, one that is both fully attentive to the here-and-now and fabulously poetic, activating other states of being.
In addition to these rich contributions, this Mesa edition also features articles, dialogues, and visual essays, offering diverse and richly ecosystemic approaches of body-ground-heartedness in their situated dimensions of resistance and creation.
Articles
This issue features three articles. Each draws on different transcultural and transdisciplinary eco-ethical-aesthetic practices and critical reflections and points toward possible regenerative confluences of the broken bonds of body-ground-heart. The articles by Ana Luiza Nobre, “Crouch Designing,” João Paulo Lima Barreto (Tukano), “The Conception of Body Based on the Practices of Indigenous Specialists of the Brazilian Amazon,” and Juan López Intzín, “Sp’ijilal O’tan: Knowledge or Epistemologies of the Heart,” constitute a call for other ontoepistemologies—cosmologies.
Mayan-born researcher Juan López Intzín focuses on the Tselta Mayan ethical and philosophical concepts that shape the epistemologies of the heart. Both poetic invitation and questioning manifesto, his text asks us to consider: if we are a domesticated people is “de-domestication” possible? He draws our attention to the notion of ch’ulel, the primary essence of existence—what we might call vital power or energy—reclaimed and embraced by the Zapatista movement in Mexico in the 1990s. An essence that awakens our consciousness and summons us to bring “our hearts back” to the forgotten cosmos, enabling the return, in Tselta Mayan terms, of lekil kuxlejal (a life of plenitude, dignity, and justice).
Likewise, João Paulo Tukano, in an article excerpted and edited especially for this Mesa issue from his book O mundo em mim: uma teoria indígena e os cuidados sobre o corpo no Alto Rio Negro (2022), also highlights an epistemology of indigenous knowledge. Here, he outlines the healing cures of indigenous healers and shamans and defends their practice as sciences that reconnect the body with the ground-world-cosmos. He presents a phenomenological view of indigenous medicine based on the practices of these cosmopolitical mediators who are operators of: “Kihti ukũse (the set of mythical narratives of the Tukanos, (Yepamahsã); , Bahsese (repertoire of formulas, words and expressions taken from the Kihti ukũse);and Bahsamori (the set of social practices associated with the bahsese and the ritual feasts and ceremonies throughout the annual cycle).” All this is summarized in the term kahtise: the immaterial elements that constitute the body.
Architect Ana Luiza Nobre, inspired by Georges Didi-Huberman’s provocation to “think from/lean into the ground,” explores the possibilities of a different kind of architecture, one that is grounded and “crouched” in its sensibilities and projections. A movement that counters the processes of modernization/globalization established in opposition to everything local, rooted, and grounded. An architecture that embraces, as Indigenous peoples teach, a “stepping softly” on the ground. “Grounding oneself,” Nobre points out, “is cultivating a politics of the Earthly,” where, by leaning towards the ground we can, to quote Huberman, “make what is below rise to us.”
Dialogues
Perhaps what most pulsates, connects, and breathes body-ground-heart in this issue is the act of listening, that is, an attentive, sensitive, and ethical listening, anchored in what Donna Haraway suggests as “response-ability”.1 One that is also grounded in permission where we ask to listen and be part of what we are listening to – listening with the body, mind and heart like the word-concept in Guarani hendu offered by Sandra Benites in her dialogue “Tembiapo: Art and Healing Peoples.”
While this attentive, sensitive, and ethical listening will not save us from our crises nor repay the unpayable debt2 of past colonialism, it is, however, fundamental to what the philosopher Isabelle Stengers calls “an ecology of practices” and “the creation of responses on which the possibility of a future that is not barbaric depends.”3 “I don’t know how to do justice,” echoed Stella Patrocínio’s voice in the dialogue “Ensaio de escuta” (Rehearsal/Essay of Listening) at the former Colônia Juliano Moreira asylum, now the Bispo do Rosario Museum. Together with Anna Carolina Vicenti Zacharias, Natasha Felix, and Sara Rumos and mediated by Diana Kolker, we listened to Stella’s falatório (chatter).4 Stella’s chatter grounds us in both palpable helplessness in relation to an irreparable past and provocation for a future otherwise: we must listen and listen collectively.
Oralitura, as the term conceived by performance scholar Leda Martins’s poetic work suggests,5 emerges from this responsive and collective listening. “Art as a shell: just listening,” was how artist and psychiatrist Lula Wanderley described the Brazilian artist’s Lygia Clark’s hybrid artistic and clinical practice. These sensibilities and potentialities permeate the project Body, Gesture, Affect with women at the Talavera Bruce prison. In the dialogue featured in this issue of MESA, project coordinators Tania Rivera and Alice Poppe joined forces with collaborating artist Caroline Valansi and composer, performer, and art professor Tato Taborda. Concepts, words, and practices such as choreolistening (Rivera), radiochoreography (Poppe), swinging body (Valansi), and audionutrition (Taborda) emerge from this collective listening of bodies, grounds, and hearts.
The dialogue “We are from That Land: Transversal Dialogues Between Art and Territory” features a conversation between educator/curator Mélanie Mozzer and artist Savio Ribeiro as they discuss the vitality and struggles of the art scene in the peripheral context of São Gonçalo, an outlying suburban region of Rio de Janeiro, based on a recent conference they curated on contemporary art in the region. The territory of São Gonçalo is dear to Mesa; the 6th edition “Hidden Lives” features a case study with artists, educators, and activists from the region. Mozzer and Ribeiro similarly emphasize the fundamental importance of listening to the territory and its multiple voices and also point to the vital need for a counter-movement of writing the “narratives of our own revolutions.”
In times of urgency, we need to listen to each other, to the earth, to nature, and to the nonhuman. This isn’t some kind of return to nature fantasy. Nor is it a cure. But rather, a way to sensitize ourselves to what Susan Buck Morss suggests as “sniffing out danger.”6As Indigenous people say that when you see the jaguar in the forest, it’s already too late.7
Visual Essays
Another special feature in this issue comprises four visual essays, each opening a multisensory window onto different contemporary worlds. Here we were interested in exploring resonances, connections, eco-ethical-aesthetic interdependencies, and confluences between body-ground-heart.
In “Other Poetics: Diving into a Brazil of Art” we journey amidst the vital creativity of popular manifestations of Brazilian art, captured through the lens of artist and filmmaker Lucas Van de Beuque. In his essay, we rediscover the vital imaginaries of the origins of the artistic-human phenomenon – celebration, home-life, nature – free from erudite dogma and vibrating body-ground-heart from other margins of contemporary artistic production.
The essay “What is this Ground on which I Step? Work, Care, and Survival at Casa Resistências, a shelter for LBT women in the Maré Favela Complex” was written by Casa collaborators, Beatriz Virgínia Gomes Belmiro and Kimberly Veiga and features the photography of Suellen Cloud. The essay was the result of a collaboration between Mesa, Casa Resistências and Imagens do Povo – an organization and school of popular photography in Maré promoting a critical and respectful registering of local culture. Residence here becomes resistance, the Casa’s work involves regenerative vital forces and an ethics of care that embraces affectivity, solidarity, creativity, and communality, and psychosocial constructs of healing through mutual belonging.
Artist Carla Santana’s essay, “Land as Memory, Dwelling, and Nourishment: The Sertão Negro,” engages us with the multiple worlds of earth-soil-ground that she explored during her residency at the artistic cultural center Sertão Negro, located in the semiarid region of Brazil’s sertão in the country’s northwest. Here Santana immersed herself in an exploration of other modes of existence and practices of communion and preservation with nature. During her residency at Sertão Negro she drew on the transformative social utopias and cosmopolitical experiences of the Kalunga Quilombola [maroon] Community of Engenho II and the animal worlds built by communities of collective insects such as mound houses, microcosmic bee hives, wasp nests, anthills, and armadillo burrows.
In synergy with the impulses of “ancestral futures” as the indigenous leader Ailton Krenak often voices, trans and neurodivergent artist-researcher Jialu Pombo digs up the ground and returns their body to the earth. In their visual essay “A Nameless Creature Embodying Experience Faces the Earth,” combining photographs, collages and textual reflections that draw on their doctoral thesis (2023), Jialu points to a feeling that these images were “theprelude to a long process of grounding, which could also be called enrooting.” Jialu invites us to face and embrace the earthiness of our ground-bodies as a means of provoking “other perspectives” and connective relationships “that have always been present, but that sometimes escape us: the body is water, fire, air and earth.”
Think Piece
We began conceiving and planning for “Body Ground Heart” in conversations with Mônica Hoff in 2022, for which we are extremely grateful. Plans shifted and changed, schedules and deadlines took over. Yet, amidst this ebb and flow of life, it is as if this was all somehow wholly necessary for her Think piece to emerge. Hoff’s texts merges inspirations, questions, references, memories, and desires, as a poetic, vibrant, and deeply moving text born from the fusion of the “episteme” of body-ground-heart.
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Interweaving these multiple voices and practices of resistance and creation, “Body Ground Heart” invests in acuerpamiento,8 cuerpo means body, suggesting bodies joining with other bodies, as feminist Lorena Cabnal advocates in her community-based territorial feminist activism in Guatemala. That is, in seeking the common ground that permeates struggles and embodying themin solidarity. This issue of Mesa invites bodies and hearts to embrace their ground as tangible horizons in the search for other forms and collective practices of living, creating, and resisting, where art might act as an ecosystemic agent of restorative connectivity.
We thank all our contributors from the bottom of our hearts; may this edition resonate in their body-ground-hearts and that of others.
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Jessica Gogan is a researcher, writer, translator, and director of MESA Institute and editor-in-chief of MESA. She holds a PhD in Art History (2016) and is a research fellow in the Graduate Program in Contemporary Studies of the Arts at the Federal Fluminense University (UFF), where she also completed postdoctoral studies (2018-2023). She researches and works at the intersections of artistic, clinical, and pedagogical practices. Publication highlights include: Domingos da Criação: Uma Coleção Poética do Experimental na Arte e Educação (2017), in collaboration with Frederico Morais and Eu Não sei o que dizer mas Desejo profundo que você me escute (2024).
Luiz Guilherme Vergara is an associate professor in the art department and a member of the Graduate Program in Contemporary Art Studies at Fluminense Federal University. He is also a co-founder of Mesa Institute. He was coordinator of the undergraduate arts program (2019-2024) and director of the Museum of Contemporary Art (MAC) in Niterói from 2005 to 2008 and 2013 to 2016. He coordinates the research group (CNPq) ynterfluxes contemporâneas: Arte Comunidade e Natureza (Art, Community, and Nature).
1 Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Durham/London: Duke and University Press, 2016)
2 Denise da Silva Ferreira, The Unpayable Debt, Political Imagination Workshop with the support of Casa do Povo, 2019 Available: https://casadopovo.org.br/divida-impagavel/
3 Isabelle Stengers. “Introductory Notes on an Ecology of Practices.” Cultural Studies Review, 2005, 11(1), 183–196 and Catastrophic Times: Resisting the Coming Barbarism, translated by Andrew Goffey (Open Humanities Press/Meson Press: 2015) 73.
4 In 1986, as part of the movement to humanize practices in psychiatric contexts, the project Oficina de Livre Criação Artística (Workshop of Free Artistic Creation) was created at the former asylum known as Colônia Juliano Moreira in partnership with the Parque Lage School of Visual Arts (EAV). Conceived by psychologists Denise Correa and Marlene Sá Freire, with the guidance of the artist Nelly Gutmacher and the participation of artists Carla Guagliardi and Márcio Rolo, who were EAV students at the time, the project organized art workshops for inmates at the now-defunct Teixeira Brandão Pavillion (formerly the women’s inpatient pavilion). It was in this context that Carla Guagliardi and Nelly Gutmacher, at Carla’s suggestion, began recording their conversations with Stella–the impactful falatório (chatter), as Stella called it.
5 Leda Maria Martins, Performances do tempo espiral (São Paulo: Cobogó, 2021)
6 Grant Kester, “Aesthetics after the End of Art: An Interview with Susan Buck-Morss.” Art Journal, Vol. 56, No. 1, Aesthetics and the Body Politics, (Spring, 1997) 38-45, 43.
7 Laymert Garcia dos Santos, Transcultural Amazon: Shamanism and Technoscience in Opera. São Paulo: N-1, 2013 in: Tato Taborda, Resonances: Sympathetic Vibrations and Insurgency Frequencies. (Rio de Janeiro: UFRJ, 2021) 25.
8 See: Diana Milena Niño Patiño. A philosophical conversation with Lorena Cabnal from Guatemala. Revista Estudos Feministas, Florianópolis, v. 31, n. 3, 2023. Available at: https://www.scielo.br/j/ref/a/4DfwsdcBSVTqdbfTGG9rMTb/ . Accessed: August 2025.
