Entre papagaios, araras, urubus ecarcarás

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“An antelope of a newkind has been encountered in Africa by an explorer who has succeeded incapturing an individual and bringing it to Europe...The living animal is placedin a cage and catalogued. Once it is dead it will be stuffed and preserved”(Briet 1951: 10).

I believe it was not agood beginning. I will start over again.

I will tell you a storyabout the ones who were not supposed to be here (my own story, about notbelonging) — because I must, because it is the only empty spot for me. I have toshare the violence that was invisible before I got here. I will explain itagain but differently (that is not true). It will not be the last time. I canchange the story (maybe that is also not true): I will repeat, interrupt, falland die. This is a story about how I became a troublemaker or an angry bird.

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Quando a violência é invisível porque não estávamos aqui.

Eons and eons ago,before the first boat could be seen on the glittering shore with the new world,parrots painted landscapes on the other side of the Atlantic. On one winterlockdown evening, there was also a story. One student from a well-known artinstitution was sitting in the kitchen of the house that I now live in: with amelodic, soft, caressing, sweet baritone, consistent voice, the student wasnarrating how fabulous and fantastic their experience had been so far at theSchool, because everyone was so polite and helpful. They found space to developand go deep in their practice (exactly what they had been looking for) toupgrade their career and with the feedback from peers, tutors, and staff theywere able to expand their involvement in the art field.

Breathless striving at acrossroads.

Have you ever suffered violence there? Not at all. Quitethe opposite.

Violence does not existif we are not there.

Carcará/ Pega, mata e come/ Carcará /Não vai morrer defome /Carcará /Mais coragem do que homem /Carcará/ Pega, mata e come/ - Joao Do Vale and Jose Candido

The Western culturaltechnique of documentation is what comes before this experience; the documentis the technological apparatus that concerns the liberal nation-state andserves to maintain its structures. This writing tries to complexify therelations between my artistic practice and the invisible macro-structures ofpower like the document (proof of existence) with a shrill scream, a knot inthe neck, deep anguish, and a sinking melancholy. Most cultural institutionsreproduce inequalities of social, gender, race, and class, mainly as a way tomaintain power; in this particular case: those created by the choreographicshifts from south to north, the colonial reproduction of captivity, of thearchive, of categorization. With a cold analytic procedure - capturing invitro, dead or alive - all urgent life forms are framed in neat terms such asinternationalization, inclusion, and diversity.

Between profiles, Petridishes, vogelhuisje, zoo catalogues, greenhouses, and apes.

Are we still here?

The Future of Art Research: IN VIVO

I decided to escape fromthe in vitro, the glass, the studio, and the walls of the institution and wentaway embodying a bird, a captive-born who never learned how to fly and almostdied in this new hostile environment. A bird who only complains about abuses ofpower or unequal conditions unveils the failure of the institution to deal withand to acknowledge that, by exposing and naming the bird as angry, unable tofly, hermetic, complex, exotic, unique, and violent.

The exposure of captiveexotic ones happens in a micropolitical way with bacteria, birds, plants, andhumans. This practice of putting 'exotic' beings on display began in Europe inthe early modern period, when European explorers made their way to every cornerof the globe. Sailors brought people with them from the newly explored areas,much as they might present foreign objects, plants, and animals to prove theexoticism and wealth of previously unknown countries. Along with thepresentation of individual human beings, major exhibitions were organized fromthe 16th century onward. I would like to tell another story, in which refusalis the knowledge embodied experience of a collective voice that flies;“ungovernable” as Fred Moten and Sadiya Hartman would say. A story of refusing.

Is it true that ArtResearch resembles animal parks and greenhouses, thriving in a state ofcaptivity that is classified in zoo catalogues and profile shots? Within theirexhibits, applicants, staff, and tutors honoring their specific heritage andbackground utilize the concept of representation. At the same time, the lack ofplural voices to develop methodologies, pedagogies, and broader contentreferences continue to perpetuate a narrow field of foreign landscapes. Fromone perspective, this educational system enacts forms of discipline, violence,punishment, and containment that do unquantifiable damage. On the other hand,it is possible to draw fugitive choreographies inside the institutionalborders, to open portals in which we can imagine impossible planes, lines,dances, and layers of escaping together; a shared technology could be a commonway of inhabiting this space as a refuge. An ontology of fugitivity operates atthe intersection of Black studies and feminist science and technology studiesas a performance of resistance to systems of knowledge.

This essay is an attemptto ask – in a frustrated and submerged, tear sunken technology of wording andon behalf of the ones who never had the right to live or who do not belong, orthose who have never been here, for those who died right after birth - what itcould be if we dream and act together, towards indiscipline and disruption ofmacrostructures.

In the encounter,slowness, and softness stand in opposition to the ones described as fast, sharpand loud. In this encounter, the grammar of exclusion becomes visible: withthese parameters, based on the hierarchy of a specific cosmology, the soft andslow are allowed to perform and legitimize violence towards the fast, quick andloud, and the multitude of bodies that are restless and out of tune. And thus,a regime of invisibility is created and perpetuated. The antelope, for example,in a state of dance, with its powerful musculature of the lower limbs, canremain sublime even at high speed. Always afraid, always beautiful, even whenrunning in the herd it stubbornly refuses stillness, because the urgency tostay alive is deep in its flesh.

Ei, você aí /Me dá um dinheiro aí /Me dá um dinheiro aí/Ei, você aí /Me dá um dinheiro aí Me dá um dinheiro aí - Glauco Silva Ferreira / Homero Silva Ferreira / IvanSilva Ferreira

Perhaps, it will bepossible to elaborate here on how this neoliberal structure tried to kill thedance, assassinate the movement, destroy the impossible transatlanticdisplacements, and all its choreographic futurities. It has also changed intopoverty: the plethora, potency, exuberance, resistance, heat, vitality,dexterity, sweat, tears, and pain, exoticizing the flesh into pornography.Perhaps not, due to the impossibility of relations within volcanicdisplacements, fissures, breakages, explosions, rainforest, humidity, andcontamination that have transformed RAGE into ACTION, creating a rupture, abomb, dynamite.

For a bacteria from ahighly contagious context from the south; trans- dislocated and relocated inthis in vitro experiment called “reality”, the available options would beimmediate death or a shapeshifting survival mode transmuted in rhythm, speed,sharpness, precision in a radical choreography. The bacteria together can alsochange the environment. I was immersed in a petri dish, a test tube in thisrealm; and all my movements, thoughts, desires, and companion speciesdisappeared, and vanished away. I forgot everything. I was under control andsurveillance by the “real scientists” who were naming, describing, cataloging,commenting, wording, categorizing, understanding, reading, listening,analyzing, and criticizing.

I can not remember.

I am a captive-bornbird,

melancholic at ease

with the perpetual dreamof freedom

I am colonized

I can barely see throughthe bars of rage

with my clipped wings

I can barely takeshallow flights

from this in vitrocondition

trapped

with tears choking in mythroat

I envy thosefree-flying, flocking around

who have never beencatalogued

I forgot how to sing andnever learned how to fly

I was born in captivityin a foreign country and quartered.

from a grave ofdreams  

I am constantly shoutinga nightmare scream  

always angry because Ican't feel the breeze.

Even though I am a bird,I cannot fly. I decided to use the same technology: Let’s write, listen andread. “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house,” said AudreLorde. And if we sleep and dream together? Aren’t we all dead by now? Are theyanesthetized? Can they feel anything? Can we feel anything?

Freeze, stillness, towhom does slowness belong?

I cannot remember.

I will tell you anotherstory about birds...

Magpies are normallysedentary and spend winters close to their nesting territories, but birdsliving near the northern limit of their range in Sweden, Finland, and Russiacan move south in harsh weather. Magpies have been observed engaging inelaborate social rituals, possibly including the expression of grief. Mirrorself-recognition has been demonstrated in European magpies making them one ofonly a few species to possess this capability. Their intelligence is equivalentto that of the great apes (chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans) in terms ofsocial cognition, causal reasoning, flexibility, imagination, and prospection.They are everywhere here in the Netherlands. One day I was flying low and foundan open wound, a smashed “Maggie” run over with the guts in the open air. Iremembered the colors, the fruits, the samba, Ze Carioca, Carmen Miranda, Rio,and the Brazilian Carnival.

Entre Papangus, Caretase La Ursa.

Ei pessoal /Ei moçada /Carnaval começa No galo damadrugada./ Ei pessoal/ Ei moçada Carnaval começa No galo da madrugada.

“A document is a proofin support of a fact” (Briet 1951: 9).

I want to highlight theresemblance of colonial technologies disguised as scientific experiments in thearchiving of species, human apes, objects, and artifacts. I declare war againstthis process through voicing a micro perspective as follows:

What happens when youisolate a bacteria from their usual biological surroundings is that, while itmay not fully or accurately predict the effects on a whole organism, it permitsa more convenient analysis for the scientists. Laboratory experiments also haveverified that when some bacteria are exposed to a high amount of antibioticsthey become super-bacteria. Anaesthetic attempts to make them attune, slowdown, and adapt do not put them to sleep but make them really, really angry. Inthis sense, the savage mind contributed to this technology by framingintellectually and through a sophisticated methodology a particularunderstanding of the world: a way of analyzing, distinguishing, andclassifying; a logic based on dialectics and reasoning which does not alwaysserve“ global south” cosmovisions.

My practice, called Attempts to survive in apnea, deals witha series of scores that address several air constrictions in high-riskunhealthy areas (not safe at all). Apnea is a blocking of airflow on anindividual, and the resulting effects (lack of oxygenation, higher bloodpressure, and an overall sense of suffocation), highlight a somatic-politicalnotion of “apnea” to a general condition of existence for racializedindividuals in a colonized situation. What is it to breathe in a worldsuffocating by toxic hegemonies, and ecological and sanitary catastrophes? Didyou know that the mitochondria breathing oxygen are vestiges of the firstmutated bacterias living in symbiosis? Due to the photosynthetic efforts ofbacteria, the planet has an atmosphere with oxygen, allowing a poisonous gas tobe translated into enjoyable breezes, holding up macaws, parrots, and magpies.The question is how to imagine a possible choreography from this apnea: How totake a deep breath and feel the breeze?

What we learn from thisinstitutional symbiotic relation is that if a text can give words to something- a difficulty, violence, an injustice, a dynamic - or if it can name somethingthat had yet to be named in quite the same way, then people will find it, evenif they do not find a lead in the language; they will grab hold of it; theywill persist with it.

Ouvi dizer que o mundovai-se acabar/ Que tudo vai pra cucuia/ O sol não mais brilhará /

Mas se deixarem/ Umbombo e uma mulata/ E um trombone de prata O frevo bom viverá

Pode acabar o petróleoPode acabar a vergonha

Pode acabar tudo enfimMas deixem o frevo pra mim. Capiba.

Going back to theSchool: The peer-to-peer learning possibility of the institution could be readas a contamination of microorganisms. One becomes millions, and pluralexistences become visible through the modification of one and the other. Butknowledge as something that is constructed and transformed collectively canonly be held in a peer-to-peer learning environment if the surroundings do notsabotage the generosity and resilience by a process of atomization andisolation. The mechanisms of the institution must be transparent: the access toresources needs to contribute to the community, not to engrain prejudices butto encourage reflection and common decision making to diminish the inequalitiesof class, gender, and race. A common vocabulary is needed to address theseissues from an anti-racist, anti-colonial position, to acknowledge privilegesand aesthetic decisions based on hegemonic statements within the art field.

Becoming a flock ofbirds should not be an impossible achievement. The institutionalized exchangebetween peers should aim for a riot or a celebration avoiding any feedback thatcould be behaviorist and descriptive; commenting and criticizing practices asif a so-called “neutral vocabulary” could exist tends towards exoticization andcategorization. Atomization – or anti-flocking – is a technology specificallydesigned to target those who can only survive in flocks and swarms. When thebirds spread the seeds of forest trees among us… As Nelly Wat describes, SaraAhmed - in her lecture “Complaint as Queer Method”- continues to return to themetaphor of a post box ‘occupied by birds nesting, which she uses to visualizewhat a complaint can feel like; the post box, though it was not created for thebirds that nest within, becomes a safe shelter. Yet the nest can also bedisturbed by the letters within’ (Wat 2019: np). Quoting Ahmed: “We know somuch from trying to transform the worlds that don’t accommodate us. But thatfight can also just be so damn hard. When we have to fight for existence, wecan end up feeling that fighting is our existence. And so, we need each other.We need to become each other’s resources” (Ahmed in Wat 2019; np).

South Boom Boom is an attempt to survive in apnea, a continuous work, a possibilityto reimagine the world, a way to escape captivity, draw fugitive lines, resist,take flight, conceive resistances, migrate, reinvent a catastrophe, deform theshapes of oppression across time.

References

AHMED, Sara, On BeingIncluded. Racism and diversity in institutional life. Duke University PressDurham and London 2012.

BRIET, Suzanne Briet,Qu'est-ce que la documentation ? Qu'est-ce que la documentation ? Éditionsdocumentaires, industrielles et techniques, 1951.

MOTEN, Fred and HARTMAN,Sadiya. (27 Sep 2014)‘Fugitivity’ and ‘waywardness. Arika. Last accessed 28thApril 2022. https://arika.org.uk/archive/items/episode-6-make-way-out-no-way/fugitivity-and-waywardness

WAT, Nelly, “Complaintas Queer Method: Sara Ahmed Lectures at McGill”, The McGill Daily,

https://www.mcgilldaily.com/2019/10/complaint-as-queer-method/#close-modal

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