For work reasons, I will soon take a trip to Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I have established relationships with different members of the cultural community. One of them is called Batista. Capacete directs a residency for young artists encouraged with the support of patrons. I could not help but send you a message of solidarity in the face of the atrocious events that occurred in one of the favelas in Rio. The massacre committed during an operation against crime, implemented by a police system that persecuted, beat and murdered. Although there are four police officers who died, the other 117 victims, many of them with evidence of having been executed, reveal that the security forces forgot their condition as human beings and became repressors, protected by a local government that does not recognize their poor communities or the blackness that has been condemned to exile for so long.
The square Vila Cruzeiro was filled with bloody bodies, covered with blankets, in a scene reminiscent of Han Kang’s book, Human Actions. So terrifying and incomprehensible. The lives of young people recruited for crime remained there, because they had no other option. Batista tells me about the excessive force of the operation and, worried, hopes that my trip will still go ahead.
I wonder, how many potential artists, turned criminals, have died without expressing themselves other than through violence? in his book Poetics of the relationshipthe novelist, thinker and theorist originally from Martinique Edouárd Glissant (1928-2011) mentions a concept: “the word of the landscape and the landscape of the word… in the first case, the territory infiltrates the language; in the second, the language expands in space, transforming signs, letters and codes into terrain, climate or current.” Textual quote from the exhibition Earth, fire, water and winds: for a museum of wandering with Edouárd Glissantwhich is presented at the Tomie Ohtake Institute of São Paulo in Brazil. A tribute to who was the great peacemaker of the world through poetry and words. In the opinion of curators Ana Román and Paulo Miyada, for Glissant the landscape is not a mere background, but an active force that shapes memory, gesture and speech.
Understanding that our environment is not anonymous nor for our personal use, and that it is capable of speaking to us and expressing the meaning of our existence, that words are built from landscapes that allow us to see beyond the immediate, was the work of Glissant, one of the most influential spokespersons in favor of those who have less. Today its voice spreads due to the urgency of opening our eyes to what surrounds us, understood as an interdependent community, in which the human being is a fundamental part. Also the only destroyer. Always with a restorative spirit, the Martinican thinker was known for his strong decolonial poetic intervention. His fight against the abuses committed by empires on our lands was manifested by denouncing the “civilizing” idea of a natural landscape, a so-called “virgin land,” which belongs to no one and, therefore, exploitable.
These days his thoughts make even more sense when faced with the image of an atrocious landscape that leaves us speechless, or whose words must be laments that we must all hear. It is not only a favela in Rio, it is the misfortune that affects the most needy, making them victims of the decisions of politicians and potentates that have ended up affecting everyone: climate change due to extractivity, crime due to hunger and due to the right-wing policies that polarize and re-emerge strongly in Latin America.
But in Brazil there is also another landscape that vibrates with poetry, music and art. Many young artists are spokespersons for the enormous needs of the planet. On a loom, in ceramics, in embroidery, in found objects that refer to stories, stories of lives of sacrifice and pain are woven. Adding support from society, they have created an infrastructure in which local galleries and collectors support and promote them. Art is a way of inhabiting the world, of creating consciousness and community, of painting the landscape of the future.
How do we inhabit spaces? Why do we insist on populating places that endanger our lives? Why do we deteriorate the environment that surrounds us? Why does poverty grow enormously in cities that are in full development? Why are we not able to respond to the voices of those who need us?
What we forget is that it is those poor people, burdens of advanced society, who are the legitimate owners of the land. As the Brazilian artist Paulo Tavares said, the forest, the jungle, the original areas belonged to them. They were their cities in which the balance was maintained as long as they were not “discovered.” Their landscapes built of time and understanding of nature were taken from them by civilized minds that benefited from wealth until it was exhausted.
Nature was conceived as the wild that had to be civilized. Transformed into an ostentatious landscape of appearances, inhabited by fearful beings, with insurmountable walls, security systems, modern slavery at the service of created needs, all this against a primordial landscape. Just around the corner from luxury developments, needy people have been condemned to a landscape of hunger, misery and injustice. In many cases, the only way out is crime.
Like those of Edward Zaid or Frantz Fanon, the concepts of Edouard Glissant must be rescued. The Tomie Ohtake Institute exhibits pieces by artists whose careers were shaped by diaspora and migration. The axes refer to concepts that Glissant fought for: “Everyone,” as an attempt at inclusion. “Creolization” refers to cultures that have been born from clashes and that, out of necessity, have had to move from their habitats. “Archipelago”, as an intuitive and hesitant thought opposed to rigid systems; dispersed reality that interconnects diverse communities without subtracting their individuality. “Opacity”, a right against definitions and clarifications, of a “self” that cannot be fully understood and should be accepted in a world of diversity and inclusion. “Word of landscape” that is not scenery, but protagonist; an exuberant, indomitable nature that claims the vestiges of an ancestral cosmogony, in which the poetics of the relationship is materialized, as memory and as a physical body.
A good number of artists whose creation is relevant today in the markets have emerged from communities torn by stories of pain and poverty, overcome thanks to their artistic vocation. Not only in Brazil, in Mexico and in almost the entire world. Today they are recognized, they are exhibited in luxury galleries and art fairs, in private collections, they hang from the walls of millionaires’ homes and flood museums and biennials with a fresh, original, different and restorative proposal. Stories that, through color, precarious and ancestral materials that draw from the environment, subtleties in the way of conceiving myths, magic and the daily life of communities far from us. Art arises where there is a hunger to tell stories and a desire to give meaning to the strange and often incomprehensible existence. It manages to change the landscape of hopelessness into one that redeems the human condition. @Suscrowley
The post Landscapes of hope and death appeared first on Veritas News.
