Rural School, author: Andrea Avendano.

G.5.1 Museo de la Nada (Museum of Nothingness): Contrahegemonic Actions of Art in Education

Andrea Avendano Caneo, independent scholar (Chile)

Education has been a way of symbolic violence for most Native communities in Latin America. Schools for indigena communities insist in a Western way to see life and give Eurocentric concepts related to knowledge in most of their structure. I advocate for the integration of issues of contemporary art, like diversity, local knowledge and the existence of other ways to build life. This emphasizes my conviction that everyone has the right to live his own culture within the context of school, and that art can be a space in which to bring together diverse knowledge for the sake of equality in education. For this reason I created the art project called Museo de la Nada, which is an art action inside rural schools, where the main goal is to make children aware of the cultural resistance they can create through the arts. This art project intends to be a sustainable place that reconnects the poetry of landscapes in rural schools with children’s daily lives, having the environment play the role of an endless and vivid backdrop for their education. With this wide perspective of knowledge, we can affirm what Edward Said pointed out: what makes culture interesting is how cultures relate with one another, not the greatness of one aside. This statement embraces the idea that working as a community must be taught in schools because culture is made by people with people, not alone (Ingold, 2013: p. 2). Teaching this as a primary fact is a responsibility we have as cultural workers. And this specifically is one of the values that all indigenous communities have as a life system.

G.5.2 The Words Front: Engaged Poetry in Brazil between 2016-18

Roy David Frankel, poet and independent scholar

This communication aims to address key aspects of my doctorate thesis, in which I’ve tried to discuss what would be an engaged poetry in the Brazilian contemporary context, starting with the theoretical structure of Matvejevitch, correlating it with theoreticians in the arts and sociology fields, like Lippard and Miguel Chaia, apart from bringing specific points on Bosi, Bloch, Rancière and Pasolini in order to understand how it is constructed the relationship between politics and poetry. Studies from André Mesquita and Alexandre Vilas Boas, that aims to go deeper in this discussion through the activist art panorama, are also analyzed. As study objects in the field of poetry, there were chosen three productions in the period 2016-18: the CEP Notebooks, 13 fascicles with dozens of poets that orbited the Poetic Experimentation Center (CEP 20.000), the work-in-progress O Pau do Brasil, of Wilson Alves-Bezerra (Urutau), a book that is expanded in each new edition published, and Golpe: antologia-manifesto (Nosotros), probably the biggest engaged art anthology in the recent period in Brazil. Our guiding hypothesis is that due to the ongoing macropolitical process in Brazil from 2016 to 2018, it has happened an attempt of positioning trough poetry and not only through the civil participation of its authors. As an important task of this study is the identification of a strong correlation between poetic productions in the period 2016-18 in Brazil and its sociopolitical context, not only as a witness, but as an attempt of displacement.

G.5.3 Art as a medium of expresion and survival during 1918 influenza and Covid-19 pandemics: Collaborative creation process, Art and Activism in O perfeito cozinheiro das almas deste mundo, diary of Oswald de Andrade’s garçonnière, and SobreVivências Project

Yara dos Santos Augusto Silva, Federal Center for Technological Education of Minas Gerais (CEFET-MG), Brazil

During the 1918 influenza pandemic, O perfeito cozinheiro das almas deste mundo (The perfect cook of the souls of this world) was composed as a collective notebook that registers the stimulating friendship among goers who attended the garçonnière maintained by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade (1890-1954). It draws on a collaborative creative process, guided by the combination of registration, marking, drawing, collage and assembly operations. In this artist’s book, which articulates language manipulation, intermedial contact and aesthetic experimentalism, we inquire the practice of a creative process that interweaves play and writing, using play as a motor to expand the possibilities of expression and meaning. Central figure of Brazilian Modernism, Andrade was the mentor of Anthropophagic movement, which proposed that the critical devouring of foreign cultural values, digested and recombined with local references, could lead to an authentic and transgressive art. Accordingly to this concept, during pre-modernism period, the mentioned work makes use of different expressive features and free experimentalism, in a preview of what would hatch during the Modern Art Week (1922), mark of modernity in Brazilian art and Latin American culture. This study investigates how the instance of play between arts and medias animates the creation of this avant-garde work .We analyze how the formal and semantic implications of the playful writing, emerged from an original creative process, culminates in new representative regimes. In addition, we present some preliminary results of SobreVivências (SurVivals), an artistic resistance project, based on texts and images, that reinterpretates  Oswald and friends’ collaborative creation process considering the present context of Covid- 19 pandemic. SobreVivências is a project focused on social functions of art, developed during sanitary, economic, political and social adverse conditions in Brazil. We employ a transdisciplinary theoretical approach, based on contributions of Comparative Literature, Aesthetics, Visual Anthropology and Intermedial Studies.