Whats on | Despina

Open Bodies Residency / Residência Corpos Abertos 2018

September 2018

Open Bodies Residency (Residência Corpos Abertos) is a programme designed jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery, with the support from the British Council and Creative Scotland. It brings together Brazilian and Scottish-based performance artists who adress issues related to gender and/or sexuality. The programme is in two parts. The first part was a residency which took place at Despina in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in September 2018. The selected artists participated in a range of cross-cultural activities such as public talks, sharing of work events and workshops. Part two of the programme saw the Scottish artists participate in the Open Out programme at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in February 2019.

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Selected for this first edition, Miro Spinelli, Vinícius Pinto Rosa, Henry McPherson and Stephanie Black-Daniels worked together in our art sudios during the month of September 2018 and developed their research and projects in response to the new environment and the proposed dialogues. They also participated in a series of events and activities, such as talks, workshops and an open studio event to share their works with the public.

Learn more below about the artists and check out the photo galleries at the end of this page.

Miro Spinelli is a performer artist and researcher who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a Master’s Degree in Performance from the Performing Arts PhD Programme at UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). Currently, Spinelli is investigating how performance and its radical connection with materiality, writing and dissent can generate forces on the subjects, creating possible counter-ontologies. Since 2014, he has been developing the continuous project and series “Gordura Trans” (“Trans Fat”), mixing performance, photographs, texts and installations.

This project has been presented in several Brazilian cities and abroad with the collaboration of artists such as Fernanda Magalhães, Jota Mombasa and Jup Pires. In 2017, he was awarded a scholarship (along with artist Luisa Marinho) to take part in a residence programme at the Andreas Züst Library, in Switzerland, where they developed together the “Chupim Papers”, which shed light on themes such as precariousness, abjection, decoloniality, politics of affection and transgenderism, focusing on the body and its poetics and political potencial.

More information, here.

Vinícius Pinto Rosa lives and works in Niterói (RJ). He currently holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and works as an assistant to Rio-based artist Laura Lima. His practice incorporates issues that cross identities and subjectivities in the production of objects and installations, with the body itself as a power of image and action, which, in turn, establishes new forms of relations, access and images of the world and of the other. His practice is very influenced by the universe of a carpentry (where his father works and where much of his experience within the studio space takes place).

His works reach both performance and design fields and question constructions, polarizations and binary lines already established. They also reveal a hybridism and a multiplicity of activations and accesses that the body can create from a direct relation with the object. Vinicius has been developing the projects “Devices” and “Baseline” since 2014 and they have already been presented in several Brazilian galleries and art spaces.

More information, here.

Henry McPherson is an inter-media artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. His practice in composition, improvisation and performance is embedded in mixed-media score-production, devised performance, present-time composition, cross and inter-disciplinary practice, through which he explores personal and collective identities, musical and otherwise performative traditions. Henry’s work centres around the body-mind, score-object as mediator, the subject of invocation, impulse-led generation, queer and sustainable art practices, and meanings of ownership in collectively-generated improvisation. He is a founding member of Glasgow’s mixed-arts collective EAST (Experimental Artists Social Theatre), KUI piano duo, and the chamber trio Savage Parade.

In recent years, Henry has collaborated with groups and individuals such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scotland, Martyn Brabbins, RedNote ensemble, The Glasgow New Music Expedition, Garth Knox, Zilan Liao and Germany’s Ensemble Modern. He is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland composition dept., and is an award holder of the Dinah Wolfe Memorial Prize for Composition (2014); Scottish Opera’s Opera Sparks Competition (2016); the Patron’s Prize for Composition (2017); the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Composition Club Prize (2017); the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award (2018); and was a nominee for the inaugural Scottish Awards for New Music (2017).

He has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativiy (CA, Alberta, The Creative Gesture: Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance), Despina (Open Bodies Residency, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, with the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh) and Skammdegi Residency and Festival (IS, Olafsfjördur).

More information, here.

Stephanie Black-Daniels is a Scottish based artist living and working in Glasgow, having spent most of her early years and education in the Middle East. Most recently she has completed her Phd in Fine Art practice, with a specialism in performance at The Glasgow School of Art. Since 2010 she has toured her work nationally and internationally to festivals and galleries in the UK, Berlin, Lithuania, Finland and Chicago. In 2011, she received the Athena Award by New Moves International and National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. Stephanie was also mentored by the late drag King pioneer Diane Torr.

She has a well-established facilitation practice, which is vital to the way she makes, researches and produces new work. Her most recent workshop was at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, looking at the ‘Body as Sculpture’. Stephanie is interested how an object can change her interaction and intimacy with others, creating visual and poetic scores to act as a dramaturgical key to unlocking subject-matter or narratives for performance. Her work situates between a physical and sculptural practice, developing live and documented performative outcomes where sound, movement, image, object, light and costume intersect. Stephanie engages with performance as a way to explore the relationship between body and space, especially around gender and sexuality. She uses the body as a tool for measurement and is interested in the ‘extended body’ and ‘body as object’ to consider questions around ‘the self’, ‘the other’ and ‘the theatrical’.

More information, here.

Pictures Gallery I (horizontal scrolling)
Residency, workshops, open studio event
Photos: Frederico Pellachin

Pictures Gallery II (horizontal scrolling)
Artists’ works
Photos: Frederico Pellachin

Pictures Gallery III (horizontal scrolling)
Open Out Programme (The Fruitmarket Gallery, February 2019)
Photos: Chris Scott

Open Bodies Residency 2018

A project by
Despina
The Fruitmarket Gallery

Support
British Council
Creative Scotland

Project Conception & Coordenation
Consuelo Bassanesi
Iain Morrison

Communication, Production & Documentation
Frederico Pellachin

Curatorial Support
Guilherme Altmayer
Raphael Fonseca

Financial & Legal Management
Clarice Corrêa

Thanks to
Alexandre de Oliveira, Iain Morrison & The Fruitmarket Gallery, British Council, Creative Scotland, Ricardo Kelsch, Jak Soroka, Hanna Tuulikki, Raphael Fonseca, Guilherme Altmayer, Lorena Pazzanese, Maíra Barillo, Maria Clara Contrucci, Manuela Maria, Paula Villa Nova, Marcelo Sant’Anna and Tetsuya Maruyama.

Senado Tomado Especial – Open Bodies Residency 2018 (Residência Corpos Abertos)

Thursday, 27.09.2018

Come along next Thurssday (27), from 7 pm onwards, for Despina’s “Senado Tomado”, our monthly open studios event. For this special edition, we bring together the works produced by Miro Spinelli (RJ, Brazil), Vinicius Pinto Rosa (RJ, Brazil), Henry McPherson (Scotland, UK) and Stephanie Black-Daniels (Scotland, UK) during their residencies in our space.

Selected for the Open Bodies Residency 2018 (Residência Corpos Abertos) – a programme conceived jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery, with the support from the British Council and Creative Scotland -, the four artists worked in our studios developing their researches and projects in response to the new environment and to the proposed dialogues.

On the same night, we will be sharing for the first time in Brazil the film “SING SIGN: A CLOSE DUET” (2015), by Finnish-English artist and musician Hanna Tuulikki, as well as video recording fragments of “ACTS OF SELF-LOVE” (2016), a performance by Scottish artist Jak Soroka.

On the decks, Fine Estirpe DJ Ensemble will entertain you all with a classy and provocative set.

See you all on Thursday! Despina is located at Rua do Senado, 271 (Centro). Free admission.

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ABOUT THE ARTISTS IN RESIDENCY

MIRO SPINELLI is a performer artist and researcher who lives and works in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. He holds a Master’s Degree in Performance from the Performing Arts PhD Programme at UFRJ (Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro). Currently, Spinelli is investigating how performance and its radical connection with materiality, writing and dissent can generate forces on the subjects, creating possible counter-ontologies. Since 2014, he has been developing the continuous project and series “Gordura Trans” (“Trans Fat”), mixing performance, photographs, texts and installations. This project has been presented in several Brazilian cities and abroad with the collaboration of artists such as Fernanda Magalhães, Jota Mombasa and Jup Pires. In 2017, he was awarded a scholarship (along with artist Luisa Marinho) to take part in a residence programme at the Andreas Züst Library, in Switzerland, where they developed together the “Chupim Papers”, which shed light on themes such as precariousness, abjection, decoloniality, politics of affection and transgenderism, focusing on the body and its poetics and political potencial.

VINÍCIUS PINTO ROSA lives and works in Niterói (RJ). He currently holds a Bachelor’s Degree in Visual Arts from Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF) and works as an assistant to Rio-based artist Laura Lima. His practice incorporates issues that cross identities and subjectivities in the production of objects and installations, with the body itself as a power of image and action, which, in turn, establishes new forms of relations, access and images of the world and of the other. His practice is very influenced by the universe of a carpentry (where his father works and where much of his experience within the studio space takes place). His works reach both performance and design fields and question constructions, polarizations and binary lines already established. They also reveal a hybridism and a multiplicity of activations and accesses that the body can create from a direct relation with the object. Vinicius has been developing the projects “Devices” and “Baseline” since 2014 and they have already been presented in several Brazilian galleries and art spaces.

HENRY MCPHERSON is an inter-media artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. His practice in composition, improvisation and performance is embedded in mixed-media score-production, devised performance, present-time composition, cross and inter-disciplinary practice, through which he explores personal and collective identities, musical and otherwise performative traditions. Henry’s work centres around the body-mind, score-object as mediator, the subject of invocation, impulse-led generation, queer and sustainable art practices, and meanings of ownership in collectively-generated improvisation. He is a founding member of Glasgow’s mixed-arts collective EAST (Experimental Artists Social Theatre), KUI piano duo, and the chamber trio Savage Parade. In recent years, Henry has collaborated with groups and individuals such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scotland, Martyn Brabbins, RedNote ensemble, The Glasgow New Music Expedition, Garth Knox, Zilan Liao and Germany’s Ensemble Modern. He is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland composition dept., and is an award holder of the Dinah Wolfe Memorial Prize for Composition (2014); Scottish Opera’s Opera Sparks Competition (2016); the Patron’s Prize for Composition (2017); the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Composition Club Prize (2017); the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award (2018); and was a nominee for the inaugural Scottish Awards for New Music (2017). He has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativiy (CA, Alberta, The Creative Gesture: Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance), Despina (Open Bodies Residency, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, with the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh) and Skammdegi Residency and Festival (IS, Olafsfjördur).

STEPHANIE BLACK-DANIELS is a Scottish based artist living and working in Glasgow, having spent most of her early years and education in the Middle East. Most recently she has completed her Phd in Fine Art practice, with a specialism in performance at The Glasgow School of Art. Since 2010 she has toured her work nationally and internationally to festivals and galleries in the UK, Berlin, Lithuania, Finland and Chicago. In 2011, she received the Athena Award by New Moves International and National Review of Live Art, Glasgow. Stephanie was also mentored by the late drag King pioneer Diane Torr. She has a well-established facilitation practice, which is vital to the way she makes, researches and produces new work. Her most recent workshop was at Glasgow Sculpture Studios, looking at the ‘Body as Sculpture’. Stephanie is interested how an object can change her interaction and intimacy with others, creating visual and poetic scores to act as a dramaturgical key to unlocking subject-matter or narratives for performance. Her work situates between a physical and sculptural practice, developing live and documented performative outcomes where sound, movement, image, object, light and costume intersect. Stephanie engages with performance as a way to explore the relationship between body and space, especially around gender and sexuality. She uses the body as a tool for measurement and is interested in the ‘extended body’ and ‘body as object’ to consider questions around ‘the self’, ‘the other’ and ‘the theatrical’.

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ABOUT THE FILMS

SING SIGN: A CLOSE DUET (Hanna Tuulikki , 2015) is a vocal and gestural suite created in response to the intimate world of Edinburgh’s historic ‘closes’ – the small alleyways that lead off either side of the Royal Mile. Sheltered in the confined space of a ‘close’, Tuulikki and her collaborator Daniel Padden enact an enigmatic encounter: a wordless dialogue conducted entirely through gesture and song. Inspired by the Baroque dance suite, a street-map dating from 1765 provides a visual score. The vocal composition, divided into four movements – Allemande, Courante, Sarabande and Gigue – takes the form of a hocket (a musical device where the melody is split between two voices), with the parts divided between the singers in accordance with the closes as they branch off the high street. Where Tuulikki reaches for the lowest notes of her vocal register, Padden sings at his highest, each undermining normative gendered vocal characters, to find a common tonal space between them. The choreography spells street names in British Sign Language, mimetic hand gesture, and exaggerated body language. Despite the complete absence of sounded words, at the heart of the work is an embodied reflection on language, and how the languages to which we have access shape our experience of the world around us.

ACTS OF SELF-LOVE (Jak Soroka, 2016) is a four-hour performance of on-going preparation and catwalking, in which Soroka struts a variety of selves along a spectrum of gender expression. In placing these live acts of gender fucking alongside Soroka’s video selfies of defecating, Acts of Self Love explores the fiction of identity and the reality of the body. Performed at The Arches, New Now festival in Amsterdam and Basel, and Buzzcut 2016.

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OPEN BODIES RESIDENCY 2018

A project by
Despina
The Fruitmarket Gallery

Support
British Council
Creative Scotland

Project Conception & Coordenation
Consuelo Bassanesi
Iain Morrison

Communications, Production & Documentation
Frederico Pellachin

Curatorial Support
Guilherme Altmayer
Raphael Fonseca

Financial & Legal Management
Clarice Corrêa

Workshop – Sound/Body/Space (with artist Henry McPherson)

SUBSCRIPTIONS CLOSED!

Despina resident artist, Henry McPherson, seeks local artists who are interested in working with sound to participate in a free sound workshop. Henry is a Scotland-based artist and musician who works with collages of found sounds, music and improvisation, space, and the body. He is currently on a residency with Despina through the Open Bodies Residency (Residência Corpos Abertos), and he is exploring the idea of mapping the city of Rio through recorded sounds. During the residency, Henry is documenting sounds in locations of importance to the queer/LGBTQ(+) community, building a series of sound-walks, and investigating how our bodies relate to the sounds around us.

Henry is seeking between 1 and 5 local artists who have an interest in working with sound, the body, and engaging with new and different ways of listening, to take part in a small group-workshop on Thursday 20^th September. The workshop will feature a short group discussion, followed by exercises in listening to the body, the room, and surroundings in Despina (R. do Senado, 271) and in nearby Campo de Santana (Praça da República). At the end of the session there will be a short discussion and feedback. Participants are advised to wear comfortable clothing, and are welcome to bring musical instruments if they choose. The workshop will take place between 12pm and 4pm, and will be conducted in English with Portuguese translation.

This workshop is free of charge and places are limited!

How to apply

Send us an email to cursos@despina.org with the subject “Sound/Body/Space” + name + contact phone number.

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About the artist

Henry McPherson is an inter-media artist based in Glasgow, Scotland. His practice in composition, improvisation and performance is embedded in mixed-media score-production, devised performance, present-time composition, cross and inter-disciplinary practice, through which he explores personal and collective identities, musical and otherwise performative traditions. Henry’s work centres around the body-mind, score-object as mediator, the subject of invocation, impulse-led generation, queer and sustainable art practices, and meanings of ownership in collectively-generated improvisation. He is a founding member of Glasgow’s mixed-arts collective EAST (Experimental Artists Social Theatre), KUI piano duo, and the chamber trio Savage Parade. In recent years, Henry has collaborated with groups and individuals such as the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Scotland, Martyn Brabbins, RedNote ensemble, The Glasgow New Music Expedition, Garth Knox, Zilan Liao and Germany’s Ensemble Modern. He is a graduate of the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland composition dept., and is an award holder of the Dinah Wolfe Memorial Prize for Composition (2014); Scottish Opera’s Opera Sparks Competition (2016); the Patron’s Prize for Composition (2017); the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra Composition Club Prize (2017); the Harriet Cohen Memorial Music Award (2018); and was a nominee for the inaugural Scottish Awards for New Music (2017). He has been awarded residencies at the Banff Centre for the Arts and Creativiy (CA, Alberta, The Creative Gesture: Collective Composition Lab for Music and Dance), Despina (Open Bodies Residency, Brazil, Rio de Janeiro, with the Fruitmarket Gallery Edinburgh) and Skammdegi Residency and Festival (IS, Olafsfjördur).

About Open Bodies Residency (Residência Corpos Abertos)

Open Bodies Residency (Residência Corpos Abertos) is a programme designed jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery, with support from the British Council and Creative Scotland. It seeks Brazilian and Scottish-based artists who make performance and whose work is interested in gender and/or sexuality. The programme is in two parts. The residency will take place at Despina in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in September 2018. The selected artists will participate in a range of cross-cultural activities such as public talks, sharing of work events, studio visits and exhibition tours. Part two of the programme sees the Scottish artists participate in the Open Out programme at The Fruitmarket Gallery in Edinburgh in February 2019 (dates tbc between 11–24 Feb). The artists will propose workshops and lead a programme event. The four selected artists who will be attending this year’s programme at Despina are: Miro Spinelli (Brazil), Vinícius Pinto Rosa (Brazil), Henry McPherson (Scotland) and Stephanie Black-Daniels (Scotland). They will take over Despina’s residency studios to develop their projects and participate in a series of events and activities, including public talks and workshops.

Image credit
Photo: Nicolas Cotienne
(Image feat. Henry McPherson, right; Maria Donohue, centre)
METRIC, Glasgow 2018
Courtesy of the artist

Workshop – Performing women in the city (with artist Stephanie Black-Daniels)

SUBSCRIPTIONS CLOSED!

Despina resident artist, Stephanie Black-Daniels, seeks up to three female-identifying artists to performatively collaborate with, in and around the city of Rio de Janeiro.

Stephanie is an artist from Scotland who works with performance. She is currently on a residency with Despina through the Open Bodies Residency (Residência Corpos Abertos). While on this residency she is exploring the relationship of the body and gender politics in response to the city. She wishes to explore the complexity of the city and its socio-political context by working directly with the women of the city for “Performing women in the city” (‘Performando mulheres da cidade’).

Stephanie would like to link up with other female-identifying Rio-based artists. She is particularly interested in those who wish to explore place, identity, sexuality and its complexities with the city through day-long performative activities. This may include activities, such as: gesture, text, costume, video and photography.

Stephanie will work with participating artists on a one-to-one basis through a series of day-long workshops. Activities will be determined by Stephanie in advance and shaped collaboratively with the artists during the workshop.

Both Stephanie and the participating artists will work together to document the day, exchanging ideas and outcomes. Please note that outcomes from the day may be shared by Stephanie at a later date in Brazil and or/Scotland.

Stephanie is seeking artists who would like to respond to one of the following three strands:

Rituals and wildness – Using physicality to map and navigate the city and break away from ‘normalised’ interaction and gender roles
Identity and surface – Using object and clothing to mark and trace the body in relation to the city and its history
Rhythm and sexuality – Using the voice, sounds and text to build and strengthen a dialogue with the city responding to current socio-cultural ‘norms’

Key information for participating artists

Workshops will be scheduled between Friday 14th September and Friday 21st September. Artists must indicate which date they would be available to carry out the workshop. Workshops will run from 11 am to 6 pm.

This workshop is free of charge and places are limited! Only 3 artists will be selected.

Workshop schedule and fee

The day will begin with a discussion of the day’s activities at Despina. This will be followed by a site-specific performative exploration and performance moments. It will conclude with documentation, discussion and feedback. We are able to pay 100 Brazilian Reais for participating in the workshop and performance exchange. Participants will also be provided with lunch. This project is able to include children under your care, or pay for one day’s childcare. If you require this support, please identify this in your application.

How to apply

Using the email subject: ‘Performando mulheres da cidade’, write to cursos@despina.org with the following information by 5 pm on Wednesday 12th September:

your name, email address, website and social media
whether you speak English, Brazilian portuguese, or both
what dates you would be able to attend a workshop between 14th – 21st September
name two locations in the city that you would like to carry out a workshop exploration
state which of the three strands you would like to respond to
a short paragraph about your interest in the project and discussing your practice

About the artist

Stephanie is a Scottish artist making performance within the field of visual art. She has been working nationally and internationally since 2010 and is a graduate of the Glasgow School of Art. Her work is primarily concerned with gender and sexuality, looking closely at current socio-cultural and political issues. Stephanie’s practice situates between the sculptural and choreographic. She combines performance with a range of media and forms to explore the body as a tool of measurement, questioning notions around ‘self’ and ‘the other’, and creating temporal experiences for audiences through her live, recorded, drawing, image and sound-based scores.

About Open Bodies Residency / Residência Corpos Abertos

Image credit
Stephanie Black-Daniels
“Image 36”, Shrouded series, 2018
Cortesy of the artist

Public talk with artists in residence – Open Bodies Residency / Residência Corpos Abertos 2018

Tuesday, 11.09.2018

Come along next Tuesday (11), at 7 pm, for a public talk which will bring together artists Miro Spinelli (RJ, Brazil); Vinicius Pinto Rosa (RJ, Brazil), Henry McPherson (Scotland, UK) and Stephanie Black-Daniels (Scotland, UK).

Selected for the Open Bodies Residency 2018 – a programme conceived jointly by Despina and The Fruitmarket Gallery, with the support from the British Council and Creative Scotland -, the four artists are already working in their projects in our art studios. At the end of September, a special event will take place at Despina showing the results of this process.

INFO
Talk with artists participating in the Open Bodies Residency / Residência Corpos Abertos 2018
When: Tuesday, 11.09, 7 pm
Where: Despina (Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro).
Free admission

ABOUT THE ARTISTS

Cine Clube Despina presents: “13th”

Friday, 22.06.2018

Art and Activism in Latin America – year III

For this edition of Cine Clube Despina, we are pleased to invite everybody for a special screening of the film “13th“, an acclaimed documentary by the American director Ava DuVernay, in which scholars, activists and other experts seek to analyze the path that has been building forms of contemporary slavery in the United States, articulated with public security programs and economic circuits.

The exhibition of this film is an invitation to think about the relations of the North American context with the Brazilian current scenario. After the screening, artists and researchers Luciane Ramos (Revista Omenelick 2º Ato) and Renata Codagan (Universidade das Quebradas) will talk to public about the film and other topics related.

This event is part of the activities that Brazilian artist Ana Lira is developing for her residency at Despina.

Come along from 6:30 on! Free admission.

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ABOUT THE FILM

13th is a 2016 American documentary by director Ava DuVernay. The film explores the “intersection of race, justice, and mass incarceration in the United States; it is titled after the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution, which freed the slaves and prohibited slavery, with the exception of slavery as punishment for a crime. DuVernay contends that slavery has been perpetuated in practices since the end of the American Civil War through such actions as criminalizing behavior and enabling police to arrest poor freedmen and force them to work for the state under convict leasing; suppression of African Americans by disenfranchisement, lynchings and Jim Crow; politicians declaring a war on drugs that weigh more heavily on minority communities and, by the late 20th century, mass incarceration of people of color in the United States. She examines the prison-industrial complex and the emerging detention-industrial complex, demonstrating how much money is being made by corporations from such incarcerations. (Source: Wikipedia)

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ABOUT THE GUESTS

LUCIANE RAMOS is an anthropologist, dancer, researcher, project manager at Acervo África (SP) and one of the editorial staff of magazine Omenelick 2º Ato. PhD in Arts of the Scene, holds a master degree in anthropology from UNICAMP. Works in the fields of arts, African studies and education.

RENATA CODAGAN is an art educator, has been a member of the Tear Arts Institute team since 1996, where she coordinates the reading mediation projects. She is one of coordinator of Universidade das Quebradas / UFRJ. Also provides advice to institutions and social projects that work with education, art and culture.

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To learn more about Art and Activim in Latin America – year III, click here.

Workshop – Queer Retrofuturism

Thursday, 21.06.2018

SUBSCRIPTIONS CLOSED!

Art and Activism in Latin America – year III (2018)

Led by: Felipe Rivas San Martín

This workshop is proposed as a journey through time, as a collective forum of discussion and affective-political activation around the temporality of sexual dissent and gender activism. During the workshop, the main debates on sexual dissent and queer theory will be discussed alongside memories of queerness that cross the personal biography (micro) and the social context (macro), as well as the sexual past of resistance in Latin-American – more visible today thanks to the boom of art archives. This workshop serves as a reflection on activism as a human activity that inhabits the urgency of the present, and that is also affected by the past and by a possible future. Some of the topics that are going to be discussed: do sexual and gender dissent have a future? Or: Is the future heterosexual? Will the future be queer, a queer utopia or a political-sexual dystopia? From this context, the workshop proposes a retrofuturist methodology based on the review of past archives and current events. The workshop invites all participants to produce materials (text and images) in order to project domination, fights, conquests and resistances of sexual dissidents in the future.

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Info
What: Workshop – “Queer Retrofuturim” (Free)
Led by: Felipe Rivas San Martín
Where: Despina (Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro)
When: Thursday, 21 june
Time: 6:30 pm – 10 pm

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Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin

This workshop was part of the third edition of Despina’s Art and Activism in Latin America project, with the support from the Prince Claus Fund. For more information, click here.

Dissenso e Destruição

Ana Lira, Danitza Luna e Felipe Rivas San Martín

14.06.2018 - 25.06.2018

Arte e Ativismo na América Latina – ano III (2018)

In this third year of the programme Art and Activism in Latin America, we propose to think action strategies as political tools, able to shake hegemonic discourses, most often seen as unshakable. Practices that originate from discomfort and disagreement zones, emerging in face of urgency to conjoin in the fight against institutionalized violence and social injustice – dissent.

These discontents evolve through aesthetic and political actions of and contestation, articulating the destructuring of dominance through gestures that reconstruct perception, opening up to new forms of political subjectivation – destruction.

In this gathering of latin american artists, it becomes evident how much we share social emergencies, beyond specific contexts, and the abyss between among our neighbour countries, considering the tiny interlocution that we establish between us. We therefore celebrate the encounter of Ana Lira (Brasil), Danitza Luna (Bolívia) and Felipe Rivas San Martín (Chile), made possible in this space and time.

These three artists and activists, whose practices collaborate in the dillution of the frontiers between art and activism, configurate today more than an exhibition, but a web where diverse fronts of articulations entangle – developing network action strategies by means of collective researches.

Ana Lira asks: why do we activate politics mechanisms from a militarized language? The artist, who decides that she will no longer put herself in the target of police during her collective actions, proposes a detachment from belic practices, and the approach to invisibility as a place of articulation. Through collective agencying, flag and billboard productions and street interventions, the artist proposes a reflection on how much verbal demilitarization exercises and the maintenance of caring networks, can establish new means for political action.

The anarchist-feminist bolivian movement Mujeres Creando, here represented by Danitza Luna, proposes the graffiti “Nossa vingança é sermos felizes” (Our revenge is to be happy) as methodology for political activation of the symbolic field. Through a series of meetings with women for creative practices, named “Gráficas Feministas” (Feminist Graphic Press), this process produces confluences between diverse confrontations of chauvinism. The participants – many without prior experience with graphic production – expressed feelings of revolt through drawings and writings which resulted in 75 posters, united in a set of prints shared among the participants, and distributed free of charge.

Meanwhile, Felipe Rivas San Martin presents results of his research “Homosexual Data”, on the construction of the homossexual individual across time and of biommetrical data starting from two ‘studies’. The first, from 1938, would identify homossexuals (frequenters of the Tiradentes Square, at Centro da Cidade of Rio de Janeiro) from the triangular form of it’s pubian hair cluster, and the other, from 2017, via algorythms of facial recognition. Eighty years span and in this archive revision of past and present, the chilean artist reports the persistent outline and control of the homossexual body, inviting us to create our own (transviated) archive.

What is configurated here, through the convergence of these multiple discursive practices, is a platform that invites other views and voices to action and conversation, in search of sharing paths of convergence and dissonance that our diverse experiences have in common.

Guilherme Altmayer
curator

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To learn more about the artists and Art and Activim in Latin America – year III, click here.

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PICTURES GALLERY (horizontal scrolling)
Photos: Denise Adams e Frederico Pellachin

Workshop – “Nuestra venganza es ser felices”

7 meetings between May and June

SUBSCRIPTIONS CLOSED!

Art and Activism in Latin America – year III

Led by: Danitza Luna

“Nuestra venganza es ser felices” (Our vengeance is to be happy) is a graphic feminist workshop for all women – of all forms and colour, occupations and professions, of all imaginable and unimaginable origins, creative and angry, silent and noisy. Women in state of irreversible and irrepressible rebellion. “Nuestra venganza es ser felices” is an in grafiti by the Bolivian feminist movement “Mujeres Creando” – which also acts as synthesis of a method, a fight and resistance strategy. During the workshop, the participants worked only with pencil and paper in a process that was more political than artistic, in which the graphic results were compiled in a zine format publication, launched in the opening of the exhibition “Dissent and Destruction”.

Schedule of meetings

Saturday- 19 May (3 – 6 pm)

Tuesday – 22 May (6 – 9 pm)

Thursday – 24 May (3 – 6 pm)

Saturday – 26 May (3 – 6 pm)

Tuesday – 29 May (6 – 9 pm)

Tuesday – 5 June (6 – 9 pm)

Thursday – 7 June (3 – 6 pm)

Important! The meetings are not continuous. You can join as many as you want.

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Info

What: Workshop – “Nuestra venganza es ser felices” (Free)
Led by: Danitza Luna
Where: Despina (Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro)
When: 7 meetings – schedule above

Credit of the image
Mujeres Creando

Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin

This workshop was part of the third edition of Despina’s Art and Activism in Latin America project, with the support from the Prince Claus Fund. For more information, click here.

Workshop – About an insurgent feeling

From 28.05 to 25.06.2018

SUBSCRIPTIONS CLOSED!

Art and Activism in Latin America, year III (2018)

Led by: Ana Lira

This study group of collective articulation served to mobilize discussions as well as discursive and symbolic material productions regarding collective and insurgent actions which we are experiencing in Brazil at the moment. Are there connections beyond a feeling of insurgence? These encounters included a series of activities – studies, discussions, experimentations and an open studio for the production of mechanisms of collective activation and artistic actions.

Info

What: Workshop – “About an insurgent feeling” (Free)
Led by: Ana Lira
Where: Despina (Rua do Senado, 271 – Centro)
When: Every Monday between 28 May e 25 June
Time: from 6 to 9 pm

Pictures Gallery (horizontal scrolling)
by Frederico Pellachin

This workshop was part of the third edition of Despina’s Art and Activism in Latin America project, with the support from the Prince Claus Fund. For more information, click here.