Long-term work (a lifetime project) is equivalent to working the soil. It demands checking how something planted is growing. It requires having the patience to fruit. As Lisl Ponger, Austrian artist and friend, once said, “Stay Calm, Be Brave, and Wait for the Signs!”

It took a while to embody the way we (Fer) wanted writing to happen. A sensation of delay was infected by an ideal conception of this practice. But a dissertation has the potential to be a space for experimentation, a place to compose a repertoire, a space for liberation through writing (bell hooks), and for sharing. We resolved to break with this sensation, this internalized (Eurocentric) ideal to meet certain standards of writing, that is responsible for continuing to invalidate creative works from the Souths, the peripheries, the borders. These hands started typing far-from-ideal writing, although some experiments revealed a new path. But taking a new course is challenging.

Two thoughts resonated in this kind of writing. The first is related to creative processes: “Poetry means risk,” stated the Brazilian poet Augusto de Campos. The second expresses a non-conforming question on the never-justifiable motives for violence against non-hegemonic bodies, and on a metaphorical level, symbolic killings. In the documentary Examined Life (2010), Judith Butler remarked, “How could it be that somebody’s style of walking could engender the desire to kill that person? To walk in a different way can be a dangerous thing.” The sensation of this walking-writing is similar to “coming out of the closet” (Eve K. Sedgwick). In both cases, there is a risk of being attacked by normopaths for being how we are.   

RESEARCHING :: ESCAPING MODE

There is a point where bodily memories and learning a methodology in practice entangle. 

Researching artistic archives to know… 

to know what has been done…

what has been done to face repressive regimes 

became a reason to visit different places and geographies. We (Fer) started following mail art network directories shared in the researched archives and documents. Those experiences were part of a fugitive plan (Fred Moten & Stefano Harney) to survive, to escape the preordained destiny of being (Gilles Deleuze & Félix Guattari), the normative fate, the pre-established familiar environment, the violence attached to it, and consequently, the absence of a feeling: feeling home. Carrying our world in our luggage turned out to be a profession. At a certain point it turned out to be a matter of persistence, endurance, and self-invention/renovation in a nomadic, precarious, and unstable way of life in an exile those vital researches mobilized. 

… “the existential action.”

We (Fer) decided to prioritize, to turn our attention to artistic interventions connecting the body and critical discourse, those performative experimentations that challenge social norms, artistic and activist impulses that took back public space in the face of repressive political regimes and the oppressive order of bodies in the Brazilian 1980s. The occupation of public space when it was seized, the subversion of gender roles and their compulsory sexuality, and the confrontation of moralistic good manners in the arts were some of the fields of action the Gang and participants of the Brazilian Porn Art Movement (PAM) were shaping together. Their poetic and artistic scripts were operating a choreopolitics (André Lepecki) against the political repression of two regimes: the Brazilian military dictatorship (1964-1985), and its moralistic and conservative heteronormativity.

This case has the potential to contribute to undermining, to making cracks in canonic historical accounts and, at the same time, it represents a sort of affirmative politics in the historiography of the arts.

The dissertation comprised social and literary analysis, a coming-out/hardcore theory that involves autoethnography, episodes of sexism, sexual liberation, post/porn/terrorism, experimental poetry, and countless signs of coloniality in a Brazil-abyss.

META-THESIS

We decide to write because something is not said. In our (Fer’s) case, this drive concerns a collective artistic and poetic formation, a piece of artistic and political memory that was lost. Research on the Brazilian Porn Art Movement and Latin American post/pornographies has been guided by affective connections, but also by the definite necessity of building a social and collective memory on the topic. Historiography then, meant the very attempt of re-constructing that temporality to contextualize, and to read the complexity of the time of action. Factual and contextual elements were essential in order to evaluate the potential of artistic practice. Therefore, we tried, by all means, to re-collect and recuperate crucial elements to activate those historical-artistic and activist practices.  

We aimed to show all the steps of the research process, conditions implied, strategies, instabilities, insecurities, privileges, and vulnerabilities. It was essential to assume our standpoint speech (Djamila Ribeiro) or locus of enunciation (Walter Mignolo) in order to highlight invisible social links. If for Hélène Cixous, “writing is a feminist strategy,” drag writing gives way to other genres, to empathy, and to escaping the cold, pure-brain, distant and detached masculine and impersonal forms of writing that claim to be scientific. 

In the age of performativity, literary transvestism affords the chance to be real in fiction, to anticipate that which is yet to come, to be that metamorphose ambulante [walking metamorphosis] of Raul Seixas’ song performed in the voice and body of the Brazilian singer Ney Matogrosso, and, as a reader, to be in the realm of interpretation and in.corpo.r.ação (action in the process of embodying fictions). 

The documents and speeches related to the Porn Art Movement (1980-1984) required editing, curating, and healing. It was even necessary to overcome the rejection of our voice, to self-examine our skin, bones, flesh, and muscles, and return to the conversations in a battle to confront the coloniality in the gaze, the normative conditioned manner of looking, feeling, and acting in a capitalistic society marked by colonialism, slavery, genocides. We have to fight against the all-too-easy tendency to disincarnate our body, devoid of singular desire/tesão, deconstructing the naturalness built by the system (Paul B. Preciado).

In this experimental research and writing, we brought together the intellectual contribution of a performative poetry guerrilla and the performative literature to show how their production enquired into, appropriated, and created languages taken to the limit, to articulate ephemeral collective forces and words capable of transmuting the condition of being in that moment of political transition to democracy. In this case, it was an articulation of the expanded art field and pornography as an action of political and aesthetic activism.

THE BODY-ARCHIVE

The understanding of the PAM proposal of that moment was updated while it trespassed this militant-mestizo-peripheral-androgynous-activist-academic-subaltern body. But identification is insufficient.  Definite and closed categories and identities produce invisibilities as well. They fail at mirroring the complexity of our being. Undoubtedly, choosing to be invisible and being rendered invisible are different, and in the same way, so are committing suicide and being suicided by society.

Writing proved to be a way of inhabiting this body-house, as the Brazilian artist Lygia Clark conceived it. It engendered a healing process, while recalling and rescuing memories of vulnerability—our scars. Our scars reflect this colonial land. We are beaten, and this society’s veil of common sense will try to convince us this happens through fault of our own. Complaining, persisting, struggling, or fighting for something different, will inevitably result in various forms of punishment.

Like a boomerang, unsolved her/stories and histories obey the law of eternal return. Each generation will probably have the opportunity to break the cycle of oppression, violence, dishonesty, and lack of ethics, at macro and micro-political levels. To the contrary, complicity-silence maintains the order of injustices and ingrains harmful patterns of behavior. 

The Brazilian singer Maria Bethânia voices a sacred warning: 

“[…] atente ao tempo

Não começa nem termina, é nunca, é sempre

[…] Fulmina o injusto, deixa nua a justiça”

[…] watch the time! // It does not start, or end, it is never, it is always // […]. It vanquishes the unjust, it exposes justice. 

Difference has been subjected to forms of spanking; humiliation; subordination to a provider, the father figure, the preacher, a superior, the state; to show how vulnerable and fragile we can (be made to) be. But we learn to resist, to endure, to be stronger, to perform a situation analysis, to wait for the right time to act and, ultimately, to overcome repressive forces. Until then, our revenge is to be happy, dragging, and embodying the mask of joy that fascists hate, cultivating joyful affections, and exploring the potency of a constant state of enthusiasm, or even euphoria. “Happiness is a hot weapon,” sang the Brazilian singer and composer Belchior.