07.12.2024
We have invited the Brazilian writer and translator to weave a narrative inspired by Patfudyda’s work. Their text accompanies our monthly projector, which is part of “dreaming together.” Their text offers a revisitation.
I think about movement. Movement directed towards something. About the movement of our bodies towards the end of the world as it was made known to us. This movement is a movement of escape since it collectively rearticulates new ways of inhabiting the otherwise world. Fugitivity: becoming ungovernable. It is not a simple escape, but a position of rejection. As Fred Moten and Stefano Harney point out: “fugitivity escapes even from fugitives.”In its fugitive choreographies, Ondas Utópicas explores the possibilities of reversing the ways in which bodies operate, seduce, escape and resist through the activation and accidental movements of the body-camera-space relational device, where the performers always move in flight from directionality without a destination, making use of adjacencies as a generative locus for the proposed rejection.
How to make a film without it being captured by the ghost of visibility?
Patfudyda, Legendary Ciara, Theuse Luz D’Pavuna, Preta Queen B Rull and Laxxota walk together, weaving an exercise that asks us the question: “Is striking a pose making a threat?” The girls’ journey takes place in the vicinity of the Inclusartiz Institute in Gamboa (Rio de Janeiro), interacting not only with the audience in the space, but also with us who attend the film-performance. In Black Gaze, Tina M. Campt notes: “A black gaze transforms spectators into witnesses and demands a confrontation. […] When we participate as active witnesses in this confrontation, the black gaze we encounter creates complex and contradictory forms of intimacy.”
How to make a film without it being captured by the ghost of visibility? I would like to think of Ondas Utópicas as a fantasy of effeminate violence in which the mere presence of girls in a public space causes a crisis while, in the words of Jota Mombaça, “resisting the interpellations and violent attacks of cis-heteronormativity.” When we get together, something escapes, something needs to escape…we are all destined to be together. The film produces a symptom of collectivity – when the prey unite, the predator sleeps hungry.
Ondas Utópicas values the complementarity between choreography and self-defense practices, because as Mombaaça points out, “self-defense is not only about hitting back, but also about perceiving one’s own limits and developing flight tactics for when fleeing is necessary.” Redistributing violence is a “practical demand,” since diluting it is urgent. It is about assuming that place that is found in the shadows of public space, disconfiguring its relationships, “not as a people, but as a plague: at the very heart of the world, and against it.”
The work is always alive, at stake. Ondas Utópicas is a black studio, a utopia around which we can gather and plot new possibilities, since making art in Brazil today is no longer a question of will but of strategy. In the words of Patfudyda, “for some of us, this country has always been a battlefield.” For some of us, it was always a utopia. Repetition is important, because differences that allow us to expand and stress meanings are articulated around repetition.
It is necessary to understand and learn about the production mechanisms of utopias and their social function. For Felwine Sarr, utopias do not deliver us to a sweet dream, but rather serve as instruments for thinking about configurations of the possible and the spaces of the real that can be reached through thought and action. Jose Esteban Muñoz highlights the queer dimension of utopias by arguing that “the future is in the domain of queerness… Queerness is also performative, because it is not only a being, but also a doing towards and for the future. Queerness is essentially about rejecting the here and now and insisting on the potentiality or concrete possibility of a new world.”
In a way, Ondas Utópicas is also an exercise in historiography – it is a record of the conditions of possibility of this time. So the classic question “what can a body do?” reappears. In Ondas Utópicas, the body can do everything, because everything is about the body. What would become of cities if they were all occupied by thousands of us? We’re about to find out.
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07.12.2024
Reviews
viníciux da silva
We have invited the Brazilian writer and translator to weave a narrative inspired by Patfudyda’s work. Their text accompanies our monthly projector, which is part of “dreaming together.” Their text offers a revisitation.
06.12.2024
Projector
Wallace Ferreira [patfudyda]
”Soñar juntxs” , think about choreographies that allow us to cross public space, be together, be “us.” We invited Patfudyda for our spotlight, while viniciux da silva writes about the piece that will accompany this year’s close.
28.11.2024
Opinion
Christina Sharpe
Witnessing the unbearable
19.11.2024
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