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A conversation about art, politics and the struggle for democracy in Brazil, Colombia and Haiti
Slought is pleased to announce "On the Militarization of Social Control," an artist talk and film screening about art, politics and the struggle for democracy in Brazil, Colombia and Haiti. The program will take place on Friday, November 4, 2016 from 5:30-7:30pm, and will feature artist Felipe Teixeira Gonçalves of the São Paulo-based art research and art group Frente 3 de Fevereiro in dialogue with scholar Jennifer S. Ponce de León. It is organized with the Social Justice / Global South working group at the University of Pennsylvania, with support from the Department of English's Latitudes and AmLit reading groups and Du Bois College House.
Teixera will discuss a series of artistic action-investigations carried out in Rio de Janeiro, Medellín and Port-au-Prince, as well as an upcoming documentary, that address the transnational traffic of methods and technologies of repression directed against the urban poor and the targeting of urban peripheries and slums as the objects of militarized intervention and occupation. Frente 3 de Fevereiro's 2010 documentary Arquitetura da Exclusão [Architecture of Exclusion] examined these phenomenon as they are manifest in Rio de Janeiro in the state's construction of walls around favelas and the introduction in 2008 of a new model of policing in which militarized police units permanently occupy favelas.
This model of policing seen in Rio developed from two important precedents: the military occupation of Comuna 13 in Medellín, Colombia and the Brazilian military operations carried out in the Bel Air and Cité Soleil neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. The Brazilian state has exported its technologies and methods of social control to Haiti, as it is leading the coordination and military command of the United Nations Mission for the Stabilization of Haiti (MINUSTAH), which is charged with repressing and disarming rebel groups located in the country's slums. Before going to Haiti for this purpose, Brazilian soldiers passed through the specialized militarized battalions of the Rio de Janeiro Military Police to be trained in engaging in combat in slums. Felipe Teixeira and Daniel Lima investigated these transnational connections by carrying out research and art projects in Medellín and Port-au-Prince. Their documentary, Emergency Exit 2015, which is currently in the works, will bring together their work in these cities and in Rio de Janeiro to map out forms of policing and social control being exercised against the urban poor in the 21st century.
Frente 3 de Fevereiro emerged out of a "movement of collectives" that was seen among young artists in São Paulo in the early 2000s. Artists who felt estranged from established cultural institutions and the commercial art circuit began producing their work in the streets, creating their own networks of socially engaged cultural producers, and working collectively to produce art and carry out social research. Frente officially formed and adopted its name in 2004 as a response to the police killing of an innocent black man, Flávio Sant'anna. This incident, which exemplified the racist character of the police violence carried out daily against black Brazilians, was the impetus for Frente to form as an art and research group identified by its focus on issues of racism and state violence.
One of Frente's earliest works, Zona de Ação (2004), included street interventions and a performance denouncing racist police violence that were sited in a São Paulo neighborhood where an especially deadly battalion of the military police is located. Frente soon began staging spectacular guerrilla interventions in soccer games, unfurling enormous banners in the stands that featured pointed and poetic phrases about racism and blackness in Brazil. A series of these interventions the group produced in 2005 aimed to re-frame and radicalize discussions about racism that, at the time, were garnering significant coverage in Brazil's mass media due to a high profile incident of racist harassment that had occurred at an international soccer match. Frente later took this interventionist strategy to the World Cup in Berlin. Working in collaboration with local anti-racist collectives, Frente developed a series of media and urban interventions that addressed the vulnerability of immigrants to racist violence by Neo-Nazi groups in the city.
In 2006 Frente began a trilogy of works titled Zumbi Somos Nós. The title, which means "We Are Zumbi," makes reference to a leader and defender of a major maroon settlement (quilombo) of the seventeenth century who stands as a symbol of anticolonial struggle, abolitionism, and the long history of Afro-Brazilian resistance. Frente produced a documentary of the same name title that was broadcast on national television, as well as the book Zumbi Somos Nós – A Cartography of Racism for the Urban Youth, which was distributed for free to community and cultural spaces. Their musical album Zumbi Somos Nós - Afronetic diaspora reflects the collective's musical fusion of traditional Afro-Brazilian music with the modern language of hip-hop, Afrobeat, and Latin American rhythms. This album is available for free download on the collective's website, www.frente3defevereiro.com.br