insurgent women

Glauco Rodrigues, 'Partial View of Guanabara Bay', 1981
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By ANNATERESS FABRIS & MANUFACTURING MARIAROSARIA*

Comment on the film “Ana. Untitled” directed by Lúcia Murat

At Pinacoteca de São Paulo, a young woman is walking through the exhibition Radical women: Latin American art, 1960-1985, alone or in the rare company of another older woman. It pauses in front of some unidentified works (title and authorship labels are not highlighted), but the gap can be filled by consulting the exhibition catalog, held in the second half of 2018. The woman clumsily emulates the sensual female mouth of film in 16mm/35mm eat me (1975), by Lygia Pape, whose language will begin to reveal itself as scissors; her gaze focuses on three portraits of maids from the series the servitude(1976-1989), by Panamanian Sandra Eleta; America, I do not invoke your name in vain (1970), by Chilean painter Gracia Barrios; four engravings by the Argentine Margarita Paksa from the series out-of-focus situations (1966) and battle diagrams (1972-1976); one of the reproductions of the action The penis as a working tool (1982), by the Mexican María Bustamante.

Interspersed with these works, there are flashes of the woman in a theater dressing room and in a dramatic reading of letters, during which it is stated that “fiction can contain more truths than facts”, as noted by Virginia Wolf in A roof of your own (1929)[1] In the correspondence between women artists from Latin America mentioned by the actress, which would be archived at the University of Bogotá, the name of a certain Ana sometimes appears. The film does not provide further data, but the end credits and paratextual material inform that the direct reference is a process-piece, There is more future than past (2017), created and performed by Clarisse Zarvos, Mariana Barcelos and Daniele Avila Small, who directed it.

The reading of letters exchanged between Latin American artists, often forgotten by official historiography, led to reflection on our lack of knowledge of the subject, in a staging in which fiction and reality, performance and exposition of one's own feelings, external references and personal opinions were shuffled and intertwined. complemented to give life to "a fiction documentary”, as the subtitle read.

The visit to the Pinacoteca continues with a quick visit to an example of mail art, Family group, Reconstruction of the myth (1980), by Argentinian Graciela Gutiérrez Marx; per It's what's left (1974), from the series Photopoemation by Anna Maria Maiolino, a sequence of three photos in which the artist simulates cutting her own nose, tongue and piercing her eyes with scissors; with a more restrained fruition – on the part of the actress and her companion, the filmmaker Lúcia Murat – of endless tape (1978), in which the Chilean Luz Donoso wondered about the whereabouts of her countrymen after the 1973 coup, which triggers, in the film, a sequence of photos of missing Brazilian militants; with the appreciation of the record of the performance They shouted at me black (1978), by the Peruvian Victoria Santa Cruz, until the camera focused on a work from 1968, untitled, by Ana, simply Ana, with no last name.

It is a series of six black and white photos, organized in two overlapping horizontal rows, in which a woman gradually assumes her Latin American condition and her blackness – leaving vassalage behind (the first two poses refer to Sandra Eleta’s maids). ) and forced whitening –, as in Victoria Santa Cruz’s rhythmic poem, in which the initial doubt about one’s own condition – “¿Soy Chance Negra?” – becomes the final statement: “¡Negra soy!”.[2] A statement taken up again in two photographs, as we will see later.

The photographic panel in which Ana casts a critical eye on her own appearance is not unrelated to photo-performance Tina America (1976), present at the Pinacoteca exhibition. Using the portrait of identity as a model, Regina Vater parodies an article in which the magazine Veja (n. 355, June 25, 1975), in line with the UN's “Year of the Woman”, sought to characterize the new female types. Displaying different hairstyles, sometimes wearing glasses, the artist represents herself in different poses – uninhibited, mysterious, resigned, sulking, smiling, seductive –, in a demonstration of the impossibility of enclosing an identity in a classification grid.

The work Untitled still maintains links with the first series of “auto-photos” by Transformations (1976), by Gretta, a name unjustly forgotten in the 2018 exhibition. In them, the artist plays several roles – intellectual, naive, anguished – and reveals her own discomfort through a hint of a smile or expressions of despair, that signal a questioning of subjectivity itself. The arrangement of portraits of the same person in a grid, in which the variety of poses can give the idea of ​​a temporal unfolding, characterizes another work presented in the aforementioned exhibition. Its about The normal (I want to make love) (1978), in which the Mexican Mónica Mayer exposes sexual fantasies and breaks down taboos with the enunciation of the partners she would like to have or a place where she could be seen by many or, even, a circumstance that challenges the myth of virginity. The works by Regina Vater, Gretta and Mónica Mayer recall the anachronistic character that Lúcia Murat gives to Ana's action, as this type of format and questioning of identity dates from the following decade.

And from that point on, after the film was nominated – A-N-A. Untitled – begins the search for this enigmatic artist, undertaken by actress Stela (Stella Rabello), on a journey into Latin America. Certain that in this quest she will find her generation, filmmaker Lúcia Murat decides to accompany her – with a small team, made up of director of photography Léo Bittencourt and sound technician Andressa Clain Neves – towards Cuba, Argentina, Mexico and Chile, the main countries through which Brazilian exiles wandered.

A letter from Antonia Eiríz to Feliza (Bursztyn?), dated March 15, 1968, with references to Ana, whom he met in Argentina, leads to the first stage of the trip, Havana. In one of the rooms of the National Museum of Fine Arts, the guide defines the art of Eiríz in the 1960s as “grotesque expressionism”, a time when Soviet realism predominated on the island. Restrained by the regime, the artist dedicates herself to works in papier-mâché, which brings her closer to works with disposable objects made by the impetuous Brazilian. The owner of an engraving studio, a friend of Antonia, shows Stela a box with photos about a ritualistic dance by the Brazilian woman in Buenos Aires.

For Stela, Ana finally has a face, the same as in the untitled 1968 work, a face that the public will recognize a little later on, when the young black woman appears with the turban and white Candomblé clothing, and the images of the Argentine performance gain animation, in a sequence of photos that dialogue with some of Mário Cravo Neto on the same theme: candomblé (1999) andIn the land under my feet (2003), clicked in Salvador.

From Havana the team flies to Buenos Aires. A missive addressed to Lea [Lublin?] on December 6, 1968 (that is, a week before the enactment of Institutional Act No. group Culture 1968[3], which rebelled against the traditional artistic circuit, with the same vigor with which María Luisa Bemberg renewed cinema. Ana, who, at the age of nineteen, became involved in this environment, reappears in the film in a new staging of the performance My son, by Lea Lublin. Invited to the May 1968 Salon, the Argentine artist transformed a room at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris into a personal retreat, where she exhibited herself with Nicholas, her seven-month-old baby, installed in a crib, feeding him, changing his diapers , playing and talking to him, that is, clearly stating her feminine condition. Ana's repetition of the action leads to the question whether this would have been possible or if she would have ended up barred, for being mistaken for a nanny.

In a country little used to feminism, it was difficult for women to break with stereotyped models and patterns of behavior. María Luisa Bemberg (one of the founders of Argentine Feminist Union,), however, convinced of her ideas, linked her art to the issue of her sex. The short film that was part of the 2018 show, The world of women (1972)[4], a caustic and even cruel work in relation to the traditional feminine universe, has some sequences mentioned in the film by Lúcia Murat. Among them, the final one, in which over a dolled-up woman's face, trapped behind a fence, a voice over female narrates the happy end of Cinderella: taken to the castle, she and the prince got married and were very happy. In contrast to the women practically transformed into shop mannequins, Ana appears irreverent in a black and white film, smoking while her hair is fixed. blackpower, offering itself to the camera that photographs it, characterized as in the last image of the series Untitled, of his authorship, in one of the many shuffles that the film provokes.

Ana has already left cinema to dedicate herself to the visual arts, which is why her next work is a performance in which she paints her entire body red, interspersed with a report on Argentine politics in the second half of the 1960s and its consequences for the artist. Brazilian.[5] Kidnapped by a group of boys who printed Nazi symbols on her skin, the young black woman will transform the wounds into an artistic gesture. This event is a remembrance of the case of the communist militant Soledad Barrett, who in Uruguay, at the age of seventeen, was kidnapped by the neo-Nazi commando. The Savages and branded with swastika crosses for refusing to shout slogans exalting Hitler and against the Cuban Revolution. A long sequence of a manifestation of the Mothers of La Plaza de Mayo, these days, serves as a reminder that the great wound, opened in the chest of the Argentine nation on March 24, 1976, has not yet healed, creating yet another time lag within the film.

In a letter, Kati [Horna?] informs that Ana intends to go to Mexico and that Victoria [Santa Cruz?] is fixing things. And in another correspondence exchanged with Lygia Pape (December 28, 1969), the two artists manifested mutual esteem: if the Brazilian woman appreciated fear dolls (1939), Horna admired Divider (1968) and the courage of Maria Bonomi for joining the group of artists that boycotted the tenth edition of the Bienal de São Paulo, this being one of several pieces of information that are completely loose within the film.

As expected, the famous Blue House by Frida Khalo, turned into a museum in 1958, to honor her, is soon focused. Within the chronological cut of the film and the exhibition on which it was based, the mention of the name of the Mexican artist is extemporaneous, even more so as it was made: just to state that, in her time, she was invisible, being known abroad as Madame Rivera, that is, because of her husband, the muralist Diego Rivera. The two pieces of information deserve repairs, since, in 1938, André Breton dedicated the text “Frida Khalo de Rivera” to her, which leads to the assumption that this was how she presented herself. Furthermore, that same year, the artist held her first solo exhibition at the Levy Gallery in New York; in 1939, it was the turn of his show at the Renau et Colle Gallery, in Paris; and, the following year, alongside other great names in the avant-garde, she participated in the International Exhibition of Surrealism, at the Mexican Art Gallery – three events under the auspices of Breton.

It would have been much more interesting, in the wake of Whitney Chadwick, to remember her as one of the modern artists adept at self-knowledge of her own body, portrayed free of strictly masculine parameters, that is, no longer as an object of man's visual pleasure. In a work like the broken column (1944), Frida opened up the duality that, when self-portraiting, she established between the external evidence, normally offered to the observer, and the intimate perception of her own vulnerability, revealed by the observer.

As in Argentina, in Mexico there is also a long digression on a violent event that marked the recent history of that country: the massacre of about three hundred students in the Tlatelolco stadium (October 24, 1968), when the armed forces shot civilians who were protesting against the holding of the Olympic Games, which, despite the bloodshed, were started ten days later. During her stay in Mexico, after the events mentioned above, Ana performs two other bodily actions. In the second, the gesture of writing the phrases “They yelled at me black"and "Black si. black soy” in two photos that show her “laced” back, as if she had been whipped, could be close to the video Trademark (1975). In it, Letícia Parente embroiders the phrase “Made in Brasil” on the sole of her left foot, in reference to the torture practiced in the basements of the dictatorship and, possibly, also to the challenges faced by women in a patriarchal and sexist country.

In the first, more impressive, the Brazilian reenacts to venus (1981-1982) – one of the portraits of Lourdes Grobet that make up the series the double fight –, characterized by a documentary bias. This choice allows highlighting the female issue metaphorized in the use of the mask, which refers both to the anonymity of domestic work – in the words of Karen Cordero Reiman – and to the need to camouflage oneself in the performance of a traditionally male activity, as stated by one of the interviewees. by Lucia Murat. In this performance, there is an intertwined dialogue between several artists, because when Ana cuts the mask that alludes to the work of Lourdes Grobet, she does so with scissors, pointing to the aforementioned Photopoemation by Anna Maria Maiolino; removing the first face reveals a tin mask, which, once removed, reveals Ana's tongue, to which an open pair of scissors is tied with a string, an image that evokes the aforementioned film by Lygia Pape. According to Grada Kilomba, the mask was imposed on African slaves to prevent them from eating sugar cane or cocoa in their toil, although its primary function was to “implement a sense of muteness and fear, since the mouth was a place of silencing and torture”.[6] In this sense, the progressive unmasking of Ana shows how much her identity was hidden, silenced, mutilated.

As we can see, an essentially performance artist, Ana uses her own body in different ways. If, at first, this is an expressive material that allows her to recover a religious ritual and, therefore, affirm her own origins, or check the degree of acceptance of a black woman in a racist society, then, she starts to stage actions guided for the purpose of contesting political power and its burden of violence and repression. It is significant that, always in Argentina, she paints herself red to evoke the sacrifice of her people and, soon after, puts a crown on her head to symbolize an act of affirmation of her own ethnicity and resistance.

Still in that country, there is an action in which the violence suffered, visible in the marks resulting from the kidnapping and aggression, becomes a stylized geometric design evoking the many massacres of indigenous peoples that punctuate the history of Latin America. The culminating moment of this political use of the body will occur in Chile, when Ana uses an organic matter such as earth, transforming it into a paste with which she smears herself to leave the imprint of a concrete existence on a wall. In this sense, the young artist's action could be approximated to that of Nelbia Romero, who, in some works from the 1970s and 1980s, made her own body a metaphor for political repression. It is what it demonstrates Untitled (1983), in which the Uruguayan artist rubbed ink on her face to leave her own mark on the paper applied to it. The blots that cover the lower part of the serigraphy transform the face into a fragment, as only the eyes and forehead remain, while the number 01592, printed vertically in red, refers to the system used to classify prisoners, as Andrea Giunta clarifies. Returning to the Brazilian’s work, the phrase “Create popular power to stop fascism"[7] writing on the wall reinforces the idea that this performance is pregnant with a political charge, which calls into question institutional power and its control over bodies, often exercised in the form of disappearances.

Having bonded with an acting student, Ana travels with Silvia to her homeland: Chile. Seen from the window of an airplane, the snowy peaks of the Andes lead one to think that this must have been the first sight of many Brazilians, who, fleeing political persecution, took refuge in that country that welcomed them until the fall of the Salvador Allende government. .[8] And interspersed with images of the Palace of La Moneda today, images of the past appear on the screen, in black and white, with planes streaking across the sky of Santiago, the government headquarters being bombed, the building in flames, the ruins, the military , the alleged last photo of Allende[9], number 80 on Rua Morandé where her lifeless body was removed – in a disturbing contrast between two temporalities, which refers to The Persistence of Memory (2014), series of photomontages by Andrés Cruzat.

In Santiago, we follow in the footsteps of Estela and Lúcia on their walk to the Mapocho river, whose retaining walls between the Independencia and Recoleta bridges were painted by members of the Ramona Parra Brigades during election campaigns in the 1960s. Interested in muralist practice, artists such as Luz Donoso, remembered in the film, but also Carmen Johnson, Hernan Meschi and Pedro Millar, saw themselves as agents of social change and promoters of Socialism in their country. Remains of these murals came to light thanks to a large river flood in June 1979, which washed away the successive layers of paint with which the military dictatorship had covered them. It is linked to the fluvial surroundings also an intervention of the Art Actions Collective (EACH): in a period record, we see four vertical strips being hung from a bridge – the first two, with the letters “N” and “O”, respectively; the third, with the “+” symbol; the fourth, with the stamp of a revolver –, to ask for an end to the violence. Made up of sociologist Fernando Balcells, writer Diamela Eltit, poet Raúl Zurita and visual artists Juan Castillo and Lotty Rosenfeld (whose work A mile of crosses on the pavement, captured on video in 1979, was exhibited at the São Paulo fair), the collective, after the impact of the first moment of repression, decided to reconquer the streets, interested in the integration between artistic work and social action.

Perhaps more daring was the action ¡Ay Sudamerica!, when six small planes dropped 400.000 leaflets over Santiago, on July 12, 1981. It was a “social sculpture”, as CADA called it, since it involved art, politics and society. The gesture referred to the bombing of the Palace of La Moneda on September 11, 1973, but with another meaning, as it invited the public to establish a new concept of art beyond traditional limits, an art integrated into public life. Although the chronology of Ana's travels in Latin America is fluid, in all probability she could not have joined either the Brigades or the CADA, which is why, in addition to her aforementioned performance, her stay in Chile is linked to her work at Grupo Manos created in 1973 by Ilo Krugli[10], for the assembly of the children's animation show Story of a boat, a hymn to freedom.

Together with Estela, we crossed the gates of the National Stadium, where Ana and Silvia were tortured, where Ana was forced to torture Silvia, where Silvia died under torture, where Ilo Krugli was detained but managed to escape a fierce fate, which The owner of the chords and the voice that hover over the beginning of this part of the film, performed in what was then Estadio Chile, another detention center, which today bears his name, Estadio Victor Jara, has escaped.[11] In the first stadium, the photographs of the Red Cross immortalized the suffering and anguish of the 20.000 prisoners from thirty-eight countries – mainly Uruguay, Brazil, Argentina and Bolivia –, who were there for two months at the mercy of the arbitrary acts of the military. locals, Argentineans, but also Uruguayans and Brazilians, present on the spot to interrogate them and teach torture methods.

One of the most touching moments of this visit occurs when, in front of a panel of women who have passed through the detention center, the actress seems to leave the role and be herself, giving vent to an emotion that left her speechless, a deeper emotion. , perhaps because the victims were women, as the director asks. The last image of Chile is the fleeting apparition of a blue door whose lower part is written: “Here they tortured my son”. Although not named in the film, it is Villa Grimaldi, famous for the abuse practiced there, a place easily identifiable by the checkered tile in black and white of its hall, which the detainees were able to see despite entering it blindfolded.

Based on information obtained in Santiago, the team travels to Dom Pedrito, a small rural center in Rio Grande do Sul, the artist's place of origin, behind her father's rubber shop. During the trip, Léo asks Estela if she thinks Ana is alive, but the actress does not answer. This question is reminiscent of others, made in Havana, when Léo asks if the artist would have chosen an anonymous life and when Lúcia, Estela and Andressa wonder why the young Brazilian woman would have abandoned art and what her whereabouts are: prison, clandestinity, asylum ? Through someone who lived with Ana, we learn about her fears (she feared they were after her) and the hope of seeing her art recognized.

Abandoned by her family, she lived, in complete ostracism, in a shed given in by a brother, where she continued to work from discarded material. She was found lifeless in a field, but for her friend, she was already dead for a long time. From the shed, which also served as her studio – from which Estela removed a few objects, including the Flanders mask –, almost nothing was left, due to a fire, it is not known whether it was caused by the artist herself or after her death. .

The fire ends up having a symbolic value, because not Ana will be reborn from it, but the one who, having lent her body to her throughout the film, now appears on screen as herself, the slammer Roberta Estrela d'Alva, who, in Rio de Janeiro today, proposes an updated version of They shouted at me black[12], reiterating that the struggle of women artists, black artists, or simply black women, persists, because, as young Andressa pointed out, “the dictatorship for us never stopped happening”. Before this final sequence – in which resistance asserts itself as “reexistence” – Ana's trajectory ends with an excerpt from A roof of your own, in which Virginia Woolf claims that, in the sixteenth century, a woman of talent would end up insane or suicidal or isolated in a hut outside a village.

Therefore, and living up to its name – which can be interpreted as a prefix with a private, negative value –, Ana would be the one who was not, and the journey through Latin America would be nothing more than the search for a ghost. A ghost whose past is not certain, also because the dead can become whatever the living want, since they no longer have control over their own history, in the words of Estela, in two moments of the film.

In light of the sequence that closes the film, it seems to us that it would have been more appropriate to use the final reflection of the aforementioned Woolfian text, thanks to which it would surface what was between the lines in the double passage from the 1970s to the present day and from Ana to the slammer. Virginia Woolf recalls that William Shakespeare – considered by her to be the prototype of the androgynous mind – had a sister who did not write a single line because she died young; it, however, is still alive in intellectualized women and housewives, who don't have time to attend soirées. This other half of Shakespeare would be a constant presence in the literary sphere, waiting for a chance to be reborn in other bodies, with all her load of experiences acquired from other women who preceded her, even those who worked without recognition. And, if one work is the continuation of another and, in turn, will be continued by a new one, even a woman, even if not famous, writes backwards, because she descends from all the women who preceded her, having inherited from them characteristics and limitations.

In this sense, instead of making Ana a victim, due to the circumstances and because of the flags she raised in her art – those of blackness, feminism, lesbianism, sorority, leftism, engaged art, etc., so many , which become excessive and leave several loose threads in the film – she could have been better integrated into this large panel of a Latin American female identity, which, as such, is still fragmented and needs to be progressively completed by new generations of women.[13] This should have been the core of Lúcia Murat's work, which is lost amid the insistence on political events. Because the bodies of those women were insurgents, transgressors, they became weapons that attacked established customs, confronted prevailing morals, undermined institutions, therefore they were also political and subversive as much as other ideas that circulated in those decades.

* Annateresa Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Visual Arts at ECA-USP. Author, among other books, of Photography and the crisis of modernity (With Artwork).

*Mariarosaria Fabris is a retired professor at the Department of Modern Letters at FFLCH-USP. Author, among other books, of Italian cinematographic neo-realism: a reading (Edusp).

References


ARTUR, Margaret. “Slam it is the voice of identity and resistance of contemporary poets”. São Paulo, USP Magazine Portal, 23 Nov. 2017. Available at:https://jornal.usp.br/ciencias/ciencias-humanas/slam-e-voz-de-identidade-e-resistencia -dos-poetas-contemporaneos/>. Accessed on: 29 Aug. 2021.

BARI, Atilio. “Persona semper: Ilo Krugli”. Program presented by TV Cultura on August 23, 2021.

BRETON, Andrew. “Frida Khalo de Rivera”. In: The surrealism and the hairstyle... Paris: Gallimard, 1965.

CHADWICK, Whitney. Women, art, and society. London: Thames & Hudson, 2002.

COLECTIVO ACCIONES de ARTE. “¡Ay Sudamérica! 400.000 texts about Santiago” (1981). Available in:https://icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/730004>. Accessed on: 31 Aug. 2021.

CORDERO REIMAN, Karen. “Bodily Appearances/Beyond Appearances: Women and the Discourse of the Body in Mexican Art, 1960-1985”. In: FAJARDO-HILL, Cecilia; GIUNTA, Andrea (org.). Radical women: Latin American art, 1960-1985🇧🇷 São Paulo: Pinacoteca de São Paulo, 2018.

“Crisis in art and political resistance: Colectivo Acciones de Arte (CADA)”. Available in:https://www.memoriachilena.gob.cl/>. Accessed on: 31 Aug. 2021.

FARNETI, Deanna. “Frida Khalo”. In: VERGINE, Lea. L'altrametàdell'avanguardia, 1910-1940: pittrici e scultricineimovimentidelleavanguardiestoriche. Milano: Mazzotta, 1980.

FERRARI, Leon. “Culture: (Work read on 27/12/68 at the Primer Encuentro de Buenos Aires “Cultura 1968”)”. Available in:https://icaa.mfah.org/s/en/item/ 761370>. Accessed on: 31 Aug. 2021.

FERREIRA GULLAR. “The History of the Poem”. In: dirty poem. São Paulo, Companhia das Letras, 2016.

GIUNTA, Andrea. “Brands in the shape of history”. In: FAJARDO-HILL; GIUNTA (org.), cit.

GRANDÓN LEAL, Romina Alejandra. Ramona Parra Brigades: political muralism and cultural debate in the Popular Unit. Santiago: Alberto Hurtado University, 2010.

Gretta: Auto-photos/Series Transformations – 1976/Diary of a Woman – 1977. São Paulo: Massao Ohno Editor, 1978.

KILOMBA, Grada. plantation memories: episodes of everyday racism. Rio de Janeiro: Editora Cobogó, 2019.

MATTOS, Carlos Alberto. “Trainpoting + Teatro-doc” (Mar 29, 2017). Available in:https://carmattos.com/2017/03/29/trainspotting-teatro-doc/>. Accessed on: 29 Aug. 2021.

SANTA CRUZ, Victoria. “Hay que barrer”; “I was shouted black”. In: Poems and Songs. Available in: . Accessed on: 01 Aug. 6.

TRIZOLI, Talita. Feminist crossings: an overview of women artists in Brazil in the 60s/70s. São Paulo: Faculty of Education of the University of São Paulo, 2018.

WOOLF, Virginia. “A stanza tutta per se”. In: Romanzi and others. Milano: Mondadori, 1978.

Notes


[1]Reworking a series of feminist lectures given in Cambridge, in 1928, Virginia Woolf, in A room of one's own (A roof of your own, 1929), developed a reflection on the place of the feminine in a patriarchal society, defending the idea of ​​an androgynous mind, that is, masculine and feminine, at the same time, with men being predominantly masculine and women being predominantly feminine. He also addressed the extent to which women's subaltern condition hindered their free expression – whether intellectualized or not – and influenced a literary production that was not always taken into account.

[2]“I only had seven years, / only seven years / What seven years! / She won't arrive for five months! / Immediately some voices in the street, me shouted ¡Negra! / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! / Am I black? tell me / Yes! / What is it like to be black? / Black! / And I didn't know the sad truth that that one was hiding. / Black! / And I felt black, / Black! / As they say / Black! / I went back / Black! / As they wanted / Black! / I hate my hair and my thick lips / and stare at my roasted meat / And retreat / Black! / I went back / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! / And spent the time / and always bitter / I continued to carry my back with my heavy load / And how it weighed! / Me alacié el cabello / me impolvé la cara / y entre mis entrañas siempre resounded / the same word/ ¡Negra! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! / Until a day that recedes, recedes and it goes down / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! / Black! / What! /¡Y que! / Black! / Yes / Black! / I am / Black / ¡Black! / Negra / Negra soy / ¡Negra! /Sí /¡Black! /Soy /¡Negra! /Black /Black! / I'm black / From today onwards / I don't want / lacear my hair / I don't want! /Y voy a reírme de quellos / que deseguer, seguún ellos, /que por avoirnos algún sensabor /llaman a los negroes gente de color / ¿Y de qué color? / Black! / How beautiful Suena! / Black! / What pace do you have! / Black! Black! Black! Black! /Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! / Al fin comprendí / Al fin! / Ya no recede / ¡Al fin! / Y avanzo seguridad / ¡Al fin! / Go ahead and wait / ¡Al fin! / And I bless the sky / because I wanted God that black azabache was my color / And I already understood / At the end! / Ya tengo la llave / ¡Negro! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! Black! Black! / Black! Black! / I'm black!”. The composition is from 1960.

[3] Between December 1968 and March 1969, the Argentine Society of Plastic Artists held the First Meeting of Buenos Aires, Culture 1968, a series of meetings promoted by Margarita Paksa, which had a wide participation of artists and intellectuals from different political tendencies, with the aim of creating a community space in which the ideological pact counted more than aesthetic-formal differences.

[4] The short, available at youtube , was shot during the fair The woman and her world, held at the Sociedad Rural de Palermo (Buenos Aires), as its opening poster warns, perhaps to emphasize that femininity is a commercial product, like any other.

[5] It was the time of Juan Carlos Onganía, the first of the three military dictators who ruled Argentina after the coup of June 28, 1966 until the return of Peronism to power in 1973. It was one of the toughest periods in terms of repression – just remember the “Night of the truncheons” (July 29, 1966), when five faculties of the University of Buenos Aires were invaded by the police – and also one of the most tumultuous, marked by popular uprisings in Córdoba and Rosario, in 1969.

[6] In the second sequence of How much is it worth or is it per kilo? (2005), by Sérgio Bianchi, the narrator makes a detailed and, at the end, ironic description of this artifact of punishment: “The Flanders sheet mask is an iron instrument, closed behind the head by a padlock, on the front there are several holes to see and breathe. By covering the mouth, the mask makes the slaves lose their addiction to alcohol. Without the vice of drinking, slaves are not tempted to steal. In this way, two sins are extinct; sobriety and honesty are thus guaranteed”. In another part of the film, already in today's capitalist world, Arminda, a black woman, when she sees a poor lady pulling a wagon loaded with recyclable material, identifies with her and imagines herself in her place, but in the slavery past, carrying a flanders mask, which cannot contain its suffering. After that vision, Arminda, an employee of an NGO whose shenanigans she discovered, decides to break the silence and denounce them.

[7] The phrase has affinities with another poem by Victoria Santa Cruz, ha ha ha barrer, from which we reproduce the first verses: “Barrer la injusticia en la tierra / Barrer la miseria / Esta scoba que tú ves / Está hecha pa' barrer / Barrer la injusticia en la Guerra / Barrer la violence / If we want to see peace / learn to spread”.

[8] Some of these stories were recalled in Seventy (2013), by Emilia Silveira, a member of the flight that, in 1971, took political prisoners to Chile in exchange for the Swiss ambassador Giovanni Enrico Bucher, kidnapped the previous year. In the heat of the moment, two other documentaries had collected the testimonies of many of these exiles: Brazil: reports on torture, by the Americans Haskell Wexler and Saul Landau, and It's not time to cry, by Luiz Alberto Sanz and Pedro Chastel. Two years earlier, fifteen political prisoners had flown to Mexico on a FAB aircraft, having been exchanged for the US ambassador, Charles Burke Elbrick. In 2006, in Hercules56 (title taken from the plane's license plate), Sílvio Da-Rin portrayed this episode from 1969, resumed by Camilo Tavares in The day that lasted 21 years (2012). No films were made about other Latin American countries mentioned in Lúcia Murat's production, but many exiles passed through Argentina – such as Ferreira Gullar, who, after wandering through other lands, arrived in Buenos Aires, where, between May and October 1975, composed what he thought would be his "final testimony", the famous dirty poem (1976) – or went to Cuba, the destination of many children separated from their families. There are testimonials from children of militants and the film The Chilean Building (2010), by Macarena Aguiló, gives an idea of ​​what life was like for these little ones on the island. Cuba was also the target of José Maria Ferreira de Araújo, a member of the Popular Revolutionary Vanguard (VPR), where he met the Paraguayan Soledad Barrett. In 1970, the militant returned to his country, being murdered, and, shortly afterwards, the young communist also came to Brazil, joining the VPR and joining Cabo Anselmo. The latter, an infiltrator at the service of the repression bodies, handed over the Paraguayan and the other companions hidden to the military in a farm in Abreu e Lima, in the metropolitan region of Recife, where the “Chacina da Chácara de São Bento” took place, as it became known (January 8 from 1973).

[9] The one that appears in the film – with the president wearing a helmet and armed, surrounded by members of the GAP (Grupo de Amigos Personales) – is the one published by New York Times. In fact, it is dated June 29, 1973 and was taken during a failed military coup. The last photo was taken by Argentine photojournalist Horacio Villalobos, who, on the fateful day of September 13, captured Allende at the moment when, from a balcony on the first floor of the Palacio de la Moneda, he waves to a group of high school students.

[10] The Argentine director, actor, playwright, costume designer, writer and artist Ilo Krugli moved to Brazil in the early 1960s, where he taught a course in puppet theater and began to conceive one of his best-known plays. Story of a boat, completed in 1972. On a trip through Latin America, he returned to Rio de Janeiro, after passing through Chile (where he was detained) and Argentina, and founded Teatro Ventoforte (1974), becoming a reference in the field of theater. resistance, puppet theater and art education. In 1980, he moved to São Paulo.

[11] In fact, in Chile, the spectator is guided by the voice of Victor Jara, who chants I remember you Amanda (1969), and by the folk group Quilapayún, which performs Let's go woman, one of the parts of The Cantata of Santa Maria (1969), by Luis Advis, all exponents of the New Chilean Song. For the first time, songs corresponding to the period in which Ana wandered through Spanish-speaking countries were chosen. It was in the 1960s that the emergence of New Latin American Song, which, with social denouncement, combined the incorporation of folklore. Violeta Parra was its precursor in Chile; the great interpreter of New Cancionero Argentinian it was Mercedes Sosa; the most famous representatives of New Cuban Trova were Silvio Rodríguez and Pablo Milanés; in Mexico, Amparo Ochoa sang the identity of Great Latin American Patria. For this reason, the tango (although it is by Livio Tragtenberg) that introduces the Argentine capital sounds too obvious and the boleros that rock the Cuban and Mexican stays seem out of place (Get out of me, About Us; Taste of me), composed in the years 1940-1950. And, as it is a film about women, more female voices could have been chosen, not just those of Omara Portuondo, a member of the Cuban old guard, and Alice Caymmi.

[12]This is the slam seven years only, which the poet proposes together with the members of Slam das Minas. Introducer of the slam championships in the country and with good exposure in the media, Roberta Estrela d'Alva is the great representative of this genre among us. Also known abroad, she won third place in the Poetry Slam World Cup, held in Paris in 2011.

[13] Reflection developed from the vision of To be continued… (Latin America puzzle), which is part of the exhibition Regina Silveira: other paradoxes, on display at MAC USP between August 28, 2021 and July 3, 2022. In this large panel from 1997, the artist from Rio Grande do Sul enlarges a legal-size graphic work made for the publication Re…View, from New York, in 1992, on the occasion of the five hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America. The jigsaw puzzle highlights the stereotypical view that one has of Latin America, but, as it is incomplete, it can also be an invitation to complete what is missing with a new look. Regina Silveira was one of the Brazilian artists present at the exhibitionRadical Women: Latin American Art, 1960-1985.

 

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