I am an Arara (directed by Mariana Lacerda and Rivane Neuenschwander, Brazil, 2023, 28′). A forest runs through the protests in São Paulo during the election year of 2022, a political moment in Brazil, when what was at stake was the end of democracy and the continuity of a government whose main agenda was destruction of nature and its territories, of social conquests, of indigenous peoples and quilombolas, of culture and art.
The screening is followed by a discussion with Mariana Lacerda and Peter Pál Pelbart.
Mariana Lacerda, born in Recife, lives and works in São Paulo. She is a documentary filmmaker. In recent years, she has dedicated her films to themes such as memory, the environment, the rights of nature, indigenous rights, and the Amerindian perspectivism. He has been a member of the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS Potsdam) scholarship programme since November 2023 for the development of a film script entitled Aña. He directed the film Gyuri (2020, 87′), filmed in 2017 in Demini, Yanomami Indigenous Land, which was shown in ten different countries around the world. More recently, he directed the film Mapping Worlds (2023, 70′).
Since the 1990s, Rivane Neuenschwander, born in Belo Horizonte, chooses elements of consumer goods, social exchange, and memories as her practice’s materials. In her installations, Neuenschwander translates the intercommunicating character of living systems. In drawings, paintings, tapestries, and videos, the artist operates the intersection of her formal repertoire with science, history, psychology, linguistics, and literature in order to articulate pressing issues in contemporary politics. Attaching human action and presence to conceptual substrata, her oeuvre includes the groups that led to the forms her works take. The other is always presupposed in the structure and execution of her work, and the care applied to form always implies care toward the public. Among her recent solo exhibitions are Sementes Selvagens, Museu de Serralves (2022); Knife does not cut fire, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2021); Rivane Neuenschwander, East Tank, Tate Modern (2021).
Peter Pál Pelbart is a Hungarian-born Brazilian philosopher and an essayist. He is part of the Ueinzz Theatre Company, a schizoscenic project based in São Paulo. His works are mainly about madness, time, subjectivity, and biopolitics. He published in English Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out (2015). He translated works of Deleuze into Portuguese and is co-publisher of n-1publications. He is a professor at PUC University in São Paulo.
In English
With
Mariana Lacerda
Peter Pál Pelbart
Moderated by Marlon Miguel
Organized by
Marlon Miguel
Elena Vogman
Image Credit © Eduardo Ortega
