Other images, other gestures, other ways of being together

Invited to participate in the exhibition Arte democracia utopia. Quem não luta tá morto, Kunsch and Guimarães proposed the installation of three interconnected artistic-clinical apparatuses, which evoked the experience of the clinic by making available some contextual information to the visitor. The first installation was called Lugar de escuta [Place of Listening]. Formally, the apparatus consisted of a dozen chairs displayed in a circle in the middle of the exhibition room, which could be occupied by specific groups mediated by the museum education staff or other public groups that wished to use them for the purpose of collective listening activities. The second installation, titled Escuta mútua [Mutual Listening], was made up of pairs of chairs placed in front of each other (or with their backs to each other), which were scattered around the exhibition space. These were also available to be used by individuals willing to make contact or have a more reserved chat. Even when the chairs were not being used, the fact that they were arranged in a way that could potentially support an exchange between any two people suggested the possibility of different speaking and listening exercises that were valid without the presence and legitimation of a ‘specialist’. And, finally, the third installation was called Uma clínica pública no Rio de Janeiro: grupo de trabalho [A Public Clinic in Rio de Janeiro: Work Group]. At the beginning of the show, Kunsch and Guimarães held a two-day meeting at Escola do Olhar [School of Looking] at MAR – with a group of professionals and individuals interested in public psychoanalytical initiatives – aimed at sharing knowledge and experience on social clinical practices, both past and present. During the exchange, they defined artistic-clinical actions to be performed for the duration of the show, not only in the museum but also in its surrounding areas and in specific contexts, such as Favela da Maré and the so-called Little Africa. In the months that followed the constitution of the work group, these actions became a new experience of community clinical practice in Rio de Janeiro, which was named  ‘listeners’ (escutadores in Portuguese) by the participants themselves.

The acts of listening performed by Amò ­­– individually and in small groups of residents – were an attempt to open up to narratives that intertwine loss and resistance, both material and symbolic. A type of listening that could not and would not be neutral, given that the artists subjectively have something in common with those who were telling them stories of obliteration: the marks of enduring an allegedly universal way of existing that seeks to annul differences. Through the speech of someone else who was also silenced by structurally racist and classist governmental action, this act of listening activated a common desire to affirm the singular and revisit the ancestral, acknowledging its strong presence in the contemporary world. The materialisation of this process of listening – which began before the opening of the show and evolved throughout its duration – undertook multiple formats and was gradually brought to a social gathering space created inside the exhibition site. And once the texts, audios, videos, books, games, drawings, gestures and other formal and informal records of the listening exercise with local residents were introduced, they began to function as triggers of another type of listening, which now welcomes the voices of residents from other parts of the city who visit the exhibition. Unfolding into a long and open process – and inscribed in a vast territory where the museum is only one of it effectuation sites ­– this Public Policy proposed by collective Amò sought to percolate the dissident and dissonant voices that constitute the world and that are, despite their constitutive presence, constantly shut down by the violent imposition ­– translated and contained in governmental actions – of a paradoxically excluding universality.

The works briefly examined here share a temporality that is completely distinct from the acceleration that the several spheres of life currently require from us all. To be materialised into an effective proposition, both artworks rely on a horizontal relationship with someone else that goes beyond their role as audience to become an engaged party. In this sense, both projects demand an extended artistic experience, both in terms of the artists who propose them and the people who are ultimately targeted by the project but whose participation is fundamental for its existence. Considered as a set, these artworks also evoke a question that overarches a number of current artistic propositions: why, after all, do we call art those works that, by their own means or borrowing from other fields, denounce the lack of listening (proposing even, within its limits, to redress it) in the individual and collective realms? One way of answering this question ­– without the intention of exhausting its possibilities ­_­­­– requires attention to the way these projects fracture some of the consensuses that inform mental health policies and many of the so-called social policies that often serve to justify exclusions and maintain chronic inequalities. Consensuses that arbitrarily naturalise as ‘universal’ or ‘uniform’ established hierarchies, limits and ways of making that the artworks here (and many others) challenge and criticise by insisting on the possibility of inscribing in the world – including institutionally – different gestures, different images and different ways of being together. Ultimately insisting on a type of aesthetics that can rise to the challenge of building a different life.