17 derstand, not as a whole - to understand the existential element, the experience which may emerge from the people who live in these urban interstices and the subsequent recognition it is the artist’s job to convey. There are people who live there, after all. Instead of using a possible exercise in situationist dérive to question and spawn new processes to ponder, create and respond to these places (whose supposed desolation of values create other unexpected ones); instead of digging up “secret passages of yet another species” (to quote the surrealist English author Anthony Earnshaw), Baptista chooses to repeat this distance which ends up typifying the intellectual and the artist with regard to these places. You could argue that this distance mirrors that of the film plot, but if this elitism sprouts in the heart of the relationship with works of art, on which networks of aesthetic references and hierarchies of valorisation are created, it implies another order of human inter-relationship concerning these places
Jacques Rancière explains how the new political and capitalist order creates a time of impossibilities: there are things which can no longer be done, ideas which cannot be believed in, futures which cannot be imagined. Movements like those in São Paulo rattle this idea; they are new configurations whose idiosyncrasies have to be understood. In part, they recall the slogan of May 1968 - “Be realistic: Demand the Impossible” - a principle which perplexes and confuses the establishment. And these configurations can be found in some of the work produced for comics, or histórias em quadrinhos as they are known in Brazil, in echoes which are not merely thematic but also formal and expressive. If we believe that comics are part of the discourses that circulate in the public realm, and therefore in the political realm, we have to accept that some of what is produced seeks an active and significant role.
that cannot be ignored. However, this, perhaps, is a minor aspect compared to the artist’s central goal with this small story, and his work as a whole, which is to concentrate his efforts on a subject that is taking place here and now and therefore should be brought to the widest possible audience. A declaration of interest: the author is a member of the Oficina do Cego (one of the associations involved in bringing this book to publication), with whatever influence this fact may or may not have on his interpretation of the work.
The group of Brazilian authors in this small exhibition are joined less by a common nationality and more by political affinities. With very varying levels of success (commercial and critical), diverse work and singular approaches, they could be said to be united by their creation of an urban perspective of those people who usually have no political voice. From reading their work as a whole, what emerge, besides the human portraits of present day Brazil, are platforms which aim to reflect on, mirror and ponder the social tensions, contemporary urban development and the exercising of representative emancipation. It is not just the fact that their characters, fictitious or real, relate to individuals usually outside the subject matter of more conventional comics – those living in the favelas and the poor cities and streets, the young unemployed, and those alienated for some reason - it is also because of the way they work, how they build the structure of their texts and how they divulge their published work, be it via commercially distributed and even award-winning books or a daily comic strip in a publication, a zine sold online, or an image on Tumblr. They create a space for thought which, as such, existing in the public sphere can dialogue with the rest of the world in the most diverse ways. As a reportage or “autobiography of the other”, Morro da Favela by André Diniz is a vastly different work to the others clustered together in this section, contrasting with the fictional stories of the other authors. However, these fictional stories, which feed from more conventional genres (Franz and Gerlach re-visit elements from superhero comics, commercial manga and science fiction, while Kitagawa reverses elements of detective /urban crime stories), contemporary fields (D’Salete enhances the global “alternative” comic language with a powerful focus on the mundane, normal and ubiquitous) and the absurd and experimental (Sica), show a similarity to Morro in their focus on representing these less privileged, and usually disenfranchised, groups on the political stage. Instead of emerging as representatives of the disadvantaged classes in an economy of melodramas which would reduce them to the state of being unable to express themselves freely, and merely as conventional symbols of a social condition, these characters encompass various styles of life, of free expression, of speaking with their own voice. Perhaps they are uncommitted voices which will never attain a total certainty, a definitive role, a “happy ever after” ending, but the restlessness they cre-
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Six Corners of Disquietude
Contemporary Brazilian Authors: André Diniz, Marcelo D’Salete, Pedro Franz, Diego Gerlach, André Kitagawa and Rafael Sica. By Pedro Moura As we write these lines, the social situation in Brazil is still extremely tense, triggered by the mass demonstrations associated with the ‘Movimento Passe Livre’ and, to use a word from one side of the barricades, the associated “turmoil” in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Brasilia and elsewhere. The direct cause may be the 20-centavo rise in the bus fare in São Paulo, but that is just the proverbial last drop which has allied it to other movements all around the world, whether successful or not, and whether taken over by outside forces or not (the Arab Spring, the Occupy Wall Street movement, the demonstrations by various groups of workers in Greece, the crowds of ‘indignados’ in Spain and the similar demonstrations in Portugal). When one speaks of “freedom” today, one speaks above all of the rules of a game which is vitiated from the outset, where the very possibility of discourse is regimented and all the voices outside this space are regarded as “crass”, “idealistic”, “unrealistic” and even “irresponsible”. And hence “outside the game”. But the city is a public space and politics as an exercise implies participation in this space: its physical occupation makes complete sense; in fact, it is one of the democratic activities that makes most sense at this time of crisis in the democratic political system. In “In What Time do we Live?”,