Festival Agora – Outras Imaginações Políticas: Museum of Modern Art, RJ

Text by the curators:

It is a consensus that we live in an era in which everything around us seems to be in crisis: the climate, capitalism, democracy, worn-out Western epistemologies, false technological promises. Faced with this diagnosis, the urgency of generating profound changes regarding the ways in which our society works is evident. But it is precisely here that we are faced with another impasse. We live in a moment in which the political imagination seems to be at a standstill. Imagining, that is, expanding the negotiable horizons of the possible, is the initial gesture for transforming the future. If imaginations are blocked, how can we begin to transform the present and reverse the path that sows a dystopian future?

Isn’t part of what gives rise to this state of obstructed imagination that there is a new language that was supposed to emerge and yet doesn’t? In other words, another and unprecedented grammar that should emerge as a kind of engine for political transformation. It is precisely in this way, in favor of an irrigated imagination and an insurgent language, that the field of art enters the scene at Festival Agora. The possibility of creating other possible worlds in the sphere of art makes it an element of singular strength when it comes to the chance to imagine a future that does not reproduce the course that leads to collapse. We are not talking about an artistic practice that solves social problems, but that, in its own way, allows us to see a little beyond the anesthesia of the present, perhaps reconditioning our bodies and ways of seeing.

Thus, we present works by eight artists residing in Rio de Janeiro who are part of an emerging scene in the city. They are: Ana Clara Tito, Ana Hortides, Arorá, Darks Miranda, Emilia Estrada, Mariana Paraizo, Panmela Castro, and Tadáskía. Each in its own way, they address issues that make us reflect on other possible imaginations for the struggle for rights in the democratic field and the dispute over public space. Some question the separations between the public and the private, the intimate and the collective, bringing the home to the center of the conversation; others weave relations between history, memory and the role of the public sphere in the construction of our identities, attentive to the negotiations between me-and-the-other, seeing and being seen. There are still those who claim a more delusional reading of reality, betting on changing forms and structures that question our criteria for reading the real. In short, yourcontributions are fragments of fictional speculations that resist univocal meanings, affirming the polyphonic vocation of artistic practice in the present. The public will be able to see, occupying different spaces in the external area of ​​MAM-Rio, works that oscillate between the rawness and intransigence of the body and the transcendent vigor of dreams, all betting on the fact that playing with language is one of the ways of not subjecting ourselves to the uninterrupted failure of the now and, thus, irrigating other imaginations for the future – a task for all of us.