Clarissa Diniz: Two of MESA’s main art projects –Urban Tours and Narratives around Fire— revolve around the idea of communication. On the one hand a dialogue is explored (following the intense exchange of experiences that takes place in Recorridos), and on the other when someone is called upon to talk into a microphone for hours, the increasingly rare art of listening is being exercised. I’d like you to comment on that communicative side of MESA’s work, and in particular, to talk a little about how you view the relationship between art and communication; where do they dovetail, and where do they exclude each other? Out of what ideas about art and communication does MESA’s work stem?
MESA: When we invite people to come together, we’re aware of the different places they’re coming from. By and large they’re people who normally wouldn’t meet each other, and we encourage their coming into contact. Gilberto Gil spoke of Points of Culture (2) as performing a sort of “shiatsu” on society. Taking advantage of this image, we imagine our work acting as a massage on a city’s cultural and related circuits. We take people from one side of the city to another, and we encourage institutional, personal, and existential encounters. We make energies flow where institutional or geographic barriers would otherwise block them.
Listening is certainly the most powerful action we could possibly promote. The winner is the person who, in the situation we generate, places him or herself in the generous position of receptivity, and the winner is also the person who speaks, who can bring up bubbles of existence. For a few moments, those fragile membranes arise between the narrator and the listener. They will then explode and will have to be searched for through memory, through our fragile human biochemistry, which we help to recompose by reconnecting people with one another. This shouldn’t be understood as a process of creating harmony, since such encounters can unleash conflicts that are necessary.
Perhaps the most powerful task of communication we engage in is that of placing common people, as it were, in situations that are unusual for them, by making social contact with outsiders possible. We try to do this in such a way as to let the dialogue take place in a very natural way, with genuine empathy. Conversely, we’re not interested in communication in a linear direction designed to produce extremely objectified meanings. How can people be encouraged to manifest themselves, to feel that they’re the producers of meanings? How can the possibility of the unexpected be given free rein? These kinds of questions prevent us from handling information bureaucratically, which is an ever-present risk. We’re really not interested in research and direct communication. Instead of working from the bottom to the top, we’re moving towards a mountain-city, like in a long spiral, where each guest shows us the vantage place they’re looking from and we understand that that’s absolutely real and equally relative. That way we divest information, in the sense that that we’re not in a hurry: there’s no need to say much, and much less a need to clarify anything. We don’t want to encapsulate thought. We’re not making bonsais.
CD: Regarding institutionalization, Urban Tours and Narratives… are uniquely characterized by the fact that they take place regularly, following a timely regularity that is rarely found in Brazilian art. The city of Fortaleza knows that there is an Urban Tour every Saturday, starting at the CCBNB (Centro Cultural Banco do Nordeste – Banco do Nordeste Cultural Center). For that to be possible, MESA works in conjunction with various institutions (particularly the CCBNB). Can you tell us what interests are at play in that process –its political implications, the densification of the public condition of art, among others— and in a broader sense, how you view the relationship between invention and institution (even making art an institutionalized thing)?
MESA: In part, we have a fairly independent relationship with institutions, because we establish a prior agreement. We work in collaboration with the financers. If they don’t accept that we’re working on an equal footing, we don’t have a deal. Even in a state with severe financial constraints, we reject certain proposals that are well-structured but would lead us to legitimize institutions whose performance in the city is problematic. On the other hand, our ethical relationship with the CCBNB and the independence that the CCBNB guarantees are exemplary. We provide the guidelines for the Tours and indicate which invited parties will conduct the mediation. The project’s lengthy political survival perhaps also stems from the fact that we treat the topics preventively, before they reach critical moments, when many sectors are committed and all the movements become more controversial. To us it’s obvious that each institution or individual who interacts with the project is going to view it differently, with different aims. Our job is to reconcile those points of view, by addressing other interests of the Cultural Center –such as attracting the public and offering media visibility (after eight years, the project continues to appear in the press regularly). The professionalism of its management allows us to devote ourselves to our activities without concern for bureaucracy.
We’ve already conducted several projects that can be used as public-policy instruments to activate cultural and urban changes. Those experiences have led us to believe that providing services to the State could be an important field of action for art, much more so than it currently is. Our willingness to work in areas of social disintegration, in conjunction with housing ministries, for instance, is underestimated.
Notes:
* MESA (Mediación de Saberes) came into being in February 2003 as a means of becoming a laboratory for the development and exchange of urban experiences that could be turned into public-policy instruments. One of its main motivations is to act in counterpoint to the apartheid that exists in the city of Fortaleza, Brazil. The initiative was launched by Julio Lira (Visual Arts/Sociology) and was joined by members of other fields, such as Thais Monteiro (Sociology), Robéiro Sacramento (Music), and Isabel Silvino (Philosophy), among others. Subsequently, MESA undertook different projects for numerous institutions. The group’s best-known project, PerCursos Urbanos (Urban Tours) forms part of the Centro Cultural Banco del Nordeste’s programming (in Fortaleza and more recently in Juazeiro del Norte) and had already been carried out in the Seventh Mercosur Biennial’s Available Artist program, at the SESC Arts Exhibit in Sao Paulo (2010). They have also participated in residencies at El Levante in Rosario (2009), and in Planta Alta in the city of Asunción (Paraguay, 2011). It was also presented in Buenos Aires during the Encuentro de Iniciativas de Artistas promoted by Trama (2006). The MESA group has also worked in many other projects, among them Bienal fuera de la Bienal, Narrativas en torno al fuego, Gestos por la Ciudad (2007), Tomar Lugar en la Máquina (2010), Escucha Nómade, carried out for the Ceará Book Biennial (2004, 2006),the Dragón del Mar Art and Cultural Center (2005-2011), the Fortaleza City Hall (2007), the Ceará Dance Biennial (2010), and the Fortaleza Culture Secretariat (2011-2012).
(1) The size of the group has varied throughout its existence; Julio Lira and Thais Montero are two of its remaining original members.
(2) A policy implemented by the Lula and Dilma Roussef administrations, the aim of which is to foster existing socio-cultural practices that can have a significant impact on their respective contexts.
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