“Today, our time
requires lightness, humor, enchantment and poetry. It is no longer the struggle
between good and evil, represented by Star Wars, but the utopia of a beautiful
life. To discover the moment of beauty poetry gives us, the inspiration that
reminds us that we are in this life not only to work, to fight, to bicker, but
also to love, to smile, to dance, to hug, to dream. We live in a time where the
most revolutionary thing is to be a poet.”
When I received the
book Imaginação: Reinventar a Cultura (Imagination: Reinventing Culture),
by Marta Porto, I abandoned what I was doing. I immersed myself in it and each
word, each idea, brought to me the Marta I know and admire and the enormous
pleasure, both intellectual and physical, brought by every encounter with her.
Especially, the words that open this text and bring together her critical
spirit, her intelligence and her profound humanism.
I read the book “instantly”,
thirsty for it. I underlined words, entire passages, and came back to it on a
number of occasions, looking for comfort and motivation. I now go back it in
order to share it with others.
Divided into three
acts, the first brings us some pills of inspiration, “About arts and
artists”. The text “About art and frontier: letter with Amós Oz” was
presented last year here in Lisbon, at the bookshop Tigre de Papel, on the occasion
of the Festival da Palavra. She quotes the Russian Nobel Prize in Chemistry, Ilya
Progogine, who, associating art/creativity with the irreversible phenomena that
occur in nature said that “The universe around us is just one example of possible
universes.” It is this variable that the arts bring to the real world, says
Marta. “The idea that reality is one among many possibilities. And that
differences nourish us, increase probabilities and possibilities in life and do
not restrict them.” (p. 23).
Imagination and poetry,
their power, are central elements in the way Marta thinks about culture and the
world. On p.52, she proposes “a return to an Aristotelian ideal of 'poetics',
the place where human imagination is valued as a power that may create worlds
and realities different from those given by a given time-space.”
Living today a moment
in history where the world seems to be going backwards, often feeling paralysed,
numb, or otherwise perfectly conscious but unable to react, Marta draws
inspiration from Italo Calvino, who in Six proposals for the next millennium
says that “it has been poets and artists who remind humanity, at every time and
era lived, that imagination, poetry and the arts are the main antidote against
fear, violence and barbarism.” The impact of this idea returns, in a very
concrete way, in the third act of the book, "Act".
In between, we have the
second act, the most extensive, on “Politics, culture and social imaginary”.
A reflection dedicated to the urgency to rethink, reinvent, democracy, also
through the reinvention of cultural policies. One reads on p. 42 that “It is the people, the
artists, who make arts and culture, but it is politics that create the
conditions for it to be democratic, to expand and make sense for the society as
a whole."
Considering the intensified
discussion generated in recent weeks in Portugal (on issues which are, nevertheless,
permanent and persistent, such as the role of cultural policies (or their
absence), power, fear, silence, subservience), Marta suggests, in a very
relevant way also for us, that “culture, or rather, the policies that embody
it, must prioritise the construction of a social imaginary of understanding,
criticism and struggle to assert democratic ideas. To stimulate sensitive
mentalities capable of structuring societies in which the respecting the rights
is not an act of mercy, but a conscious act that responds to a democratic
imperative.” (p. 36).
The reinvention of
democracy inevitably involves the reinvention of policies that form cultures.
It is also interesting to see here how Marta manages to summarise in four lines
what it means to “form cultures”: “When examples are exceptions, we can speak
of a lack of or need for education. When they are the majority, we speak of
social culture, of an imaginary of how we manifest, perceive and act as a
social body.” (p. 37)
But, after all, what
can cultural policies do? The book presents us with three ideas (pp.44-47):
1. The need for the
cultural ecosystem to “elaborate and develop actions that guarantee that the
values which are essential to cultural democracy continue to exist and
override the need to create walls, to destroy cultures and entire forms of
existence, abandoning them to indifference, misery and lack of opportunities.”
2. The need to recognise
and understand the new learning codes that new technologies offer "to
promote curiosity and openness to another kind of knowledge that is not
available in the fast and superficial ways offered by social media." To promote
experiments that can “stimulate cultural alterity”, “practice the experience of
putting oneself into someone else’s shoes”.
3. The defense of
artistic freedom and artists as the foundation of cultural management and
policies. Because “A free world is built without fear of discomfort, inconvenience,
sometimes the shock and horror, which works of art have always caused
throughout history.”
“A good cultural policy
is one that intertwines two fields of public life: the aesthetic and ethical
development (values) of a society”, says Marta (p.93). She values and
reinforces the power of experience, stating that “Experience is a fact that
becomes meaning, that inspires and makes us happy, shocks and moves us. (...)
It is knowing that a museum is not important for an individual or a city just
because it generates jobs or attracts tourists. (...) but because there, in
that space, at that moment, one is offered to live the unexplainable, the
emotion, the shock in the face of an aesthetic experience that makes one cry,
or rejoice, or get irritated and angry… that puts one in front of the magic
side of life, the one that comes closest to the reason of human existence... ” (p.97-98).
Thus, we come to act 3,
“Act”. Marta asks at the outset: "What are the cultural values culture
commit itself to building a democracy that goes beyond voting at the ballot
box?" (p.102). This question is fundamental, considering the distrust and
disrespect citizens have been expressing regarding the system created and their
need to find a point of escape not through the real, but through what they
consider “authentic”, even if barbaric, elementary, primary[1].
This first question is
reinforced with another one: "Is imagination a value for educating and
learning?" (p.103). Marta tells us of the need to “think socio-pedagogical
networks in which cultural spaces - museums, libraries, points of culture -
integrate these efforts to educate for life, valuing ethics, aesthetics,
creativity and the power of imagination as pillars this refoundation of time,
school experience and learning processes.” (p.104). And she presents us with
four dimensions of learning where the arts and literature collaborate
decisively: education in values; the place for creative experience; the mastery
of complex cognitive skills; understanding the signs of the time that we live.
Before concluding, I go
back in the book, on p.47, where Marta talks about the urgency of
institutionalising the freedom of the arts as a pillar of political democracy
and creating support programmes with a higher degree of risk, stating that “The
spirit of the time that we were delegated to live forces us to get out of already
known comfort formulas.”
How to interwine the
political dimension of life, the arts and their modulations of experiences?
“Above all, by nurturing
curators, managers, purposes and programmes of art and culture of energy,
curiosity, risk and potency. Opening a path to liberate the arts and their
public representations from all kinds of domestication that eliminates worries
and anxieties and ends up playing the game already played.” (p. 109).
Marta brings me that
mixture of restlessness and comfort that I need to stay alert, to continue to
grow more and more aware of the world around me, to feed the hope and the
desire to take a step in my lifetime on a journey that some started long ago
and others will cherish in the future. We will be the best we can.
No comments:
Post a Comment