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| Last day of the project "This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender" in Ovar (2022) |
In 2022, I had the happiness of participating in a very beautiful project by ondamarela, called “This Machine Surrounds Hate and Forces it to Surrender”. It was a project that invited people of different ages in different parts of the country to address the issues of hate, prejudice, difference and freedom through new artistic creations, built with these same people. On the last day of the project, we discussed what this experience had been like for the different participants. I often think of a teenage girl in one of those conversations. When I said “The artists are leaving today, the project is over. What happens tomorrow?” she murmured, “Tomorrow will be a sad day.”
I thought about her
again last month, at the meeting Mutante organised
by Comédias do Minho. This meeting was the culmination of the Mutantes Project,
which sought to involve young people aged 12 to 18 who live in the 10
municipalities of the Alto Minho region in a reflection, through the arts, on
'I', the 'other' and 'us'. During the three days that brought together culture
and education professionals, fifteen young people who had participated in the
project workshops worked intensely with choreographer Joana Castro in the
construction of a performance, presented to us on the last day. We saw and
heard young people who were sensitive, attentive, sincere, hopeful, but also
anguished, and we felt that, over the course of those three days of work, a
very strong and very moving connection was created between them, although they had
not known each other before. In the conversation that followed, I asked: “So,
what happens tomorrow?”. Several answered: “Tomorrow there is school.”
Last day of the meeting Mutantes in Paredes de Coura (2023).
The formal end of a
project seems to be a definite end for many of the people who participated in
it. There doesn't seem to be a continuation in their lives, there doesn't seem
to be a will or capacity or, perhaps, imagination for its continuation in “real
life”. Maybe people (not just the younger ones) don't imagine themselves
capable of changing something that the project made them acknowledge it needed
to be changed. And although many of the projects are aimed at empowering people
or promoting civic participation, there is a political culture that convinces
many people that it's not worth imagining, it's not worth trying, it's not
worth worrying and acting. There is a culture of impossibility.
The arts and culture alone
do not have the power to bring about changes in people's personal and
collective lives. Those who expose themselves to them and get involved with
them receive nourishment, but do not automatically become more active, more
imaginative or even better people. That said, I often wonder what could be done
to connect these experiences to “tomorrow” and to create a culture where people
can feel included, empowered, important and needed, cared for, in charge of
their own minds and lives.
When last October I was
at the Tropenmuseum in Amsterdam, I had the opportunity to visit the new
exhibition “Our
Colonial Inheritance”. The museum, which has accustomed us to a courageous
and frontal attitude towards its own past and the country's past and present,
did not disappoint us this time either. But what I would like to highlight here
is what happens when we reach the end of the exhibition. Before entering the
last room, we read on a panel: “How do you get involved? Choose the way that
suits you”. We are then invited to meet different people who have decided to
act in order to build a better and fairer world. The ways of doing it were
different and this conveys the idea that there is something that each of us can
do, in our own way; that we are neither small nor impotent in the face of great
causes and problems.
I am also thinking of
my first visit, last March, to Kazerne
Dossin, a Holocaust memorial museum in the Belgian city of Mechelen. There
were three things that made me think about the role that a museum can play in
empowering people and promoting active citizenship:
In the temporary
exhibition “Homosexuals
and lesbians in Nazi Europe”, History gains a more humane, closer, less
abstract scale, through the personal stories of different people who suffered
discrimination and persecution, who died or who survived.
In the permanent
exhibition, presented in three chapters spread over three floors (Mass,
Fear, Death), the museum includes stories resistance to the occupying Nazi regime,
sometimes through comic episodes, but coming from ordinary people, civil
servants who were, probably, just as afraid as everyone else.
At the end of each chapter, before moving on to the next floor, the museum challenges us with current events. These are not past stories, they are always present. “Immigration and refugees in Europe today” or “When the State starts to discriminate” are current issues, concerning the people next to us or ourselves.
The feeling of
impotence, the feeling of the impossibility of change is something that is
cultivated among citizens, something that becomes a culture. Joana Villaverde
recorded it in a way that left an impression on me in her article “As
vidas do interior importam” (The lives of the interior matter), written in
2020 in Avis, Alentejo. I believe that this feeling gains strength because
people also feel alone,
We live closer and, at the same time, further apart. We take care of our own and ignore others. We distrust those we don't know, we don't love those we don't know. Perhaps, a possible path forward is to look for ways to make it more evident, on a smaller, closer, more humane scale, that we are not alone, that we share values, that we care, that we have each other. That the love and hope don't end when the project ends.
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