MASP

THURSDAY, 6.9
11 AM – 11:10 AM
Introduction
Adriano Pedrosa, artistic director, MASP
 
11:10 AM – 1 PM
ABIGAIL CAMPOS LEAL
Planetary dysphoria
The transition is a mystery, obscure. first, they announced the transmutation of colors, a new choreography of bathrooms, other signatures, another spelling of the first name, the transfer of articles, and a new way of dancing gender over sex’s corpse. a chest, a pump, a razor, a cut. shaking binarism was its first curse. then, one—not one but several other pests, one after another, the Race, the Species... which had always been announced, but which only now let themselves be sniffed out; however, this scene has been doubling. the prophecy thus writes: we speak your language only to announce the end of your Species, of your World. you turned us into animals, but when we announced that we were never human, Human, Man, were you amazed?! during the transition, we departed, earthlings. then, we left not only gender but Humanity behind.
 
MONICA BENICIO
The Power of Lesbian Women in the Consolidation of Brazilian Democracy
The presentation will focus on debating the importance of lesbian women in our democracy and how the erasure of these women, which still occurs systematically, is one of the obstacles to the existence of a socially just, diverse, and inclusive country. Mônica will address topics such as the history of the lesbian movement in Brazil, the representation of lesbian women in politics, structural violence against lesbian women, and the relevance of dissident families in the areas of sexuality and gender.
 
BRUNO OLIVEIRA – CASA 1
I Don’t Do It for Love: Non-Subordinate Insertions in the Art Field
Has the existence of other narratives and experiences of memories deconstructed and reconstructed traditional historiography, or is it a subordinate integration? How are structured the categories of works, accounts, and practices made by historically invisible, inferior, and marginalized populations—such as the production linked to Latin American territories and the Global South, made by women, Indigenous people, Black people, transvestigender people, LGB+ people? Based on which vocabularies have other possibilities of symbolic representation been constructed—or yet, how have we perpetuated the dominant perspectives and vocabularies? The construction of this debate proposes to bring to the surface the complexity of the decolonization movements of museums, monuments, and memory itself, especially from the memory initiatives of Casa 1.
 
Mediation
Guilherme Giufrida, assistant curator, MASP  
 
2:30 PM – 4:30 PM
CYNTHIA SHUFFER
Marika Graphic Style by Memory. Notes on Censorship and Moral Panic
The future of graphic intervention in what is today the Memorial Disidente a Cielo Abierto in the recently renamed Daniel Zamudio Park (formerly San Borja Park), as well as its corrective erasure as it is considered a work of “visual violence” due to its sexual content, will be the core of this presentation. The mural was produced from an open call, in which more than 20 visual artists and collectives took part; they organized their works to be exhibited in a public place, aiming to rescue the vital and dissident memory that goes beyond the limits of heteronormativity and overflows the mandate of a sort of mandatory sexuality. Its location produces a series of symbolic and material acts of violence that ended up demarcating a space of dispute for existence, for the maintenance of an LGBTIQANB+ territory in the center of Chile’s capital and contrary to common sense, which seeks to eradicate it at any cost.
 
FERNANDO DAVIS
Inventing Outdoors. Critical Assemblages and Political Imagination in an Exhibition on Contemporary Art and Sexual Disobedience
This presentation analyzes the exhibition Inventar a la intemperie: desobediencias sexuales e imaginación política en el arte contemporáneo, presented in 2021 at the Memory Park—Monument to the Victims of State Terrorism. The project aimed to address the intersections and exchanges of contemporary artistic practices, activism, and sexual politics in the Argentine scene since the 1960s, putting in conversation a set of experiences that, in addition to disturbing and extrapolating the established divisions between art and politics, contributed to the questioning, in different historical moments, of the normalized production of bodies and sexual and gender identities. The assemblage articulated links among works, archival objects, systems of representation, historical settings, and minority sexual politics, not only with the aim of recovering objects and narratives that were closed or little explored by art history and art theory’s canonical accounts. The proposal was to compose “critical montages,” sensitive links between materiality and time that allowed the questioning of how these outdoor practices contributed to imagining other forms of politics, to shift the limits of the possible in the creation of new subjectivities, affections, and alternative ways of life.
 
MAHMOUD KHALED
Paintings, Houses, Memorials
In this lecture, artist Mahmoud Khaled discusses two of his bodies of work: Painter on a study trip (2014) and Proposal for a House Museum of an Unknown Crying Man (2017). Both works used paintings and houses as source material and points for departure for their narrative and conceptual formulation, the lecture also discusses how exhibitions can be used as media for the formal manifestation of the work and also treated as an artwork in itself with its won physicality and conditions. 
 
Mediation
Daniela Rodrigues, curatorial assistant, MASP
 
FRIDAY, 6.10
11 AM – 1 PM
REMOM MATHEUS BORTOLOZZI
Diversity Memories through the Bajubá Collection
The Bajubá Collection is a collective project started in 2010, aimed at the preservation, safeguard, and historiographical instigation of Brazilian LGBT art, memory, and culture. The project began from the collecting vocation and dedication to the task of acquiring works of art, books, periodicals, vinyl records, and compact discs produced by Brazilian lesbians, gays, bisexuals, transvestites, and transsexuals, or materials with themes related to sexual diversity and the plurality of gender expressions in Brazil. Among second-hand bookstores, antique shops, and personal collections, the Bajubá Collection aims to take history into our hands and search for our fragments, our dead people, our rubble, and our glitter. Nothing that ever happened can be considered lost. Inspired by the pieces of sheets embroidered and dyed by drops of Leonilson’s blood, we take perdition in our hands and make ink out of it to (re)write our history. The presentation proposes a reflection based on the continuous process of Bajubá Collection’s constitution and the production of Brazilian LGBT memories, as well as the different aesthetics of these communities.
 
KAROL RADZISZEWSKI
Queer Archives Institute: Shifting Narratives
In post-communist states, where a number of historical threads were broken or, in fact, never emerged, there has been an attempt to construct national identities anew and to create fresh narratives. Today, recent history, including art history, is being largely (re)constructed, as well as often tampered with. In my artistic practice, I am particularly interested in such procedures, namely appendicising, rewriting, and revising art history from the queer perspective. In my presentation, I will take special interest in the ways in which archive-based art can have a political impact on our present and future, including its numerous aspects (i.e. cultural, social and sexual). My long-term project titled Queer Archives Institute (QAI) will be offered as an example of this methodology. In my talk, I will present the different forms the QAI takes—from an exhibition to a temporary office, a publication, a performance, a lecture.
 
JAMAL BATTS
“I Cruise a Black Maze”: Black Visuality, Queer Disorientation, and the Siting of Risk
In queer studies, the bathhouse serves as an ultimate architecture of liberation — a bastion against the onslaught of deadly queer antagonisms. This talk considers the ways in which black gay and lesbian film, photography, and poetry navigates and imagines the space of the bathhouse—considered a dangerous vector of HIV transmission by the state and some liberal LGBTQ political actors. It situates three artists’ works produced in response to the HIV/AIDS crisis as they map the erotic and vexing space of queer public sex institutions—the late Black gay poet Essex Hemphill in 1992 during the early crisis, Britain-based South Asian gay photographer Sunil Gupta in 1999 shortly after the introduction of antiretroviral medication, and black lesbian filmmaker Tiona Nekkia McClodden in its present, 2017. I argue that these artists utilize forms of chromatic blackness and disoriented vision as erotic and gendered methods for elaborating, critiquing, and inhabiting queer desire.
 
Mediation
Leandro Muniz, curatorial assistant, MASP
 
2:30 PM – 4:30 PM
DANIELI BALBI
Women on the Move: Perspective and Density in the Creation of Trans Characters in Last Decade’s Audiovisual Media
In recent years, the transsexual community has had a strong presence in the collective social imaginary, seen through TV and cinema screens and, above all, from the popularization of streaming content in the context of the circulation of goods produced by the cultural industry. Because of this fact, there are some issues that traverse the social relations of production that are bundled together and that, for this reason, require greater analytical density for understanding the phenomenon; namely: social relations of work, production, race, and workforce markers throughout history and the concrete and historically traceable social interests of domination. All of this will help us to understand what the portrayal of exotification holds within itself.

ERICA MALUNGUINHO
The History Has Other Sides!
The official history of the Brazilian State still reproduces narratives that exclude the experiences of women, LGBTQIA+ people, and the Black population. This process sustains the manifestations of structural oppressions and creates obstacles to the full realization of democracy. Erica Malunguinho will address the importance of revising a story told through the prism of those in power who, at the same time, were violators of life and humanity.
 
Mediation
David Ribeiro, curatorial assistant, MASP

ABIGAIL CAMPOS LEAL
abigail Campos Leal, a winding mountain range, transits between Art and Philosophy as a way of producing poetics that materially affect the colonial world’s undoing, thus enabling radically different ways of dancing life in the cosmos. Acts as the organizer of Slam Marginália, a poetry battle made by/for trans people. has published escuiresendo: ontographies poetics (O Sexo da Palavra, 2020) and ex/orbitâncias: the paths of gender defection (GLAC, 2021). studies for a doctorate in Philosophy at the Pontifícia Universidade Católica de São Paulo (PUC-SP), with the research a transição é uma fuga: as poéticas trans racializadas y o fim da ontologia [transition is an escape: racialized trans poetics and the end of ontology]. works as a professor in the Human Sciences and Decolonial Thought specialization course at PUC-SP.
 
BRUNO OLIVEIRA
Bruno O. is an educator and visual artist. Studies for a doctorate in Visual Arts at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG). He holds a Master’s degree in Latin American Interdisciplinary Studies (UNILA); he is specialist in Visual Arts and Contemporaneity (UEMG) and graduated in Computer Science (FUMEC/MG). He is a researcher at MALOCA: Grupo de Estudos Multidisciplinares em Urbanismos e Arquiteturas do Sul [Multidisciplinary Study Group in Southern Urbanism and Architecture] at UNILA, with inquiries on Latin American visual expressions. He worked as a programming coordinator at Casa 1 (São Paulo/SP), a cultural center and a welcoming space for LGBT youth expelled from home. Currently, he is an educator and artist at Jardim Miriam Arte Clube (JAMAC), a visual arts and citizenship studio in São Paulo’s south zone, and part of the Bajubá Collection, a collective initiative for the preservation, safeguarding, and historiographical research on Brazilian art, memory, and LGBT culture.
 
CYNTHIA SHUFFER
Cynthia Shuffer is a researcher and photographer. Ph.D. in American Studies from the University of Santiago de Chile and post-doctoral researcher at the same institution. Her research area focuses on photography, archives, and feminism. Militant of the Coordenadora Feminista 8M organization and member of the Brigada de Arte y Propaganda Laura Rodig. Currently, she is part of the Red de Conceptualismos del Sur, as coordinator of its archive. Curator of the photographic exhibition Nuestra urgencia x vencer on the archive of women’s struggle against dictatorship and co-author, with Kena Lorenzini, of the book Nuestra urgencia por vencer. Fotografías de la lucha de mujeres contra la dictadura (2021).
 
DANIELI BALBI
Danieli Balbi is Ph.D. in Science of Literature from the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ), professor at UFRJ’s School of Social Communication. She also studies Economic Sciences at Universidade Veiga de Almeida (UVA) and studies for a post-doctorate in Communication and Aesthetics at ECO-UFRJ.
 
ERICA MALUNGUINHO
Erica Malunguinho is an educator and cultural agitator. Master in Aesthetics and Art History. In 2018, she became the first trans congressperson elected in Brazil, with more than 55 thousand votes in the state of São Paulo by the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL). Erica is the head of the Commission for the Defense of the Rights of the Human Person, Citizenship, Participation, and Social Issues at São Paulo’s Legislative Assembly. Born in the state of Pernambuco, she has lived in São Paulo for 17 years. Before entering institutional politics, she worked in the education of children and youth, being largely involved in teacher training. Erica is famous for having given birth, in the central region of the city of São Paulo, to an urban quilombo known as Aparelha Luzia, a territory for the circulation of Black arts, cultures, and politics, also visible as an aesthetic-political installation, a zone of affection and a biome of Black intelligence.
 
FERNANDO DAVIS
Fernando Davis is a professor and researcher at the Faculty of Arts at the Universidad Nacional de La Plata (UNLP). Currently, he directs the research team Sexual Maladjustments in the History of Southern Art. Archival technologies, Critical Visualities, and Queer Temporalities, at the Instituto de Investigación en Producción y Enseñanza del Arte Latinoamericano de la FDA-UNLP. Among other exhibitions, he curated !QUEER! Disolvencias opacas, poéticas torcidas y otras fantasías insurgentes [!QUEER! Opaque Dissolutions, Crooked Poetics and Other Insurgent Fantasies] (La Plata, UNLP Art Center, 2018) and Inventar a la intemperie. Desobediencias sexuales e imaginación política en el arte contemporáneo [Inventing Outdoors. Sexual Disobedience and Political Imagination in Contemporary Art] (co-curator, Buenos Aires, Parque de la Memoria – Monumento a las Víctimas del Terrorismo de Estado, 2021). He has been a member of the Red Conceptualismos del Sur since its foundation in 2007.
 
JAMAL BATTS
Jamal Batts, Ph.D. is a scholar, curator, and writer. His work reflects on the relationship between Black queer contemporary visual art and the intricacies of sexual risk. He is a University of California President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, a Curator-in-Residence at the University of Pennsylvania, a Robert Rauschenberg Foundation Scholar-in-Residence, a Ford Foundation Dissertation Fellow, and a ONE National Lesbian & Gay Archives LGBTQ Research Fellow. His writing appears in publications such as the catalog for The New Museum’s Trigger: Gender as a Tool and a Weapon, Open Space, ASAP/J, and New Life Quarterly. He is a member of the curatorial collective The Black Aesthetic.
 
KAROL RADZISZEWSKI
Karol Radziszewski (b. 1980, Poland) is an interdisciplinary artist—he makes paintings, films, photographs, and installations. His archive-based methodology incorporates a range of cultural, historical, religious, social, and gender references. He has often reinterpreted the work of other artists, mainly the Eastern European neo-avant-garde, culling out their queer motifs or coming at their work from a queer and feminist perspective. Using the tools of appropriation art, he attempts to rewrite the official history and create his own narrative. Since 2005, he is publisher and editor-in-chief of DIK Fagazine, and has founded the Queer Archives Institute in 2015.
 
MAHMOUD KHALED
Mahmoud Khaled studied Fine Arts in Alexandria, Egypt, and Trondheim, Norway. His classical training as a visual artist seems to manifest in his interest in materiality and formal composition and their capacity to mimic the theatricality of power. His relationship to fine art education is critical and conversational. It informs an alternating ontological position where he either pronounces himself within the work as a vocational voice or swaps it for another hat: once performing the protagonist role of a painter flâneur and another time the one of an unknown curator of a politically important memorial. His work complicates and appropriates form to offer virtual proposals that rethink justice and imagine possibilities for a redemptive future. He has been named a 2020 DAAD artist in residence in Berlin.
 
MONICA BENICIO
Monica Benicio is a human rights and LGBTI+ activist, born and raised in Favela da Maré, Rio de Janeiro. She is an urbanist architect graduated from the Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), where she also obtained a Master’s degree in Architecture, in the area of Violence and Right to the City. She is a councilwoman for the city of Rio de Janeiro and has guided her work in the promotion and defense of women’s rights and the urbanist debate with a focus on social inclusion. Since the murder of her partner, councilwoman Marielle Franco, on March 14, 2018, she has been tirelessly devoted to the fight for justice for that barbaric crime, becoming an international reference in the defense of human rights.
 
REMOM MATHEUS BORTOLOZZI
Remom Bortolozzi is Ph.D. in Sciences from the Public Health Program at the Department of Preventive Medicine of the University of São Paulo’s (USP) Faculty of Medicine. He also holds a degree in Psychology from the Universidade Federal do Paraná (UFPR); a Master’s degree in Education from the Universidade de Brasília (UnB); and a specialization in Gender and Sexuality from the Universidade Estadual do Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). He is a founding member and coordinator of the Bajubá Collection. Currently, he is a manager at the Centro de Acolhida Casarão Brasil, a Specialized Shelter Center aimed at transvestites and trans women.