ON THE MARGINS OF THE ORDINARY WORLD

Angélica Liddell, Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Pedro Barateiro, Horácio Frutuoso, Pedro Barateiro, Meg Stuart, Jonathas de Andrade, INMUNE – National Institute for Black Women in Portugal, Jonas & Lander, Marina Abramovic, Jonathan Saldanha, William Forsythe, Vasya Run, Tania Bruguera… these are just some of the names gathered in the second edition of BoCA, which is back, now in Lisbon, Porto, and Braga, to provoke, reinforce, or reformulate unlikely relationships. After all, these are unlikely, unstable, precarious, uprooted times, marked by tension and collision between powerful forces, ranging
from desire and sex to war and annihilation. There are renewed movements in the air to claim rights, an extreme of positions, which bring to art the experience of the margins and
society in turmoil.

BoCA is “out of place,” it is “extradisciplinary,” it challenges us to change our position—whether we are spectators or citizens—by following the transgressive movements of artists (such as the Chilean group Ciudad Aberta, who arrive here on a performative journey). In the spirit of the many crises we are experiencing—migrants, extremism, climate change, inequalities, values, memory—these creators are in constant motion and unrest, between artistic languages, between geographies, between identities (nationality, sexuality…). At BoCA 2019, Beyoncé is evoked in a religious celebration led by Pastor Yolanda Norton (USA), pole dancing from the New York underworld is an expression of virtuosity and inquiry into race, discrimination, and identity (Gerard & Kelly), and photographer Wolfgang Tillmans gives
an electronic music concert. In this spirit of openness to others and to difference, Gonçalo M. Tavares & Os Espacialistas activate an “ephemeral space for Direct Art” in the performance that is “Laboratory of Above-Average Ways of Feeling,” which is also what BoCA is all about.

At BoCA 2019, we will consolidate our structural concepts and our practice through synergies designed between cities, between cultural facilities, between artistic territories, and between diverse audiences. BoCA reaffirms and consolidates its place as an active and decisive agent in work that takes place on different scales: in the investment and dissemination of cultural and artistic diversity; in the integration and empowerment of different communities, minorities, and ethnic groups; in the decentralization of cultural offerings within each city, within each region, and outside major centers; in the investigation of programming formats on local, interregional, and national scales; in the enhancement of tangible and intangible heritage through programming in heritage facilities and the investigation of new urban dynamics that we associate with the intangible expression that underpins our contemporary culture.

More than 50 institutional partners have joined BoCA in this edition. In the 2019/2020 biennium, BoCA takes its vocation as a project with a national dimension, a single body made up of different complicities and extending to different regions of the country, even further. Its scale exceeds borders and regionalisms, deepens relationships and affections, energizes new futures, and practices inclusion, diversity, and itinerancy as structuring elements of its identity.

In 2019, BoCA solidifies its programmatic line, based on programming expanded by various cultural facilities; on commissioning new creations from artists who develop extra-disciplinary languages; the challenge of creating new works in territories foreign to those in which the authors are specialists; the presentation of works that reveal new (marginal) identities of international artists; and the spatial recontextualization of existing creations, promoting new readings, which are also inclusive because they bring together audiences from very diverse circuits and sensibilities. This communion, in my view, goes beyond notions of multidisciplinary, undisciplined, or transdisciplinary. I therefore propose an “extradisciplinary” practice (Brian Holmes, on Community Subjects), because we seek innovative and fertile ground that enables the mapping of a new affective and cultural topography.

The program refers to contemporary dramaturgy, in which the articulation of all elements—the artists, the fields of intervention and imagination, the places occupied by the program, and the entire construction of ephemeral spaces—translates into a meaningful unity, where the order of particularity and plurality of the world in which we live, of the coexistence of many differences, participates: temporal, spatial, cultural, of scale. This unity contributes to the construction of a “common world,” as Hannah Arendt defined it, that is, a world defined by what is publicly shared among different individuals. In a time of fractured identities, we embrace fragmentation and from it we try to configure a dramaturgy about union. What does it mean to belong to a moment of global social and political fragmentation? What does it mean for power to erase identities and biographies that were pioneering? What does it mean for history to be reconstructed by power, rewritten for its own benefit? And for the feminine to be written with a masculine hand? Retelling history, redefining identities, genders, and nationalities. The BoCA 2019 program emphasizes identity, race, and gender politics, and continues to reflect on the dimensions of ritual and the sacred present in our contemporary world.

We are once again working closely with national and international artists, producing and co-producing 22 new creations in world premiere and presenting 12 creations in national premiere. All the artists in this edition are fundamental in constructing the larger puzzle that is this program, which unfolds in three cities.
Each one is a world that is important to frequent, even more than just visit, named without any order or hierarchy. Rui Chafes, Vera Mantero, Mariana Tegner Barros, Milo Rau, João Pais Filipe, João Pedro Rodrigues & João Rui Guerra da Mata, Ryan Trecartin, Otolith Group, Joana da Conceição, Kukuruz Quartet, Volmir Cordeiro, Maria Trabulo, Adolfo Luxúria Canibal… While emphasizing that this is a program in which everyone is equally fundamental, I must nevertheless express my enthusiasm for the Resident Artists in the 2019/2020 biennium: Marlene Monteiro Freitas, Horácio Frutuoso, Diana Policarpo, and Gerard & Kelly, whose works we will showcase in different contexts throughout this period.

I would like to thank all the partners who made this second edition possible, which brings the city of Braga together with the cities of Lisbon and Porto, the audiences who have followed us and those who will discover us for the first time. Curiosity, risk, and discovery guide us all in yet another edition.