BoCA inhabits the crossing between artistic territories, between spaces of culture and nature, welcoming audiences as constituents of polysemic beings who do not need to identify themselves—what matters is the generation of life, the exchange of experiences and knowledge that takes place in the collective. What matters is the relationship of radical empathy that BoCA, an agent of an artistic ecosystem anchored in crossovers, wishes to foster.

This edition of BoCA keeps alive its mission to support new languages, privileging the spaces ‘between’ – for example, between the performative and the visual –, new commissions to Portuguese and foreign artists, in trans dialogue (therefore, transgender in all its meanings), implementing projects that propose a new consciousness and models between artistic practices and sustainability.

Faced with the new civilizational era we are experiencing, the only reliable path is to act, to take concrete steps, even if small, towards a far-reaching transformation. The path that opens up as a challenge before us is the search for a new consciousness, new models, new identities, and new dissensions.

The currents of innovation and digitalization will say that it is too late to reflect on the human, to reclaim it, and that we should invest our efforts in reflecting on the post-human. In the face of the current dehumanization we are witnessing, it seems to me that we are facing the great challenge of our lives, which the pandemic has only made more evident: to make the ethical responsibility of life and this place ‘between’ and ‘trans’ that we wish to build a place of love. This is what this edition of BoCA is all about, opening up space for the polysemy of places of speech, pointing out the wounds of the past that we have not yet faced, and envisioning a possible future to be built together. In the midst of the storm of ecological, economic, and values crises, let us lean on the wise vision of Bruno Latour (who is also present at this BoCA) when he states that we have two possibilities for facing the moment we are living in: the catastrophic one, in which we accept that everything is ending and we resign ourselves from our responsibilities; and the optimistic one, in which we affirm that we have learned that everything is always in the process of rebirth. Hence the echo that the conference-performance “Moving Earths,” in collaboration with sociologist Frédérique Aït-Touati, makes with the 17th century and the Renaissance, presenting a New New World.

NEW COLLECTIVE NARRATIVES

In a time of global crisis characterized by concepts of fluidity—of time, space, truth, identities, vibrant being, life—in which history assumes itself as a space open to new subjects and new critical perspectives, we need to build together narratives and elements that inspire and mobilize us to reconnect with the deepest human dimension. “It is heartbreaking that the earth is so brutally exploited today. As if bled dry, and almost without blood,” writes Byung-Chul Han in “In Praise of the Earth.”

With “The Boat,” Grada Kilomba not only creates her first work for public space, but also inaugurates a new collective narrative in that same public space, built from the history of dehumanization, violence, and genocide of African and indigenous peoples.

How can we construct new narratives that reaffirm history as a fluid and non-normative construction? How can we open spaces for fictional narratives where imagination can heal the past and reshape the future? Odete, in On Revelations and Muddy Becomings, delves into a dialogue between history, archaeology, and research to recover the place of mystery and fantasy in the present time. The fluid historical characters she summons for the performance, like the bodies Miles Greenberg places on pedestals with sand, create a new shared imaginary of the “Whole-World” (Édouard Glissant), which is what we are looking for: the humanity to come. For her part, Lithuanian artist Anastasia Sosunova manipulates modern mythology and explores constructions of iconographies and symbols to shape new revealing and metamorphic narratives, while visual and performance artist Carlos Azeredo Mesquita questions, with his project “Uber-Alles,” the official, hegemonic, and nationalist narratives that hymns tell about the identity of peoples.

How can we propose narratives that reinforce the codependencies between living beings (humans, non-humans, post-humans, agents, actors, vibrant beings…) through a holistic perspective? Recognizing that we are all nature (Ailton Krenak), Andreia Santana’s performative and installation creation calls for an interdependence between sculptures, performers, and bacteria deposited on sculptural objects through the physical, oral, and sound contact of the performers. And how can we explore sustainable and inclusive vocabularies that, as in Noé Soulier’s “Passages,” explore the driving heritage that humans share with other animals?

A test of “Prove You Are Human” (an act that has become almost primitive in our relationship with the Internet) is linked to activating a radical empathy with history, rewriting and re-inscribing collective narratives in the present that, on the one hand, propose opening history to a biodiverse coexistence with multiple voices and, on the other, respond to the urgencies of a contemporary world in crisis, caused above all by climate change—and which leads the sun to speak directly to us (Agnieszka Polska’s “The New Sun”).

LIMITS OF THE HUMAN:
IMAGE, LANGUAGE, AND NOISE

The philosopher Bruno Latour, whose lecture-performance “Moving Earths” we present in collaboration with sociologist Frédérique Aït-Touati, urges us to live together, a challenge that includes and embraces all the plurality of what constitutes life on Earth: “If somewhere in 1610 we had to absorb the shock that ‘the earth revolves’ as stated by Galileo, in 2021 we must accept the much more surprising shock that the earth trembles and reacts to human actions, to the point of affecting all our development projects.”

Today, we need to redefine a new physical and mental geography that reflects the need to rethink the world as a whole, and this challenge necessarily involves representing the world through images that construct paradigms and myths. Art is the language, the medium, and the fundamental link in the construction of this New New World.

It is this vision of the world that, in the face of the tremor of direct action caused by humans, brings Bruno Latour closer to the ephemeral construction of the theatrical device.

The mental world we construct from the visual and cognitive productions to which we are exposed, with greater emphasis on contact with the digital, has an effect on neuroplasticity and our brain. According to Byung-Chul Han, human exposure to the digital fragments and hinders collective action and causes damage to our subjectivity. The risk of psychopolitical dictatorship that the digital offers puts humans at risk. With “The Third Reich,” director Romeo Castellucci brings us precisely the image of imposed and mandatory communication, whose authoritarianism hides behind the demand for equality. On a large screen, we see all the nouns in the Italian dictionary projected, fired one after the other by a hyper-fast machine that strips them of meaning and sense, making them equal in a mass emptying. A military aggression of the digital, which separates and hurts humanity, behind the specter of “freedom.”

It is also with civic and emotional awareness that promotes a radical break with fascist and anti-democratic tendencies that we must test our humanity: “Prove You Are Human.” One of the best examples of the current program is the mobilizing capacity of the activist and feminist collective LASTESIS (Chile), which in 2020 expanded the street performance “Un Violador en tu Camino” to more than 50 countries, proving its humanity through radical empathy. Aware that nature is affected by this physical, cultural, social, and political mobilization, that we are just one more element, Chilean artists and activists are coming to Portugal for the first time to develop, with around 80 local women and dissidents, the performance “Resistance,” which proposes to denounce the violence of colonial thinking and active extractivism. Grada Kilomba also paves the way for a break with an oppressive and colonialist view of the past, with the performances she will direct around “O Barco” (The Boat), in which she makes communities from the African diaspora the protagonists, creating a space for vindication, lamentation, and rituality so that history can be recovered and rewritten.

In a different way, Pedro Costa touches on the same wound. He uses video, theater, and music with Os Músicos do Tejo (The Musicians of the Tagus) to create a fictional narrative that once again places the emphasis on post-colonialism. The Portuguese premiere of American photographer and director Khalik Allah shows us the dissident faces of the streets of New York, with a disarming gaze that exposes a viscerally beautiful humanity.

EMOTIONAL STOPS

Mónica Calle (Between Heaven and Earth) and Dayana Lucas (Falling Upward Simone Weil) turn their attention to public, natural, and urban spaces, where they lead small groups of spectators on intimate journeys to unknown places. Mónica Calle returns to intimacy, inspired by the words of Fiama Hasse Pais Brandão, to remind us that we are connected: “In the Apocalypse, repentant demons will be angels and guilty angels will be demons, physically connected, back to back.”

The scale of affection and closeness is also very present in the creations of Joana Castro and Maurícia | Neves, who take a micro situation of emotional vulnerability (the end of a romantic relationship) and turn it into a work that reflects the macro, a world in rupture, in revolution. André Uerba reaffirms this place of closeness, of demanding an end to social distancing, which characterizes his performative creations, and proposes to explore the different dimensions of touch, its properties, qualities, and complexities, suggesting the breaking down of any kind of barriers between the performers.

Film director Gus Van Sant makes his debut with his first stage creation, the musical theater show “Andy,” inspired by the story of Andy Warhol. Here, Gus Van Sant not only recovers a narrative from art history that makes a radical break with the past, proposing a paradigm shift regarding the body, time, the camera, and a sustainable poetics based on interpersonal relationships and emotional closeness. These are documentary narratives that combine fictional writing, reviving the belief in the collective and the creation of new movements with the power to reconnect us to the human. In addition to the uniqueness of this performance in the American director’s cinematographic and artistic oeuvre, it is also unusual in that it brings to Lisbon, as the place where the show was created, the memory of a remarkable time in world pop culture, led by Andy Warhol and experienced by Gus Van Sant from within. This new New York – Lisbon – New York also reaffirms that we are all connected, while revealing in Van Sant’s narrative the importance of the place of affection and friendship.

THE DEFENSE OF NATURE

Everything is connected in this generic concept that we all participate in the whole and that humanity is a vast notion that includes various entities, some of which cannot even be named, and which finds its central axis in nature. In this sense, almost inevitably, BoCA proposes to combine artistic programming with natural spaces and, to this end, over the course of 10 years, has developed the project “The Defense of Nature,” inspired by the legacy of Joseph Beuys.

The gesture that makes up “Planting 7,000 Trees” is divided between 7,000 plantings of new creations (natural/artistic) of native species, fertilizing a long-term project in which new municipalities and thousands of national and foreign artists (including ordinary citizens, revisited here as artists) will be the agents of building a forest of artists and works of art. In this blurring of the roles between natural and human, artist and non-artist, Beuys affirmed the iconic phrase that “we can all be artists.” In light of this proposition, we affirm: “we can all save the world.” Acting in this sense is the necessary step to take for an identity test that affirms our humanity. It is precisely in this pulsating place between art and nature that “I want to see my mountains” is situated, curated by Delfim Sardo and Sílvia Gomes, with the participation of artists Sara Bichão, Diana Policarpo, Dayana Lucas, Gustavo Sumpta, Gustavo Ciríaco, Musa paradisiaca, and the Berru collective.

If CAPTCHA (Automated Turing test to tell computers and humans apart) is a security test known as challenge-response authentication, the 3rd edition of BoCA launches the challenge “Prove You Are Human” (Prove You Are Human) and listens to responses and questions not only from the artists who make up its program, but also proposes that the public take the test through premises it proposes, based on aesthetic experience, reflection, and invitation to action. This small movement in this direction, which constitutes the program of this edition of the biennial, is possible thanks to the funding entities, institutional partnerships, co-producers, and the support we have gathered around this edition, to whom I am enormously grateful.

This plurality of rhythms, formats, genres, and relationships constitutes the crossing that Paul B. Preciado speaks of, which is based on mixtures that never cease to reveal nature, as exemplified by the project by António Poppe & La Família Gitana (in which the poetry of Camões and Davi Kopenawa, of the Yanomami Indians, is combined with the poetry of Camões) or in the new forms that Tânia Carvalho and Matthieu Ehrlacher experiment with tradition, with the Rancho Folclórico da Casa do Minho in Lisbon and the Grupo Folclórico de Faro. The intersections and transcendence of segmentation and cataloging, in praise of a community of differences, are based on policies of care that raise other fundamental questions, such as migration and the reasons behind it, as in Tiago Cadete’s “Brasa,” the feminine and its historical condition, which Anne Imhof reflects on in “Untitled (Wave),” and the sound and visual futurologies that Jonathan Saldanha brings to life in the plant space, similar to Capicua with Tiago Barbosa, who present “A Tralha” in the natural space.

In this edition of BoCA, I propose a program that combines different rhythms of projects and relationships with artists and institutions, based on a transition of integrated, plural, and sustainable production and creation processes, namely: short-term projects that reinforce the artistic and ethical commitment to artists and production structures, creations that extend in time and space through a greater commitment to the short-lived nature of theater and performance (Grada Kilomba, Miles Greenberg, Mónica Calle), sustainable and long-term relationships with artists and projects (Gus Van Sant, Grada Kilomba, Odete, and Miles Greenberg are the Resident Artists in 2021-2022), deepening of reflections and long-term processes that combine performativity, visuality, activism, and neuroscience (Tania Bruguera and Jonathan Uliel Saldanha, with emphasis on the partnership with the Champalimaud Foundation in artistic residencies with neuroscientists lasting 2 to 3 years), a focus on the direct relationship and representation of local, artistic, associative, and diverse communities, whose active participation is involved in the creative development of projects (LASTESIS, Grada Kilomba, Musa paradisiaca, Miles Greenberg, Gus Van Sant, A Defesa da Natureza project), to also initiate an inter-relational ecosystem between art, sustainability, and science through the project A Defesa da Natureza, developed over 10 years and which brings together artists and populations from diverse geographies, institutional and academic partnerships (Liga para a Protecção da Natureza, the ISA Center for Applied Ecology, CENSE of FCT/Nova, the University of Algarve, and the municipalities of Lisbon, Almada, and Faro).

Prove You Are Human.

JOHN ROMÃO
Artistic Director