In the 4th edition of BoCA, with the title “Invisible Present”, I want to give visibility to living things that are not seen - either because of social, political, cultural, economic, legal or technological conditioning, or because we premeditatedly don’t want to recognize the existence of otherness, to validate identities that inhabit the margins.
“Invisible Present” questions the powers that prevent equality, justice and freedom in different contexts - from the migratory crisis, to gender identity crossings, to the war that happens far away from us - by erasing bodies, movements and actions that are the engine of life from history. Often they are bodies that inhabit the crossing between states, between categories, between names. Often they are people who die in the silent and distant anonymity of war. Often it is ancestral knowledge that has been culturally erased and is now being recovered. Often it is the movement of history itself to be repaired, to be rebuilt in the present, so that tomorrow can have more hope.
The title also reflects on the technological and digital time that tends to annul the body from the human vocabulary, in a mechanism in which we become spectres or avatars, inhabiting an aerial time and space that responds to a vertigo of acceleration. “Invisible Present” thinks about the dissolution of the body and affective relationships in this home of digital comfort - but also about a certain disenchantment with the future, a crisis that makes it impossible to fully inhabit the present.

John Romão