PRESS
PÚBLICO | ÍPSILON
Rita Xavier
21 July 2026
Self-Uncensored #4 [On Voice] – Jardins do Bombarda
“Tânia M. Guerreiro Provokes the Artistic Community into Self-Analysis”
https://www.publico.pt/2026/07/21/culturaipsilon/critica/tania-m-guerreiro-provoca-autoanalise-comunidade-artistica-2182453
The multifaceted curator, producer and consultant Tânia M. Guerreiro likes to provoke. Not as a perverse and inconsequential pleasure, but because putting herself — and us — at risk is her modus operandi for (self-)analysis. Her reflections intertwine the vices of institutionalised artistic creation with the places we occupy and the positions we assume in a current state of the world that keeps reflecting our own inconsistencies back at us, like a mirror.
In the Self-Uncensored project — literally, self-without-censorship — Tânia seeks to make the mechanisms of self-censorship conscious, challenging the artistic community to experiment with twists on the concept and its implications. Labelled an “expanded festival”, it appropriates the fetish concepts of contemporary programming in order to turn them inside out. If the festivalisation of culture tends to rapidly consume creations and trending themes, here an idea is explored in depth and digested with the time (and refinement) of the expanded. Performances, lectures, conversations, workshops and other recognisable formats seek to turn each Sunday into a ritual of encounter dedicated to the niche and to recognising its own traps. What Tânia calls the “invisible monster”.
There is explicit censorship in authoritarian regimes. But there is another kind that operates, in disguised form, within democratic regimes, infiltrating everyday choices. This is the “invisible monster” Tânia speaks of. It is no longer the forbidden that becomes desirable, but rather what we learn, almost without noticing, to desire. Within the artistic bubble, it manifests itself in the way we anticipate funding criteria, the gaze of programmers, or the languages legitimised by institutions, without being able to guide our choices by an internal compass. Freedom thus becomes a succession of conditioned choices: but to fight the monster, we must name it.
Naming the Monster
It is therefore unsurprising that this fourth moment seeks out the place of the voice.
The first performance is, paradoxically, the one in which the voice takes centre stage through its limits. In multivocalização, Gaya de Medeiros shifts the word towards the realm of the unsaid, opening up space for the body to experience and expose these unnameable impulses. Two benches and a cloud of steam occupy a sauna, the setting for the three semi-naked bodies of Gaya de Medeiros, Paula Diogo and Francisco Rebelo and for their purges. Amid towels and clothes being put on and taken off, they rehearse other forms of enunciation that inhabit the interstices between what we say and what we leave unsaid, in that almost indistinguishable potential between the playful and the erotic, laughter and tension, where the slips of the unconscious erupt. The title, too, merges “mama”, “you” and “daddy”, suspending the separation between symbolic functions that, in psychoanalysis, structure the subject. The musical quotations — Sade’s Smooth Operator and the gospel song Oh Happy Day — introduce an ironic counterpoint between seduction, guilt and the promise of redemption, reminding us that desire never reaches the body intact after passing through social normalisations.
Three tables, three texts and three microphones form the democratic number that anticipates Tudo o que não consigo dizer [Everything I Cannot Say], by Rubén Sabbadini, the performance that follows. The author-actor, more inclined towards representations than presentations, explains his strategies for reaching consensus around three written versions of the lecture, asking a group of invited women to choose which one should be read. The gesture seems simple: to relinquish his authority and entrust the decision to the collective. But the device quickly traces a spiral that betrays the curator’s decision-making role and ultimately attempts to redeem her.
Rather than resolving the question of authority, it makes visible the impossibility of eliminating it, exposing the latent — and acknowledged — mansplaining of the 50-year-old cis, heterosexual, white man reading a text. This reading is a sharing of concerns about the intended recipients and purposes of his writing and, while not seeking to be a literary exercise, it never quite manages to make itself truly vulnerable either.
Lígia Soares appears pointing a camera at us, turning the audience’s gaze back onto itself. Glorious in her cockroach costume, the astute performative Ajuste de Contas [Settling Accounts] turns humour into a critical device. Rather than speaking abstractly about inequality, she makes us account for it among those present, symbolically redistributing inheritances, advantages and positions. An annoying cockroach that clings to the toes of shoes and dirties the path of those who insist on treating money, social background and access to culture as trajectories of individual merit. In the final reckoning, she is a broke cockroach; she is the artist questioning her “small audience”, because “it’s very difficult to change ideas when we don’t talk about things, isn’t it?”
Josefa Pereira returns to the project, dwelling on and enlarging a single image and, unlike Sabbadini’s dispersions, pollinating it. The reading of Flechas Douradas [Golden Arrows] begins with a phrase attributed to Francis Ford Coppola, according to which every artist is born with a quiver containing a limited number of golden arrows — and it just happens. Drifting associatively, Josefa allows the metaphor to be contaminated by other geographies and temporalities, bringing into a History made of gifts, golden cradles and stolen gold the dimension of other small everyday treasures, more or less glittering.
Maikon K closes the performances at the point where the body manifests a poetics of transgression. In O loko e o animal são livres para matar [The Madman and the Animal Are Free to Kill], there is no childhood repression, but rather a confrontation with what culture has repressed in order to manufacture the idea of the human. Maikon experiments with an aesthetic territory in which, albeit provisionally, legal and ethical conventions are suspended. The gesture that lights a match becomes the fire that burns; the body observing a dead pigeon is the one that draws closer until it tastes its own death. Words of violence and eroticism cease to function merely as symbols and become the material of an uncomfortable but real experience. Echoing the radical and deeply controversial performance movements of the 1960s, the performance also expands into a workshop that gives the audience the possibility of taking risks and crossing through what, within us, resists limits.
Implicating Rather Than Explaining
Already offstage, over a glass of wine and two or three croquettes we were still trying to digest, the questions provoked by the programme persisted and circulated.
This (self-)analysis does not diagnose, but sniffs out the unconscious patriarchal-colonial-capitalistic monster that psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik also speaks of. It therefore means freeing creation from the productivist destiny that turns it into a commodity, and making it once again an ethical, aesthetic, clinical and political force capable of reconfiguring ways of life. Perhaps this is Tânia M. Guerreiro’s most radical gesture, and Self-Uncensored is itself just one more dimension of these singular becomings of hers: her self dancing towards other possibilities for connection, work and the creation of shared futures.
PÚBLICO | Ípsilon
Jornalista: Gonçalo Frota
25-01-2026
Self-Uncensored [UnCoding] — Teatro do Bairro Alto
«Mohammad Abbasi (e não só) desafia as censuras no TBA»
https://www.publico.pt/2026/01/25/culturaipsilon/noticia/mohammad-abbasi-nao-so-desafia-censuras-tba-2162384
Mohammad Abbasi had never seen his mother dance. For that reason, in 2008, the Iranian dancer and choreographer created a solo entitled I Am My Mother, in which he began by informing the audience of this very fact and then, imagining himself taking care of his mother’s body, lent her movements that could offer this woman the possibility of breaking away from the gestures exclusive to everyday life and entering another sphere of individual expression.
“For me,” Abbasi explains to PÚBLICO, “there was a body confined within her body, influenced and affected by Iran’s social and political norms, which do not allow my mother — or any other Iranian woman of her generation — to express herself through movement. Hence this accumulation of suppressed energy inside my mother’s body, which could easily be released through dance.”
It is not surprising that Tânia M. Guerreiro, producer and curator of the Self-Uncensored festival, with a session this Sunday, January25, at Teatro do Bairro Alto (TBA), Lisbon, thought of Mohammad Abbasi and his solo to present in this programme that questions forms of self-censorship. Self-Uncensored stems from a previous project conceived by Guerreiro, Self-Mistake, a grant that “intended to give artists the freedom to develop their work without pressure,” not even necessarily culminating in public presentations. The challenge it posed was that of full freedom and risk in creation. Upon realizing, however, that the typology of supported projects was very close to those funded by conventional grants, Tânia M. Guerreiro explains to PÚBLICO that she concluded “the opportunity to experiment and go further was not happening.”
This reflection led her to identify a mechanism of self-censorship present in art created in democratic countries, where there is choice — out of a need to differentiate them from those where there is objective censorship. “This is a project to remind us of the freedom we still have and to draw attention to a series of mechanisms we are not aware of — because there is also another type of censorship, indirect, that sometimes convinces us that we want certain things.” She illustrates this with artistic work developed with communities, which can stem both from the artists’ genuine will and from the expectation of having their proposals supported. “In recent years,” Guerreiro adds, “I also feel that the arts, instead of bringing a series of questions and provocations, have moved in the direction of responding to social needs and even raising awareness about gender issues, etc. Which is not bad in itself; the problem is when it seems that only this strand exists and we therefore do not have much diversity in support.”
Betraying the funder
This Sunday, the TBA will thus be occupied by performances, lecture-performances, and conversations around self-censorship in the artistic context, with the participation of Isabél Zuaa (luso-Guinean-Angolan interdisciplinary artist), Emmanuel Ndefo (Nigerian choreographer, performer, and researcher), Ana Borralho & João Galante (Portuguese multidisciplinary duo), Jana Shostak (Belarusian artist and activist), and Mohammad Abbasi.
The current January edition — Self-Uncensored is a festival that unfolds throughout the year and takes on different formats — began to take shape in Tânia M. Guerreiro’s mind following the open call through which Emmanuel Ndefo’s proposal to present Ecstatic Antibodies arrived, “a meditation on the body, desire, and afro-queer spirituality, evoking codes of communion and dissidence.” This was a central choice because this edition takes place under the theme “uncoding — codes, censorship, and resistance,” under which all the performances fit in some way. Jana Shostak, for example, presents Minute of Scream for…, in which she circumvents direct censorship through a scream that can symbolize many things — in Lisbon, her scream will be dedicated to Iran — while Mohammad Abbasi will present I Am My Mother, as well as the manifesto Series of Statements about Autonomy.
The first two points of Abbasi’s artistic manifesto are directed at Funding (“betray your funder, there is a political agenda behind all financial support!”, he denounces) and at Politics (“politically exotic art, created in the Global South and welcomed by the Global North market, always repeats the same themes: human rights, women’s rights, LGBTQ+ community rights, freedom of expression, and censorship”).
“I made this manifesto when I was in Iran and began to be invited by Western institutions, usually from Belgium, the Netherlands, and Germany,” he tells PÚBLICO. “At first, I was happy about that recognition. After a few years of coming to Europe, performing, sharing my ideas, and programming festivals here, I began to get irritated by some aspects of those invitations, which made me think I was being considered a kind of politically exotic artist.”
By better understanding the relationships between institutions and artists from the Middle East, Abbasi became convinced that his presence on European stages served so that “Dutch spectators, for example, could celebrate their freedom and their extraordinary society.” “They put us on display just as they did throughout history, when Black people were presented inside cages in the context of human zoos,” he comments. “I felt somewhat insulted and began to raise more questions about funding and the political agendas behind it.”
Awareness of this position, as an artist exiled in Europe in recent years, led Mohammad Abbasi to realize that, in order to escape the traps of exoticism and the themes privileged by funders and programmers — and ultimately to create with some degree of freedom — he would need to make use of a “Trojan horse.” That is, he pretends to correspond to what is expected of him while nevertheless seeking to frustrate those expectations. Ultimately, it is about finding a third path: neither obeying exoticism nor embracing the same themes of the countries that host him. It is enough, to a certain extent, to seem like yes.
PÚBLICO BRASIL
Maria Giulia Pinheiro
3 February 2026
Why Theatres Are Empty
Or Why It Is Strategic to Make People Believe They Are. Or Rather: Who Keeps Saying This, For What Purpose, and From What Position?
https://www.publico.pt/2026/02/03/publico-brasil/opiniao/teatros-estao-vazios-2163451
“Why Theatres Are Empty” is a short satirical scene by the German author Karl Valentin, written in the early decades of the twentieth century, when a series of new problems were beginning to impose themselves upon social life. With relentless irony, Valentin proposes the creation of a Universal Mandatory Theatre, imposed by the State, as unavoidable as school or firefighters. If education is compulsory, why not art?
The monologue tensions the paradoxical relationship between culture, the State, and freedom. To what extent can or should art be institutionalised? What happens when that which exists to open questions becomes a duty? Who defines what culture is or is not? The public, the awards, the State?
In 1979, Teatro da Cornucópia premiered And One Cannot Exterminate Him?, a performance built from texts by Karl Valentin, among them Why Theatres Are Empty, at Teatro do Bairro Alto. In 2026, on Sunday, 25 January, TBA hosted the Self-Uncensored [UnCoding] edition: six performances and a public conversation on the visible and invisible mechanisms that shape discourse, on censorship, codification, and breaches. It was sold out, with tickets in high demand and an audience willing to remain for almost seven uninterrupted hours of programming.
The theatre is not empty. Only those who do not go to the theatre could think so. Because people go to the theatre when they need to ask questions, or when the answers they already have are no longer enough. And we, just as in Karl Valentin’s time, are faced with many new problems — and some very old ones too.
The crisis we are going through is also an aesthetic one. Theatre is the opposite of social media, political discourse, and even a newspaper column. Theatre is the technology of encounter. It is not rhetorical; it is relational. It does not deliver quick answers: it produces experience and, often, discomfort. Very often it is not good, not “good art”. It fails. And still, it is unforgettable.
Why Theatres Are Empty
Human. Beautiful, horrible, tragic, pathetic, fragile. Handmade. These delicacies corrode the aesthetic logic of success, productivity, permanent correctness, and the idealised figure of the contemporary “good man”. Theatre is metaphor and subtext. In theatre, in the performing arts, one speaks about one thing while speaking about many others and, sometimes, indeed, about nothing at all. It is in this deviation that communication happens. But something always happens, inevitably. We leave different from how we entered.
Why Theatres Are Empty
Theatres are full, even when audiences are numerically small. Because in theatre, being alive is put to the test. We are alive together. We think with the whole body. We feel. We doubt. And that is frightening because it is uncontrollable. Thankfully.
Why Theatres Are Empty
A meme recently circulated, after the four Oscar nominations for The Secret Agent, saying: “Take your child out of football school and put them in theatre classes.” Although I believe team sports are fundamental in anyone’s upbringing, I also agree that theatre in childhood is profoundly beneficial. But above all, I would like more adults to accept placing themselves at risk before the unpredictable event that stage art produces. Especially now, when we need to learn how to ask new questions and reformulate others.
Why Theatres Are Empty
During the conversation that closed the Self-Uncensored [UnCoding] gathering, the question arose of how to break through the so-called bubbles in which we live, whether produced by algorithms or by our own habits. I do not know the answer either. Perhaps this text is, above all, an invitation for those outside the theatre bubble to try crossing into it. Not out of obligation, of course.
PÚBLICO BRASIL
Ruy Filho
30 January 2026, 7:15
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
The attacks against TBA expose a pattern that goes beyond an isolated case: culture has entered the centre of a dispute that threatens its very existence.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
You should prepare yourselves, culture will be the next to suffer attacks. That is how I ended the meeting, almost two years ago, at one of the most important institutions in Portugal. The conversation with the director ran counter to the enthusiasm surrounding what could have been a new beginning for the institution itself. I had no intention of discouraging her project. However, having directly experienced what happened in Brazil, from the beginning of the attacks on artists (and not only artists) to the most intimate and violent moments that followed, the warning seemed necessary to me. Especially among friends.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
From that meeting until today, Portugal has developed a different relationship with art. It has reached the inevitable. Always with the expected verbosity and caricature, following the script already tested in countries where culture has come under attack. The public statement made by a Lisbon city councillor about the programming of TBA (Teatro do Bairro Alto) — presented as an example of the dangerous domination of the left — already marks the zero moment of the official persecution that is to come, in one way or another. The absence of any defence from the government itself and its representatives alerts us to this fact.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
We must therefore prepare ourselves for the obvious: once the starting signal has been given, the violence will not cease. On the contrary, it will grow, spreading throughout the popular imagination and feeding multiple prejudices. It is not true, however, that they have another project for culture, which could at least suggest a desperate wish to replace values and morals. They want only its destruction. Nor should artists feel special because of this. The destruction being sought does not concern a single sector, nor is it circumstantial: it is general, and concerns no longer merely the liberal order, as so many write about (myself included), but increasingly every form of order.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
Exactly twelve days later, after several public statements from artists and cultural figures opposing the delirium in the Lisbon Assembly, I attended Self-Uncensored [Uncoding], a selection of performances curated by Tânia M. Guerreiro, featuring Iranian, Luso-Guinean-Angolan, Portuguese, Nigerian, and Belarusian artists. For five hours, we were guided through reflections that were anything but simplistic and unsettling precisely because they did not limit themselves to obvious questions, but instead brought forward impossible questions and highly critical contexts, even when ironic.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
Filling TBA responds to the current moment in two ways: it means reacting to the councillor, by affirming the theatre’s relevance; and reacting to conformist and complacent curatorial practices through a proposal with a rare potential for disturbance. Returning to the councillor, and assuming that everything is merely strategic and therefore repetitive, her speech publicly named the artists integrated into TBA’s upcoming programme. This exposure serves several purposes: to ridicule and expose the enemy. Curiously, in Manifesto on Autonomy by Mohammad Abbasi, presented at Self-Uncensored [Uncoding], one of the points concerns the right to anonymity: “Anonymity brings power, and the government will never allow us to be anonymous.”
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
The same right to a transparent existence, without social and cultural markers being imposed upon the artist and the individual regarding who they are (racial, gendered, sexual, national, etc.), is claimed by Isabél Zuaa in De.Negrir or becoming black. By sharing the same discomfort, Zuaa and Abbasi map violence as that which names, identifies, exposes, makes public, publicises, and defines the artist as someone irredeemably specific, rendering them concrete for combat and annihilation.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
This perception is not new. Signed by philosopher and sociologist Geoffroy de Lagasnerie and writer Édouard Louis, the Manifesto for an Intellectual and Political Counteroffensive (2015) defended several principles in response to the rise of French conservatism: refusal (escaping imposed debates); naming (identifying and refusing falsifications of opinion); redistribution of shame (changing the limits of what may be said); and intervention (occupying spaces to the greatest extent possible).
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
In a lecture delivered at the School of Fine Arts in Paris, Lagasnerie demonstrated how art is conditioned to coexist with multiple forms of power and is therefore incapable of ethical innocence, since nothing can be created outside the social context, in a state of total and radical exteriority. Even critical and ideological art must acknowledge and assume some complicity with the institutions and structures that organise and enable it.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
The question, then, must be approached from another angle: with which institutions have artists accepted becoming complicit? How do such political and economic institutions establish ethical modulations for artists? And what are the acceptable limits of those modulations?
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
Over recent decades, particularly with the important expansion of bodies and discourses within cultural manifestations, the illusion emerged that the symbolic positions of artists alone would be enough to generate effective historical transformations, as though art itself were sufficient and capable of politically mobilising subjects. However, the emancipation idealised by and through engagement has entered into crisis, given its inability to transform dominant powers and resolve the contradictions it reveals and denounces.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
The central point now to be investigated and experimented with by artists has become another: to give visibility to the irresolvable, to the unanswerable, not in order to achieve another form of salvation for current civilisational models, but perhaps to remain the last space where we may still refuse to lie about the world. This does not mean reducing art to political manifestation. Art must have the courage not to demand or expect from itself only what belongs to politics to accomplish.
TBA Was Only the Beginning, and It May Also Be the Beginning of the Response
When the performing arts are grounded in the collective experimentation of affects, through unexpected and potentially conflictual poetic dynamics, they free themselves from attacks and delirious discourses because it is impossible to contradict what each person feels — especially when that individual reorganises themselves deeply and plurally among many others. So long as the arts remain trapped in the illusion that they can overcome the failure of politics, they will remain imprisoned within the vile and opportunistic trap that appropriates their own justifications in order to attack them. After all, as art historian T. J. Clark explains in his most recent essay, and with his characteristic pessimism, when art takes the place of politics, this is usually a defeat of politics, not a victory of art.
Suggested readings:
Those Passions: On Art and Politics, by T. J. Clark. Thames and Hudson Ltd, 2025.
Hypocrites and Oligarch: Past and Future of the Culture Wars, by Rui Tavares. Tinta da China, 2025.
Lá — Textos para Danças
Latextosparadancas
Renan Marcondes
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/latextosparadancas/
Post: https://www.instagram.com/p/DbGPsrSjuR4/
Post: https://www.instagram.com/p/DbGMsbwjks0/
JOSEFA PEREIRA
With a lectern positioned on one side of the stage, Josefa Pereira enters wearing sober clothes: a white shirt accompanied by a delicate gold chain, trousers, heavy black shoes and a long grey blazer. Calmly, she recounts discovering a book by Maira Gainza that draws on an encounter between the author and filmmaker Francis Ford Coppola, in which he states that an artist is someone who shoots golden arrows throughout their life.
This reading leads her to reflect on what conditions of time and space allow such arrows to be shot. Remaining standing throughout, she reads a text in which she shares this question with the audience, wondering how many such arrows there might be, whether there are practice arrows, or even whether people subjected to different geographical and social conditions might receive different numbers of them. With biting humour, she addresses the radical difference that allows certain artists to produce continuously and to have the right to fail, while others have very few opportunities for visibility and experimentation. Her critique seems directed at a global context of increasing precarity and indifference towards artistic work, although she may perhaps be preaching to the converted. What occurs to us as we listen is that, in fact, we have no addressees: those to whom these questions should be directed are simply not there to hear them.
The image of the golden arrows is at once celestial, as though the artist were an ethereal being — a Cupid or a Greek god — and also an image of a gift, as though they could be received from someone endowed with the power to choose those destined to shoot them. We should note, then, how Coppola’s argument stands in direct opposition to a formulation such as Joseph Beuys’s, for whom every human being is an artist. Not here. Here, the artist is a chosen one sent into battle; this is why they are given a weapon with which to practise their craft. The argument becomes even stranger when we remember that the director’s most recent film, Megalopolis, made with his own funds after a long hiatus, proved to be a resounding box-office failure and a film of highly questionable taste. So much gold, both on and off stage, for an arrow that disappears into the air.
Presented on an evening that brought together four other artists, the piece is the most concise, both in its argument and in its scenic construction, displaying a minimalism that interests Pereira across several of her works. Giving this question a more intense performative dimension might lead the artist to investigate the very structure of the speech itself, delivered standing, frontally, with an argument as smooth and gleaming as an arrow.
After all, there is a blind spot in this question. The art system is not organised around results, well-executed works, technical excellence or heightened sensitivity — which undermines Coppola’s argument that, in the end, “only technique remains”. It is structured through the production of difference, through the creation of something that, in some way, proves to be unprecedented or, at least, has not been seen for a long time. This performativity of difference, which can at times effectively produce something singular, does not operate along the vector of an arrow shot forwards or upwards, but according to an inward vector: that of diving into oneself.
Perhaps this is why the image of Exu at the beginning of her speech is essential: at the crossroads, there are not only four paths but seven, the final vector being the one that leads within oneself. This arrow that enters the self needs neither gold, technique nor brilliance. Its power lies in being invisible.
MAIKON K
The scene is simple. A man holds a fire extinguisher and speaks to the audience under a general yellowish light. This is how Maikon K’s performance lecture O lobo e o salmão são livres para matar [The Wolf and the Salmon Are Free to Kill] begins, presented as part of Self-Uncensored #4 [On Voice], alongside five other works of a similar nature.
The artist describes his desire to work with fire inside the performance space, something almost impossible given the various safety protocols of European venues and the need to protect the audience. Despite working only with small matches, he had to buy this fire extinguisher and, for budgetary reasons, instead of hiring a firefighter, he asks someone in the audience to take responsibility for using it should that become necessary. Here we see the central question running through the work: responsibility (or irresponsibility) between artist and audience. After all, within this gathering of people, who is responsible for whom?
Having established this, the lights go out and Maikon begins a relatively simple stage action. He produces sounds and words according to the duration of the flame from each match. This relationship between the flame and sounds that carry little meaning gives the scene an almost primitive quality, as though the artist were searching for a certain ontology of artistic practice, going back to the supposed roots of what we now call art. Quickly, however, this search takes on more assertive contours as the meaning of words enters the scene, together with a mode of intonation that seems more characteristic of a certain contemporary performance scene than of a remote past.
At the end, he sets fire to his own black T-shirt and allows the audience to watch as the flames spread and occupy more and more space, presenting a loss of control over matter that is almost of the order of the obscene, of that which can no longer be seen on stage.
It is precisely at this moment that the first people leave the room, while others call for the extinguisher, in an urgency with an air of calm that is quickly resolved by using the object, leaving a trail of white liquid on the floor alongside the remains of the charred T-shirt, lending a cold and static quality to what, only seconds earlier, had been pure movement and heat. Fire, which we might also call body.
Now shirtless and once again under the lights, Maikon takes a dead pigeon from a small bag he brought onto the stage. He carefully brings it close to his own body, manipulating it until he raises it to his face. Gradually, he bites small parts of the animal, pulling out feathers and fragments of flesh. The fact that the audience leaves en masse at this point perhaps says more about the audience than about the work or even the artist. Today’s audience, we know, is hyper-informed, has clear positions on the world and knows very well what it wishes to consume under the name of art.
Above all, it is a consumer in a shop filled with diverse and inclusive producers. Even more so a Portuguese audience, which may find strange a sacrificial practice that, within African-derived religions in Brazil, is relatively commonplace. But the question raised by this gesture — eating a pigeon — may not even lead the audience to perceive its own character as consumer. On the contrary, it reaffirms the individual convictions of those who entered (and left) knowing exactly what they wanted to see as art and where they drew the line regarding what they would not tolerate witnessing.
For those who remain until the end, watching the performer lying down with the pigeon on his head, a sense of déjà vu sets in, evoking practices from the beginnings of performance art in the 1970s, when artists placed themselves under the sign of transgression through actions that called upon the audience to take a more active position. Yves Klein and Niki de Saint Phalle painted with fire; Hermann Nitsch tore apart dead animals in his works. This feeling may also relate to what Maikon seeks to argue in his speech.
For if his words contain something of a manifesto about the role of the artist still marked by essentialist traits, his actions demonstrate that what reveals itself as obscene constitutes a fine line touching life and death simultaneously. Let us remember, after all, that those who self-immolate extinguish their own bodies, while those who eat pigeons — or other animals — find precisely a means of remaining alive, affirming life even in death.
Podcast Falha (Chumbo Gallery)
18 December 2021
Podcast Falha — Tânia Guerreiro: Produção ao serviço do Artista
Coffeepaste
28 December 2021
Coffeepaste — YouTube
15 October 2020
Coffeepaste — YouTube
PÚBLICO
8 January 2022
Gonçalo Frota
Performing Arts — Self-Mistake: support grants “with an artistic vision”
Targeting a period of artistic research and prioritising risk-taking and experimental projects in the performing arts, Tânia M. Guerreiro created the Self-Mistake grants to support independent artists. In 2021/2022, 27 artists are being supported, including Ana Libório and Tiago Vieira.
The first Self-Mistake grant that author and actor Tiago Vieira received, for the 2019/20 period, funded a walk he planned between “a concentration camp near Berlin and Pina Bausch’s grave”. It was not intended as an artistic gesture in itself, but rather as a journey undertaken as personal research that could feed into possible future creations. For someone who has been developing research around the Second World War, it was another piece to add to the material he had been gathering over the years. And during the walk itself, responding to the various stimuli he encountered along the way, Tiago wrote “the equivalent of three performances”. In other words, that research eventually gave rise to Devemos Sempre Perdoar os Cobardes, Mas Nunca Ser como Eles [We Should Always Forgive Cowards, But Never Be Like Them] (premiered at Rua das Gaivotas 6), Amo-te. Mesmo que Não Compreendas (Sinfonia nº1) [I Love You. Even If You Don’t Understand (Symphony No. 1)] (presented at Casa do Capitão) and Trummer (a performance developed as part of his master’s degree and staged at KVS Theater, Brussels).
Tiago Vieira was one of the first artists supported by the Self-Mistake grants, created by performing arts producer Tânia M. Guerreiro and distinguished by their particular focus on the research period and on creators whose practice is experimental or risk-taking. Guerreiro tells PÚBLICO that the initiative emerged from “listening” to what she felt was “a need on the part of artists”. “But it is also a response that seeks to counter some of the shortcomings in existing arts funding models”, particularly regarding “emerging artists and those who are currently working at the forefront of innovation”. In practical terms, this means that artists at the beginning of their careers or those presenting bolder proposals often come up against funding criteria such as the “financial balance of projects”. “These more independent projects often struggle to achieve that financial balance through co-productions or financial contributions, which means they are systematically excluded from funding,” explains Tânia M. Guerreiro. “That is why this project is a statement.”
One of the most effective tools of the Self-Mistake grants, however, is the inventive way in which they make it possible to counter the disadvantages faced by some of these artists in the usual funding competitions for creators. By awarding funds primarily intended for research (of varying amounts and adapted to the needs of each project), Self-Mistake also enables each of those selected (27 new grants were announced in December for 2021/2022) to achieve or move closer to the financial balance valued in funding applications. “There are many cases in which, without a threshold of 4000€ in income, it is very difficult to apply,” confirms Ana Libório, another artist supported by Self-Mistake. “So the investment Self-Mistake makes by awarding us a grant also gives us the possibility of applying for other forms of support. That allowed me to remain faithful to my initial idea of what the performance [Capturing You / Fictional Politics of Movement] would be, to have a team of performers and collaborators who could strengthen it, and to pay those people. This grant allows us, as creators, to continue to be fair to our artistic project — because we often have to modify it for budgetary reasons or because of the requirements of an application for State funding.”
A place to breathe
When Ana Libório applied for her first Self-Mistake grant, however, her thinking was at a stage prior to the creation of Capturing You. She had finished the Escola Superior de Teatro e Cinema, making a living from her artistic work was still a distant prospect, and she needed to discover the path she wanted to pursue. This was what prompted her proposal, as she found in Tânia M. Guerreiro’s initiative “a project that supports failure and risk”. “It was a safe space to experiment and to find a more authorial dimension as an artist, to understand what discursive grammar I wanted to pursue individually, without being dependent on institutions or on what they propose.”
She also found in the grant awarded by the producer assistance with practical issues such as finding a rehearsal space and support in preparing a budget and submitting an application. “Often, we artists are extremely abstract and drift around a great deal, and Tânia also helped us to develop a more objective discourse about our project,” she explains. Because what Tânia offers through “her” grants goes beyond simply transferring an amount of money to finance research or creation (without requiring it to culminate in a public presentation), while providing some additional production support. “What I do is work with each artist in a very different way, depending on what the project needs most,” says the producer. “Some artists are organised, and I give them consultancy and training so that they can become more autonomous [in the more bureaucratic and financial aspects of their activity]; in other cases, because they do not have that profile, I can help them work with other producers or prepare funding applications.”
The Self-Mistake grants — which in 2021/22 support other artists including Bernardo Chatillon, Carlota Lagido, Gaya de Medeiros, Joana Castro, Joãozinho da Costa, Maurícia/Neves, Rui Catalão, Sofia Dinger and Tita Maravilha, among others — follow a “very informal” process. “Although I always launch an open call,” explains Tânia M. Guerreiro, “so that I can discover new artists and new projects. But I try to follow some of the projects over time, and that is why there are artists who receive support again, because strategically it is important to have that continuity,” complemented by “some renewal with new names”.
Tiago Vieira is one example of that continuity. At the end of February, with Self-Mistake funding, he will set off on a new walk, connecting “the place where Rimbaud was shot [by Verlaine, at the Hotel Liège in Brussels] to his childhood home in France [Charleville, near the Belgian border]”. “It is part of a project about Rimbaud, one of my obsessions, and about the idea of spiritual elevation through him, which will become my 2022 performance.” Its scope also depends on whether his application for project funding from DGARTES is successful. “Once again, the grant allows me to have a space for research and to deepen the performance. ‘Tânia’s grants’ have this advantage: they function as mechanisms and bridges towards performances. For me, they work almost like a notebook for sketches and drafts, but also as a place to breathe.” In the creator’s words, these are “grants with an artistic vision”.
On average, Tânia M. Guerreiro estimates, each grant is worth between 2000€ and 4000€, with the overall funding resulting from Self-Mistake’s own applications for support. For the first round of grants, covering the 2019/20 biennium, funding was obtained through DGARTES’ sustained support programme, after the application was brought back into consideration — having not been selected in the first phase. In Tânia M. Guerreiro’s view, this may have happened “because the project has the same vulnerabilities as the artists it seeks to support”. The second round of grants resulted from emergency funding programmes launched in response to the pandemic (by the Ministry of Culture, Lisbon City Council and the Fundo de Fomento Cultural). Therefore, despite the funding and understanding that Self-Mistake has found within Lisbon City Council, its continuation is always at risk. And it “cannot depend on theatres, because that would be a subversion”, since the objective is precisely to reach those who are usually excluded from more institutional programming and confined to the limited independent circuit.
The financial dimension, however, is only the most visible aspect of the logistical support provided by the grants, which also benefit from partnerships with rehearsal spaces such as CPBC and Desvio, in Lisbon, or Trust Collective, in a rural setting. The aim is to ensure that there is a space in which to think about and develop performances without the pressure of premiere dates and while respecting each artist’s own timeframe. With the freedom for research not to result in any immediate performance. After all, as the name itself suggests, Self-Mistake provides space for error and for the conclusion that the path may, in fact, lie elsewhere — or may still only be beginning.
PÚBLICO — Self-Mistake: bolsas de apoio “com visão artística”
PÚBLICO
6 April 2021
Gonçalo Frota
The main objective of Self-Curating is to promote artists’ autonomy and freedom while contributing to the creation of an alternative presentation circuit.
A New Support Programme for Dance and Performance for Those Who Want to Create and Decide How Their Work Is Seen
The need is not new, but the past year of the pandemic and the uncertainty of the times we are still living through have made everything more urgent. The closure of theatres and other more conventional presentation spaces, the stagnation of programming, and the difficult — even unsustainable — situation faced by many artists who have been unable to work call for new models of intervention.
The Self-Mistake project therefore joined forces with ORG.I.A and Produções Independentes, two organisations that promote independent work and the sharing of production resources in the fields of dance and performance, to launch a new support programme for artistic creation: Self-Curating.
As the name suggests, this support scheme is aimed at artists who, in addition to research and creation, also want to take responsibility for the production and presentation conditions of their own work.
According to a statement sent to the press by Self-Mistake, this new support scheme is aimed at experimental and independent creation and will prioritise the live presentation of works “in contexts and spaces that offer alternatives to conventional and institutional ones”, “in an autonomous, flexible and free manner”.
The idea, in addition to providing financial support and consultancy, when necessary, for the development of the project to be presented, is to contribute to the establishment of a new circuit for the presentation of performing arts, the same statement reads.
How does the programme work? Interested artists must submit their proposals by 31 July, sending a brief document — no more than two pages — in which they introduce themselves and their project, with the option of suggesting an amount for the grant to be awarded and possible venues for presenting the resulting work. This stage is followed by interviews with the shortlisted artists.
The programme, funded by the Directorate-General for the Arts and Lisbon City Council through its Culture Department and Social Emergency Fund, appears to have a highly simplified application process and seeks to prioritise more direct — and less hierarchical — access for artists to the means of production and presentation of their work in the fields of dance and performance.
The aim of this new initiative, Self-Mistake summarises, is “to provoke a new artistic circuit outside conventional programming, emerging from the margins of creation: artists outside institutional circuits, artists searching for new languages, artists willing to take risks, to experiment with error and failure within a freer context, giving them the choice to present themselves within their own contexts and on their own terms.”
PÚBLICO — Self-Curating article