Events

With Lux Boelitz Vidal (USP) and Lilia Moritz Schwarcz (USP)
Mediation: Júlia Vilaça Goyatá (PPGAS / USP)

"Where are the blacks?" asks the flag, extended at the front of one of the most important Brazilian museums, the São Paulo Museum of Art (MASP). Intervention by the 3 de Fevereiro Front, the work is an icon of an expographic project, curated by anthropologists, which reflects on the flows of people between Africa, America, the Caribbean and Europe marked by Slavery. MASP is no exception: numerous museological institutions around the globe have been engaged in rethinking their practices, atoning for colonial violations through the repatriation of indigenous objects or the construction of collaborative curatorial projects. In addition, there is a recent movement of appropriation of these institutions by indigenous and traditional peoples, who have been increasingly interested in the construction of their own museums, appropriating them as locus of political action. Reflecting on the different roles assumed by anthropologists in these processes, the Friday of August invites us to think: what is the place of indigenous or traditional arts, their exhibition and commercialization? How has Anthropology historically connected itself to different museological enterprises and how has it innovated in this field? What theoretical advances have these engagements fostered in anthropological reflection on expressive forms? How do the categories race and art move through these processes and relate to the decolonizing debate and struggle? What are the epistemic transformations involved in the relocation of the exhibition objects to the villages / places of “origin”?

With Juliana Borges (FESPSP) and Juliana Farias (PAGU / Unicamp)
Mediation: Milena Mateuzi (PPGAS / USP)

In recent months, the use of state strength has been present in the main media vehicles in the country. Military intervention in Rio de Janeiro, the murder of Marielle Franco following complaints against police violence in Irajá (RJ), as well as the use of violence as a common way of resolving conflicts in the countryside, added up to the long history of violence and murders through which dominant groups exercise their power. According to the philosopher Achille Mbembe, the right to decide about life and death make up the fundamental attributes of sovereignty, which through the political use of death (necropolitics) seeks to subdue and immobilize specific people and social groups. In addition to these deaths by direct use of force, there are invisible and everyday deaths, due to the reproduction of conditions of misery and social exclusion, which impels us to think about issues related to the visibility and recognition of death itself as a product of the socially oriented violence of the necropolitics. Anthropology, by devoting its attention and listening to groups that historically were instituted as preferential targets for the exercise of necropolitics, is inserted in the field of disputes around the representations and visibilities to which this debate is directed. With attention to the urgency of the issue, the Friday of the Month launches the discussion on the concept of necropolitics: What is your relationship with the concepts of biopower, feminicide, ethnocide and genocide of blacks and indigenous people? To what extent is death faced or silenced in our ethnographic and writing experiences? What place do anthropological works occupy in a field of disputes around the representation of violence and death?