Inspired by the Multitude project (#multitudepompeia), in which I am proud to participate with Cinema sem Volta, I am republishing a recent text I wrote for seLecT:
One of the icons of Brazil’s protests, Rio’s Batman shows how the ongoing demonstrations have turned the streets into a battle of languages (photo: Fernando Frazão)
Out with two thousand and crazy, in with two thousand and catharsis. That is how the year began in Brazil, fueled by the election atmosphere, the World Cup and the breath of the hashtag that entered our history: #vemprarua [come to the streets]. Read in the context of the uprisings and social movements erupting worldwide since 2011, it makes the Brazilian protests even more interesting. From Tunisia to Wall Street, Cairo to Madrid, São Paulo to Brasília, Sochi in Russia to Kyiv in Ukraine, by way of Caracas and Rio de Janeiro, not only streets but churches, museums and even shopping malls are being claimed, contested and occupied by new ways of thinking about and practicing politics.
Sluts, pot smokers, pacifists, gay people, young people looking for fun, students, teachers, workers, women, men and black blocs appear in marches, parades, demonstrations and gatherings of every size and kind. With few common denominators, their actions and demands show that one of the hallmarks of our time is the eruption of the multitude. Unlike the masses, the multitude is not a single unit, but follows temporary, provisional principles of self-organization. Multitudes both depend on and foster micropolitical spheres and their ways of challenging and connecting with macropolitics. This is not about the struggle of the small against the large, about quantities, but about qualities. Macropolitics corresponds to stable, sedimented structures, such as institutions and parties. Micropolitics corresponds to the open potential of a whole range of changing, fluid social forces that do not fit within the traditional apparatus of the state.
We need not look far, in space or time, to see these theories enacted, lived and tested as they contest physical, informational and symbolic territories. The Movimento Passe Livre [Free Fare Movement] and the rolezinhos [collective outings by young people to shopping malls] are almost self-explanatory instances of these concepts. They leak, flow and spill beyond conventional party agendas. Actions such as that of G.U.L.F. (Global Ultra Luxury Faction), which entered New York’s Guggenheim Museum on the opening day of its Futurism exhibition in late February, offer further evidence of this process. Their protest is against the working conditions of migrants building the museum’s Abu Dhabi branch. It brings other dimensions to contemporary artivism, expanding the horizons of institutional critique so important to artists such as Hans Haacke and Andrea Fraser. Through direct action and online, they have been discussing, since October, aspects that receive little attention: the social implications of establishing and exporting a museum.
The post-Wall generation
Multifaceted, these movements rally diverse sectors that subvert the order, bringing new extremes into a circuit previously intelligible through left- and right-wing clichés. Led by the so-called post-Wall generation (born after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989), their parents in Brazil are divided between those who believed we would witness the end of utopias and those who did not even know Berlin existed. Globalized, they combine masks with humor, placards with the internet and violence with well-articulated arguments.
Their way of claiming the public sphere is both media-conscious and mediated. Media-conscious because it is produced with an awareness of the importance of spreading through international news outlets. Banners in English, for example, appeared at every major demonstration. This is neither pretension nor coincidence. It is a strategy, devised by people who know a YouTube video can end up on CNN, or vice versa. But it is also mediated, because actions and demands take shape through and within the media. This is not only because social networks play a fundamental role in coordination and mobilization throughout these processes. In some cases, such as São Paulo, they even create a new geography of protest, placing sites such as Ponte Espraiada on the map so that protesters appear in the live backdrop of Globo News broadcasts. They also produce new visual vocabularies.