This week marks fifty years since the enactment of AI-5, and I want to draw attention to an exhibition at Centro Universitário Maria Antonia in which 1968 reverberates in 2013, and vice versa. I am referring to Camadas: narratividades visuais da violência by the Lâmina collective, whose members are Gabriela De Laurentiis and João Mascaro. The exhibition is curated by Ana Avelar.
The exhibition brings together a series of imaging devices from different periods and of different sizes, with films, videos, and photographs, all projected, relating to moments of violence in the 2013 demonstrations.
What is interesting is that the ensemble mixes not only formats but perspectives. It plays with appropriations that include images produced by the police themselves. These are therefore images of politics, but also traces through which to think about the contemporary politics of images.
A site of memory
Situated in a site of memory as powerful as Centro Universitário Maria Antonia, on such a significant date, amid other exhibitions directly referencing 1968, Lâmina’s show inevitably takes on further readings. It is impossible not to lose one’s bearings in time, unsure of which period and which place these images refer to.
Rua Maria Antonia is one of the sites of memory of the dictatorship. It was there, on October 2, 1968, that the violent confrontation between USP and Mackenzie students and the Military Police occurred, becoming known as the Battle of Maria Antonia, one of the events preceding AI-5.
From this perspective, the exhibition becomes an immersive installation that outmaneuvers the gaze to the rhythm of memory.
I will be at Maria Antonia with the artists in the exhibition on Tuesday the 11th at 5 p.m. There will be a conversation with the public about these issues. I invite our listeners to join us.
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