Cite as: ‘I am an Arara’, discussion, screening presented at the symposium Shifting Natures, ICI Berlin, 14 March 2024, video recording, mp4, 52:48 <https://doi.org/10.25620/e240314-1>
Discussion, Screening
14 Mar 2024

I am an Arara

I am an Arara (directed by Mariana Lacerda and Rivane Neuenschwander, Brazil, 2023, 28′). A forest runs through the protests in São Paulo during the election year of 2022, a political moment in Brazil, when what was at stake was the end of democracy and the continuity of a government whose main agenda was destruction of nature and its territories, of social conquests, of indigenous peoples and quilombolas, of culture and art.

The screening is followed by a discussion with Mariana Lacerda and Peter Pál Pelbart.

Mariana Lacerda, born in Recife, lives and works in São Paulo. She is a documentary filmmaker. In recent years, she has dedicated her films to themes such as memory, the environment, the rights of nature, indigenous rights, and the Amerindian perspectivism. He has been a member of the Research Institute for Sustainability (RIFS Potsdam) scholarship programme since November 2023 for the development of a film script entitled Aña. He directed the film Gyuri (2020, 87′), filmed in 2017 in Demini, Yanomami Indigenous Land, which was shown in ten different countries around the world. More recently, he directed the film Mapping Worlds (2023, 70′).

Since the 1990s, Rivane Neuenschwander, born in Belo Horizonte, chooses elements of consumer goods, social exchange, and memories as her practice’s materials. In her installations, Neuenschwander translates the intercommunicating character of living systems. In drawings, paintings, tapestries, and videos, the artist operates the intersection of her formal repertoire with science, history, psychology, linguistics, and literature in order to articulate pressing issues in contemporary politics. Attaching human action and presence to conceptual substrata, her oeuvre includes the groups that led to the forms her works take. The other is always presupposed in the structure and execution of her work, and the care applied to form always implies care toward the public. Among her recent solo exhibitions are Sementes Selvagens, Museu de Serralves (2022); Knife does not cut fire, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein (2021); Rivane Neuenschwander, East Tank, Tate Modern (2021).

Peter Pál Pelbart is a Hungarian-born Brazilian philosopher and an essayist. He is part of the Ueinzz Theatre Company, a schizoscenic project based in São Paulo. His works are mainly about madness, time, subjectivity, and biopolitics. He published in English Cartography of Exhaustion: Nihilism Inside Out (2015). He translated works of Deleuze into Portuguese and is co-publisher of n-1publications. He is a professor at PUC University in São Paulo.


Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

Mariana Lacerda
Peter Pál Pelbart
Marlon Miguel

Organized by

Marlon Miguel
Elena Vogman

Video in English

Format: mp4
Length: 00:52:48
First published on: https://www.ici-berlin.org/events/i-am-an-arara/
Rights: © ICI Berlin

Part of the Symposium

Shifting Natures

The very concept of nature has been the subject of thorough critique for quite a while. From a Western deconstructive perspective, nature is a signifier standing for naive immediacy or reactionary normativity. Poststructuralist and queer paradigms have shifted from an idea of nature as a being and of the natural as a given to a conception of them as the effects of discursive, performative practices. These critiques marked a turning point in the centuries-long debate on the concept of nature, pluralizing and de-essentializing it — hence, shifting natures.

While these advancements are paramount, such a deconstructive frame has also meant overemphasizing the discursive element at the expense of the materiality of power relations and embodied experiences. As Stacy Alaimo argues, ‘one of the most unfortunate legacies of poststructuralist and postmodern feminism has been the accelerated “flight from nature” fueled by rigid commitments to social constructionism.’ Within the semantic constellation of nature, which terms and concepts facilitate a connection with the material dimension, without replicating essentialist, normative, ultimately reactionary positions? What can be the epistemological, political, and affective investment in retrieving references to nature, after its deconstruction? The symposium Shifting Natures addresses these questions in three interlocked areas: Environment; Artificial Intelligence; and Gender.

Venue

ICI Berlin
(Click for further documentation)

With

David Bastidas-Bolaños
Frank Carber
Carlotta Cossutta
Jessie Hock
Özgün Eylül İşcen
Nathaniel LaCelle-Peterson
Maria Rosaria Marella
Gabriel Menotti
Chiara Montalti
Pietro Omodeo
Alice Parrinello
Kyriaki (Korina) Pavlidou
Luca Lou Pinelli
Charlotte Ross
Samuele Sartori
Myriam Sauer
Alison Sperling
Constantinos Taliotis
Cristina Voto
Ben Woodard
Silvano Zipoli Caiani

Organized by

Federica Buongiorno
Alberica Bazzoni
Xenia Chiaramonte