This year’s LAWN programme, curated by Xavier de Sousa, Anahí Saravia Herrera and Pedro Vilela, focuses on the role of performance in the city and how critical writing can reveal this relationship, how it feels, and how it manifests itself in practice. Taking a critical view of the transformative potential of performance, the programme examines how it  has operated in different territories to document change, struggle and lived experience. We are interested in engaging with these stories and reflecting on how a festival can be part of a city that embraces art as a civic practice.

Taking the encruzilhada (crossroads) as a space for non-linear thinking, divergent methods and an intertwined investigation (with the festival’s opening performance by Renan Martins and the Balé da Cidade de São Paulo as our starting point) this year we are focusing on the DDD archive, exploring stories and narratives of its history, the many ways in which it has intertwined, been shaped by and experienced in the cities of Porto, Matosinhos and Gaia, and how we can, through it, re-look at the city.  

The crossroads thus comes to be understood as a concept,a kind of perspective that allows us a methodological and/or pedagogical approach to this archive.

In general use, ‘being at a crossroads’ refers to a moment of decision, where different paths and consequences intersect, demanding choices amidst uncertainty. This condition has been a recurring theme in our curatorial work since we turned our attention to the DDD archive, compiled over ten years of the festival. Rather than being an obstacle, uncertainty has emerged as a working tool through which to orient.

In this context, we turn to the Pedagogia de Encruzilhada (1) (Pedagogy of the crossroad)’ proposed by Luiz Rufino, which suggests a break with traditional, Eurocentric and linear models of knowledge production. Inspired by Afro-diasporic knowledge, particularly African-based cosmologies this approach draws on the figure of Exu (2) as a mediator of paths, an agent of movement and a symbol of ambiguity and transformation. More than a religious reference, this is an epistemological principle: knowledge is not fixed, but circulates, is translated and reinvents itself.

Without ignoring the Afro-Diasporic foundation,whose critical and political dimensions we seek to preserve—we are interested in using the crossroads as a way of interpreting the archive: a point where narratives intersect, a spiralling circulation of meanings, composed of diverse and non-hierarchical sources.

In this context, the body takes on a central role, understood simultaneously as a field of power and as a source of knowledge. It is also crossed by politicised structures that shape our experiences. The crossroads thus becomes a space for social mapping, where our bodies and our lives are intersected by the social and the political. 

We wish to inhabit this web and work from within it, at the heart of this intersection. Thus, our approach to the archive is guided by a number of principles: multiplicity, recognising that there is no single way of understanding; experience, memory and sensitivity, drawing upon beyond the strictly rational plane; movement and transformation, understanding that the archive is not static, but dependent on time and context; and, finally, the value of the margins, drawing on historically excluded knowledge and paying close attention to peripheral movements.

Through an experience of digital wandering, to be presented in May, with texts from the LAWN project,we propose to explore the DDD archive through four themes: traces (remnants, marks, documentation and fragments), deviations (inconsistencies, gaps and contradictions), crossings (physical or metaphorical displacements) and encounters (points where paths intersect: body with body, artist with audience, languages, cultures and times).

A crossroads of archives that invites the public to an experience characterised by intersecting paths, the negotiation of meanings, and an engagement with complexities, without the obligation to resolve them. The aim is to enable the materials to be read from multiple angles, both in terms of their affinities and their frictions, including the unsaid, without the pretence of reaching a final answer, but rather to sustain a continuous critical movement, a  signature of the performingborders platform.

Notes

(1) Rufino, L. (2019) Pedagogia das Encruzilhadas. Rio de Janeiro: Mórula Editorial. 
(2) Exu is a core orisha in Afro-Brazilian religions, such as Candomblé and Umbanda, acting as a messenger between humans and the gods. Regarded as the guardian of paths, crossroads and communication, Exu is ‘the mouth of the world’.

Biographical notes

Live Art Writers Network (LAWN) is a project of the digital platform performingborders, managed by Xavier de Sousa and Anahí Saravia Herrera, dedicated to fostering critical writing and reflection in dialogue with performance and live art, intertwined with transnational critical thinking on creative processes, digital publishing and political action. 

Pedro Vilela is an artist-curator-researcher. He runs TREMA!, an association that connects Brazil and Portugal artistically, and collaborates with various organisations in the city of Porto. His primary interest lies in the Afro-Latin American scene, reflecting on themes such as decoloniality and the mechanisms of raciality. He is also the first Latin American to win the Magaly Muguercia Grant, awarded by the Iberescena Programme.