As a festival that investigates the relation between body and word, Atos de Fala (Speech Acts) is in search for performances that, akin to its experimental process, embrace and resonate the context in which they are placed.


AdF.16 folds and unfolds the Turn to Futurity”

We think about futurity and follow José Muñoz when he says that it is necessary to invent other forms of Future that are not so connected to the economy of reproduction. For that purpose Muñoz carries on Ernst Bloch’s project to “live the Future in the Present”, thus dissociating utopia from an imaginative and merely optimistic basis. Utopia has an impact because it is present in the concreteness of how each struggle relates to so many others in History. Therefore, it emerges as a horizon: distant in space yet present in time.

The ability to envision horizons has been a fundamental way of envigoration throughout these last three years in Brazil. Our political life is pressured by and impressioned with the popular encounters and occupations by the most diversed social stratums, which sometimes draw distopical relations and at other times revert those relations that seemed dead end, back into their utopic force. However we have reached a point in which these two forces are so intertwined that the popular demands – which are inclusive and wide in their formulation – are mislead by fallacious strategies that drains out the meaning of words. Distinctions between fact and rumor are blurred and we recurrently testify democratic instruments and procedures having their reasons changed and being arrested for purposes of maintenance of power. In ranges from TV news and printing presses, to the sharing dinamics of social networks; from the streets of financial centers and in the outskirts of the big cities, to the houses of the legislative, executive and judiciary powers, the constant dispute turns out to be in between the freedom of speech and the speech of freedom.

Atos de Fala simply cannot avoid taking part in this context of deadlock. That is why we bet on the Turn to Futurity as a way of trying and creating an experimental space that gathers together spectators, artists, their gestures and works. A space created through connections instead of imprisonments, a space to inspire more and more inventions as well as to reject closeted disguises, a space for enduring strategies of a collective which is always here and yet to come, always in the process of its own formation through the deviant, collectives assembles to exercise the freedom of exception.

While considering the invention of genders and the diaspora of identity, the questioning of the effects of humanity regarding the world’s scale, the conviviality of the image of the other figuring in one’s own body, tiredness as a fundamental device to inhabit contemporariness, the persistence of the book as technology, the post-porn as a way of life, the dubbing of the other as an authentic means to build a community and considering the repetition of voices of alterity as a materialistic trance, AdF.16 proposes its program as a short diagram of potential connections to open up some possibilities for us to be together in difference. Unfolding these possibilities, here and then elsewhere, we will be irradiating futurity.

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