DATA OF INTEREST

GUEST:
Daniela Brasil

HOST:
Juliana Rabelo


Synopsis:

Daniela opens by exploring the possibility of a type of learning that doesn’t center human beings. Her work is carried out with a collective of feminist migrant women to create broader, more open and more inclusive spaces. By beginning with a process of inviting diverse people to co-creation workshops, they find the concept of ancestral futurism for their collective research. The workshops began as invitations to create exercises of vocalization, collective rituals that explore self-awareness and the ways in which we can artistically express expanded forms and temporalities of being and belonging.

What are our ancestors telling us and what type of ancestor do you want to be? What cultures do we come from? What cultures do we live in? What cultures do we want to co-create together? These are some of the questions that inspire this journey of collective research. In a sense we are always migrants, as implicated by the transcultural diaspora. Ancestral futurism operates in the ambivalence of synchronicity, between the fields of the sacred and speculative fabulation.

Daniela shares examples of inspiration and results in the workshops, comparing images of technologies, crafts and techniques that are disappearing; we talk about traditions that are oppressive, protocols for healing, magic or rituals and understanding the representation of the sacred in cultures that are disappearing with embodied and intuitive experiences to deal with complex situations at the theoretical and systematic level. The healing process begins when we are together working with our hands creating something. It is about exploring the pedagogical matter of emotional worlds and the materialities we create with our heart, head and hands. How much room do we leave for other things to happen even though we later have the obligation to explain them, rationalize them or teach about them in certain spaces? Daniela talks about the tension between living in a eurocentric, capitalist, extractivist world and other possible or imagined worlds. We grow up in a culture, but what culture do we want to belong to? However, there is a certain synchronicity between the past and the future because in the end the only thing that exists is the perception of the present. In different cosmogenies like the Yoruba we find this synchronicity.

Another new experience was that of going from self-fashioning rituals internally to doing it publicly. Reception tends to be problematic even for the practitioners themselves and suggests that we must also protect this opacity, at the same time that there is a need to open epistemic and ontological spaces that speak to other forms of being. Here we see the dichotomy of how much to make public or not. The exercise entails how to join together such different spiritualities, from such different starting points, and find common-ground, commonality, in the universe, or unity in diversity. The idea is not to self-exorcize but to re-situate our roots and our connections with history that were not taught to us. These spaces also enable the exchange of stories and an examination of our own relationships. The talk ends with some reflections about post-activism. How are we involved in networks of domination and exploitation? What decolonial forms or ways of unlearning better attune us to other temporalities, other ways of being, other beings that inhabit the planet, etc? Each time we retell the past, another future is possible. Each time someone reinvents their past, they open a space for other futures to emerge, other belongings and other forms of expression.

Ancestral futurism is retelling the past to reinvent the future as an exercise of self-actualization.


Bio:

Daniela Brasil grew up in a tropical concrete jungle on the shores of the Atlantic and lived in several bioregions until moving to Graz in 2010. She studied architecture and urban design in Rio de Janeiro, Urban Environmental Design in Lisbon and Barcelona and Social Sculpture at Oxford, and received her MFA and Doctorate in Artistic Strategies for Public Participation from Bauhaus University in Weimar. She was a professor and researcher there and at the Center of Contemporary Art at Graz Technical University. She is a member of the Daily Rhythms Collective and the Neuberg College since 2015. She is on the board of advisors of the Rotor Contemporary Arts Center and the InRiCo-Colectivo indigenous rights collective in Graz. Her work is diverse in format, consisting of installations, performances, texts, the creation of meeting spaces and learning environments for all ages, but essentially centers on transformative and emancipatory learning processes that contribute to the construction of the pluriverse.

VIDEO

Ancestral-Futurist Spiritual Aesthetics

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