Art Magazine
Lanchonete<>Lanchonete at Bar Delas, 2018
NO NIIN Issue 34: To Make the Problem a Horizon of Counter-conduct came together while I was in Iran, navigating internet shutdowns, deadly protests, and ultimately the ongoing US-Israeli war of aggression on Iran. The conditions under which this editorial was written are not incidental to its content, they are part of the same continuum this issue traces.
READEditorial: To Make the Problem a Horizon of Counter-conduct
A study trip to São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro became the origin of this issue and an encounter with art scenes that refuses, in many different ways and from many different places, to separate art from life, institutions from communities, or the past from the futures it might yet build.
To understand Associação Cultural Lanchonete<>Lanchonete as a counter-colonial contemporary art project, rather than, as many would have it, merely a social project, is to understand that Brazilian contemporary art can decolonize itself and propose other modes of operation.
READLanchonete<>Lanchonete: A Contemporary Art Studio with Radically Open Doors to Pequena África
Established in Rio de Janeiro’s Pequena África, Lanchonete<>Lanchonete proposes a counter-colonial contemporary art practice that refuses institutional charity in favor of radical, two-way alliance with historically excluded Black and Indigenous communities.
“Chegança” is a playful inflection of formal, cultivated, colonizing language—a challenge to the grammatical norms of the languages imposed across Latin America. Above all, chegança is a political gesture: an inclination toward the popular, toward the people, toward the masses.
READSummoning the Presence of Indigenous worlds: A pedagogy of chegança
The curatorial project of Frestas – Trienal das Artes proposes a way of apprehending epistemologies and lifeworld relations that have been stifled by the colonial condition across different countries in Latin America.
The bigger question is whether the 36th São Paulo Bienal — however brave and sincere its proposal — can actually shift what the Bienal is understood to be. Within the Bienal’s history, this edition stands out as predominantly non-white — nationally significant, directly challenging the white dominance of the Brazilian art world. Yet the Bienal could have been more explicit about the fundamental differences between people and the structural inequalities that follow from them; this was a conceptual absence I felt across the exhibited works.
READProblematizing Universalism: A Review of The 36th São Paulo Bienal
The 36th São Paulo Bienal challenged the conventional white cube and the dominance of whiteness in bienials, demonstrating that globality can be conceived from non-Western perspective. However, rather than fundamentally challenging the hegemony of the biennial format or reconfiguring its existing logic, it raised a central problem of mega-scale exhibitions: universalism.
Founded to preserve the culture of a historically oppressed group, Casa do Povo does not restrict itself to safeguarding Jewish traditions; it welcomes those who approach the house: trans performers in theatre collectives, migrant workers, designers, political activists, and many others. Judaism itself contains multiple currents, being, in a sense, a historically multicultural culture.
READCasa do Povo: A Porous Institution
The book Modos de fazer [Ways of Doing] narrates the activities developed between 2013 and 2023 at Casa do Povo, an anti-zionist Jewish space in the center of São Paulo that brings together a Yiddish choir, a collective of trans actresses, boxing classes, political assemblies, and much more.
Everyone in Vilanismo is someone I met and grew close to within the contemporary art circuit. Some even earlier, through graffiti, like Robson, or São Paulo’s pixação scene. The idea was to understand how their practices could move forward collectively, while also allowing me to be part of that vehicle, amplifying one another. So the starting point was affection and mutual admiration.
READVilanismo: An Ethics of Care and a Philosophical Framework Emerging from Afro-Paulistano Culture
The Brotherhood of Black and Favela Men in Contemporary Art [Irmandade de Homens Pretos e Favelados Das Artes Contemporâneas] is reshaping and radicalising forms of political engagement across the Brazilian visual arts scene.
The rules of the game. Considering that declared theft produces a fracture in the very concept of authorship, and that the procedure of copying is central to Dora Longo Bahia’s practice, this is an interview in which both questions and answers are composed of modified, copied, or plagiarized texts—drawn from articles, lectures, and texts from videos and films—just as the artist, in fact, operates in her own work.
READThe Writing of a Manifesto of Political Imagination: An Interview with Dora Longo Bahia
Artist Dora Longo Bahia and critic Paula Alzugaray return to their Manifesto of Political Imagination through an interview where every question and answer is plagiarized, and the theft is the point. What does it mean to make art politically — not political art, but art made politically — when fascism is again at the door?
The cultural periodical is a means of collectively organizing ideas, of practicing and cultivating political and artistic education, and of intervening in concrete situations. None of this is possible without duration, continuity, and organization. Paradoxically, the conditions for duration and continuity in artistic and editorial activity are virtually unviable within a neoliberal context marked by the precarization of artistic labor and the fragility of public cultural policies.
READAcrobatic Skills: 15 Years of Celeste
This conversation between editor Paula Alzugaray and special reporter and art critic Juliana Monachesi offers a fragment of the history of a Brazilian art magazine that could be likened to a trench—or to an urban guerrilla.