Contemporânea

In the Face of Endings, Awaiting a New Beginning…

We live in an age that keeps enduring through countless ends of time: an age in which imagination and historicity have become entangled, at times even overlapping. From science fiction to the unfolding global panopticon of Silicon Valley;2 from the Y2K bug to the cyclical revival of nuclear threat; from the misreading of the Mayan calendar to relentless climate catastrophe; from war fetishism to colonial dehumanisations—all these ends will be followed by others yet to come, in a sequence whose only conceivable outcome seems to be the arrival of the final one. Inevitably, narration has been not only the act that binds experience to meaning but also the common denominator that allows this succession of endings to be perceived as intrinsic to our lives, as though, in the timeline of what we insist on calling “humanity,” the end were paradoxically lodged in past, present, and future alike. Indeed, because we do not know whether it has already happened, is happening now, or is still to come—or perhaps because our very narrative drive betrays a faint hope that we might somehow outwit this presumed vocation for ending—we remain compelled to narrate it.

And yet, on this quivering horizon, a growing sense of the world’s loss breaks through: a sinister cosmological conjunction,3 as conceived by Déborah Danowski and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro; the Intrusion of Gaia, in Isabelle Stengers’s words; the cyclical “apocalypses” of various Amerindian cosmologies;4 or Günther Anders’s nuclear age and unworldliness,5 to name only a few of its many expressions. Probing the past may suggest an immemorial origin for such a feeling, but the present exposes its intensification, as though the imminence of a true end were becoming ever more tangible, with the darkest imagined dystopias slipping from fiction to reality. And though it would be rash to claim unanimity, it is undeniable that the perception of this sort of historical collapse has long surpassed the boundaries of individual subjectivity. From Gaza, where daily reports bring news that fully embody the intolerable,6 to the crisis of liberal democracies in the West, we find ourselves living sluggishly through our daily catastrophes.

Is there a path, then, that might remedy the imminence of our absolute end, postponing the fall of the sky?7 Or is such a prospect located at the opposite extreme of what we now inhabit—utopia? Or, more precisely, "utopias," since the term encompasses a multiplicity of not-always reconcilable worldviews? Yet, notwithstanding the innumerable interpretations of this idea (too many for an introductory text such as this one), what truly sharpens thought is the interrogation of what lies between one boundary and the other. Which endings of History express catastrophe, and how do they generate utopia? How does mythic narrative speak to both, conjuring scenarios of endings on the one hand and of new beginnings on the other? In what ways does the present weave the two concepts together in the realm of the sensible? Could aesthetics still remain the place where imaginaries of dystopia and utopia are contested? And perhaps most pressingly for this edition: how does contemporary art, as a field of meaning-making but also of action, engage with these questions? For no matter how much effort is made to situate art as an extraordinary phenomenon, it surely does not exist in its own universe, apart from society, history, or time—not least because, as Françoise Vergès warns us,8 all signs point to Western universalism being closer to a dangerous fallacy, sustaining the idea of art’s exceptionalism whilst concealing and sublimating the structural violence still perpetuated within the artistic field.

Steeped in the entanglements and mutual contaminations of catastrophe and utopia, On Hybridity and the Poetics of Resistance opens these pages with the generous contributions of different authors and artists. The present, seen as a time riven by instability and sociopolitical abysses, is dissected in Gabriela Vaz-Pinheiro’s essay. Eduarda Neves, in turn, situates time as an entity traversing philosophical and literary thought, reclaiming its hybridity through the poetic flow of her writing. Breaking with temporal linearity, Romulo Moraes’s essay turns to music as both an annunciation and a lullaby in the face of the idea of an ending—whose “other side,” in the end, proves to be a beginning.

From poetry as the last refuge of a disenchanted humanity emerge Shahd Wadi’s poignant verses, equally grounded in literary heritage. Kitty Furtado, furthermore, offers a glimpse into her wide-ranging research on the domain of the image as a battleground for imaginaries surrounding colonial legacies and experiences. Contemporary art appears as a field of reparations linked to colonial history, land rights, and redress in the work of the Cercle d’Art des Travailleurs de Plantation Congolaise (CATPC), critically examined in Ana Salazar Herrera’s essay. In dialogue, curator Raphael Fonseca and artist Kássia Borges, a member of the Huni Kuin Artists Movement (MAHKU), reflect on the potency of Indigenous art and consider its futures within and beyond Brazil.

Through disquieting interlacings of the human and the more-than-human, artist Diana Policarpo composes visual fabulations that receive an in-depth reading in Sara de Chiara’s essay. With the hybrid images of Emily Wardill’s film Identical, perception is put to the test, as interpreted by Sara Castelo Branco. Expanding on the notion of hybrid images, the alternative realities and safe spaces devised in the work of Danielle Brathwaite-Shirley are explored by Valerie Rath, who follows a winding path through the rallying cries that animate them. Parallel universes too, shaped by the relationship between humans and AI, are ambitiously inaugurated in the project The Feral, with AnaMary Bilbao tracing a proposal woven through time and speculative fiction. These pages are also haunted by the unsettling hybrid figures imagined by artist Jonathan Uliel Saldanha in a visual essay.

Ecological concerns find expression on many fronts: in the animal subjectivity created by Jeff Wood for the Acid Flamingo project, discussed in an interview with Joana Pestana; in the investigative, documentary, and critical approach underpinning the practice of Territorial Agency, where the Anthropocene emerges as a force generating new realities, as explored in conversation with Maria Kruglyak; and in the processes of the collective SUPERFLEX, addressed in an interview with curator Margarida Mendes.

In the visual essay that unfolds across these pages, artist Sara Graça probes the wavering materiality and ambiguity conjured by the photographic image. Finally, extending the scope of enquiry and deepening the interrogations and debates taken up by this Contemporânea project, two further essays enrich this edition: Fluid Prospections, born of a series of performances curated by Alexandra Balona, investigating today's ecological and epistemic transformations; and Carma Invertido, based on the exhibition curated by Susana Ventura and artist duo Mariana Caló and Francisco Queimadela, and joined by guest artists Mattia Denisse and Von Calhau!, weaving together a number of poetic-aesthetic reflections.