PUBLIC LIFE, CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES

public life, critical perspectives and coexistence (im)possibilities

IT HAS NOT BEEN UNCOMMON TO REFER TO THE IDEA OF CURATORSHIP to its primitive sense of healing work. In March 2020, MITsp was facing the beginning of a pandemic, and it was not easy to assume that only two years later the encounter, still under safety protocols, would be possible. In this context and in such a Festival, a “reflective axis” curatorship does not escape the comeback demands. In this case, the return to onsite. If "live" has been the daily resource in this period, as a transmission device, as such, it is a device of both communication and capture, since this "live" is not confused with alive. Bodies and temporalities gain worldwide scale in the transmission sphere. If this digital sphere became unavoidable, it is true that a dimension of presence that escapes any metaphysics was given back to theatre: we are alive and, alive, mourning and struggles move us.

Also it is no coincidence that words are gaining other uses. Transmission and safety, for example, are interchangeable terms in language: health, communication and police topics in a world where the living are governed “live”. How long does it take a live death?

This is not a direct discussion about this state of affairs. Rather, it is a question of discussing what remains of it. If language, in its multiplicity, presumes agreements on the uses we make of signs, perhaps it is not too much to suppose that the impossibility of these agreements is also the symptom of something else: without agreement on the use of certain words, it is a fact that life is at risk. If this end of the line does not start in language, it won't be too much saying that language is the means by which our bets and chances slide through. What do you mean when you say justice, life, death?

Theatre as “public art” has the size of public life in a society. In Brazil, violence remains structural and structuring, continuously producing dynamics of discord, 12

so many times reducing body to corpse. It is important, then, to ask about the use value of encounter. Two years ago it might have sounded rhetorical to say: the purpose of encounter is the encounter. Today, encountering definitely implies a political drive for coexistence, in a society in which it often seems of an impossible nature. In this case, what is the use value of the impossible?

JOSÉ FERNANDO PEIXOTO DE AZEVEDO AND JULIA GUIMARÃES