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● 23/06/2016
Utopia Log 11


23.6.2016
Today we visited the the regional Ministry of Culture in Porto Alegre. On the front a series of banners and inside a row tents in the backyard garden.

For over a month artists and students have occupied the regional Department of Culture in Porto Alegre; as part of a nation-wide series of occupations to protest the coup d’état by the 'new president' Temer. The occupations create a strong symbolic gesture, opening up a space of unknown poetic presence.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9gB1cjoPY3A

If direct action establishes a ‘figuration of the future’ – and not a ‘pre-figuration’ of the future - then this huge sequence of simultaneuos occupations of almost all regional Ministries of Culture in all of Brazil, is in itself a figuration of a future. What does this mean?

What the occupiers have created is a figuration of an utopian future. They have created an interstice in time, where a potential future vision comes alive as an existing reality: now! It is a future where the artistic community – musicians, actors, visual artists, performers, writers, intellectuals – has gained access to and control over the cultural politics of a whole nation. This is a future with a open, inclusive and transversal cultural understanding - BUT this utopian future vision is not something that they are waiting for. It is something that already exists; it is emerging right now, in the month long sequence of #minC resiste occupations.

These images is from the celebration of the first month of occupation:

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