Seeing Through Stone: Sonny Trujillo’s Voice from Within
Remy Francisco, October 25, 2024 At 63 years old, Sonny Trujillo stands upon a collapsed prison surveillance tower. He paces five steps...
The lecture Performative Meetings: 20 Years of Collaborations Between Social and Artistic Movements is part of the exhibition Seeing Through Stone, which explores artistic and activist practices aimed at abolishing carceral structures and questioning historically ingrained systems of oppression. The event focuses on two decades of collaborations between social and artistic movements, highlighting how these partnerships have generated new forms of resistance and political action.
In the context of the exhibition, which brings together 85 artists and collectives from around the world who are engaged in imagining alternatives to prisons and punitive structures, the lecture investigates the intersection of art and activism as a tool to confront racial and social injustices. Frente 3 de Fevereiro, one of the featured groups, uses direct and poetic actions to challenge structural racism in Brazil and connects these struggles to global forms of resistance. By recreating the image of its founder Maurinete Lima through artificial intelligence, the collective proposes an “Ancestral Intelligence” as a contemporary force for struggle and memory.
Within the broader narrative of the exhibition, which offers a radical vision of justice and community, the lecture reflects on the power of artistic and cultural legacies as a form of social transformation. Just as the artists in Seeing Through Stone imagine worlds beyond prisons, Frente 3 de Fevereiro explores new ways of engaging with urban spaces and Afro-Brazilian resistance, contributing to the creation of a future based on justice and solidarity rather than punishment and control.
The panel will include Frente 3 de Fevereiro members, Daniel Lima, Eugênio Lima, and Felipe Teixeira, in conversation with Wagner Carvalho, Ismail Farouk, and Jennifer Lyn Sternad Ponce De Leon.
This is an online event.
Ismail Farouk is a multidisciplinary artist who currently works with the tools of film and food-growing, experimenting with rekindling relationships and networks with plants, animals, and
ecosystems we as humans are embedded in and supported by. Having handed in their PhD in food-based artistic practices, and as an artist deeply invested in urban and spatial inequalities, Farouk explores how these intersect with colonial and apartheid histories. Through their arts-based research practice, Farouk investigates how food and land-based art can unsettle colonial ways of being in the world and enact or imagine speculative futures of abundance. Farouk is currently a lecturer in Fine Art at Durban University of Technology and the Director of Art For Humanity, based in Durban, South Africa. Their work has been featured in various collections, publications, platforms, and exhibitions globally. By interrogating intersecting modalities and technologies of power that reproduce colonial legacies in the everyday, Farouk works towards carving out spaces to explore, discuss, and perform alternative and hidden archives.
Daniel Lima is an artist, curator, editor, and researcher. He holds a Bachelor’s degree in Fine Arts, a Master’s degree in Clinical Psychology, and a PhD in Audiovisual Media and Processes from the University of São Paulo, where he is part of the LabArteMídia laboratory. Since 2001, he has been creating investigative actions in research related to media, racial issues, collective resistance, colonial present, and geopolitical analysis. He is a founding member of several collectives, including Frente 3 de Fevereiro, with works developed in various cities around the world. He has received numerous awards in the fields of Visual Arts, Cinema, and Social Studies. He has participated in several national and international exhibitions, festivals, and seminars. He is the director of the production company, publishing house, and game studio, Invisíveis Produções. www.danielcflima.com
Eugênio Lima is a Dj, Actor-Mc, Researcher of Afro diasporic culture, founding member of the Núcleo Bartolomeu de Depoimentos da Frente 3 de Fevereiro, and Director of the Coletivo Legítima Defesa Winner of the Shell Theater Award for Best Music 2020, for “Terror and Misery in the Third Millennium.” Winner of the Coca Cola/FENSA 2004 award, for best music, for the play “Acordei que Sonhava”, winner of the 2006 Shell Theater Award for Best Music for Frátria Amada Brasil-Pequeno Compendium of Urban Legends” and the 2014 State Governor award with the Núcleo Bartolomeu de Depoimentos for “Antígona Recortada-Contos que Cantam Sobre Pousos Pássaros. Trainer in the area of sound design at SP Escola de Teatro from 2010 to 2019.
Jennifer Ponce de León is a scholar and writer whose research focuses on Left movements and cultural production in the 20th and 21st centuries and Marxist and anticolonial thought. She is Associate Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, where she is also faculty in Latin American and Latinx Studies and a member of the graduate groups in Comparative Literature and Hispanic Studies. She is the author of Another Aesthetics Is Possible: Arts of Rebellion in the Fourth World War (Duke University Press, 2021) and co-editor with Richard T. Rodriguez and Randall Williams of Puto and Other Plays by Ricardo A. Bracho (forthcoming from Duke University Press). She is Associate Director of the Critical Theory Workshop/Atelier de Théorie Critique and co-editor of the Anti-Imperialist Marxism book series for Iskra Books/Critical Theory Workshop. https://jenniferponcedeleon.wordpress.com/
Felipe Teixeira – DJ Fatah: DJ, municipal civil servant and member of Frente 3 de Fevereiro. Bachelor in International Relations and Master in Economics. He has been an active urban music DJ in São Paulo’s night life for 7 years and is currently resident DJ at Súbete, the biggest Reggaeton party in Brazil. He has also played in important Latin American venues such as Perro Negro in Medellín, Boom Bastik at El Marchante in Caracas and El Candelario in Bogotá.
