When my daughter was forming her first sentences, one of the combinations that frequently came out of her mouth was: “must fix the frozzle!” For some reason, she considered this activity of uttermost importance. And we, we always knew what to expect. We never did discover though, why a frozzle was called a frozzle. She was too young to explain, and growing older she simply forgot. “Fixing the frozzle” always involved cords of some sort; yarn, laces, threads or wires, sometimes several of them tangled together. She would tie them to different objects in the apartment, loose objects as well as door handles and heavy furniture. With great seriousness she went about her craft. Eventually a web had been created, connecting different spots of our home to what always ended up in a chaotic mesh.
Read moreOn “shadow society” and extermination – Swedish migration politics
n the beginning of this cold December month, the Swedish Minister of Migration, Maria Malmer Stenergard, gave an interview in which she repeated one of the new government’s and its supporting party’s intention: forcing public functionaries to report any undocumented persons we might meet in our professions. If we fail to do so, there should be consequences. The minister described this as part of the government’s determination to “exterminate” (utrota) what in Swedish public debate is called “shadow society” (skuggsamhället).
Read moreA life in the commons
Perhaps it is because already in this simple act of sharing a meal, they express a longing for a زندگی معمولی, zendegi ma’mouli, or an ordinary life, as articulated in Shervin Hajipour’s Baraye. While I watch Hajipour’s video as well as clips of high school and university students together singing this song of his that he wrote also as their song using their words, I am struck by this: the modesty of the revolution they call for and practice in their acts of defiance.
Read moreBrazil, Corona and the History of Epidemics
Acampamento Terra Livre, Brasília 2019. Photo by Patricia Lorenzoni.
In March of this year, in the solitariness of a Rio apartment during lockdown, philosopher Marcia Cavalcante Schuback gave a lecture entitled “On the isolation of the world”, in collaboration with the YouTube channel Bazar do Tempo. What does it mean, Schuback asked, to do philosophical reflection in times of pandemic? And more specifically, what does it mean not only in a certain time, but also in a specific place; a country that knows all too well epidemics of different kinds, be they biotic, social, or political. A country, where ever since the very beginning of the modern era, indigenous people have been killed and exterminated through epidemics. One could pose a related question: How to deal with the historical fact that epidemic contagion is constitutive in the making of Brazil, and that it was so before Brazil was even thought of as “Brazil”? On April 28, president Jair Messias Bolsonaro held an outdoor press hearing … Continue reading at discoversociety.org.
What’s in a Landscape? Indigenous Art and the Coevalness of Colonial Expansion
The following article is published in PARSE Journal, Issue 8: Exclusion.
Carmézia Emiliano: Wazaka’ (2016)
Carmézia Emiliano’s painting Wazaka´ (2016) depicts a huge tree, heavy with fruits of all shapes and colours, the ground around it also covered with fruit. The tree is the tree of all fruits, the world tree, or Wazaka’, a centre of the world for the Macuxi and other Carib-speaking people in the borderlands between Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana. In the painting, men and animals surround the tree’s trunk. But while the animals are happily feeding from the fallen fruit, the men’s gazes are turned towards the top, and in their hands they are holding axes. The moment depicted, immediately preceding the cutting down of Wazaka’, is a crucial one in indigenous narratives from the Monte Roraima area. Behind the tree in Emiliano’s painting, which brings the very beginning of time together with the present, is the characteristic silhouette of Monte Roraima, the stump-like plateau mountain that will be the only thing left when the axes have done their job. Continue reading …