GRAPHY

    My stream of thoughts by offering the sharings were if I’ve carried with me such core-trauma and unconsciously have embodied behaviors that lead me back to the trap of its oppressed experience, what about the rest of my people – Brazilians that also were raised or live there? Aren’t we trapping ourselves in the inner wound, then? Aren’t we sustaining an oppressed society – keeping the traumatization of it and, by consequence, reproducing History within the colonial-capitalist-patriarchal-white supremacist mindset? For that reason, is that I’ve formulated the methodology “Actions of Connecting”, attempting to mind the gap between the “I” and other. Hence, the sharings were an attempt to embody othering, to not only connect with people or even recognize the reason why we couldn’t connect, but mostly to provoke in each one of them their “envoicement” processes - their inner voice to come out from their inner wounds. Traumas are inner wounds in the format of fissures asking to become a scar. All not visible by an insensitive eye, but that continuously bleeds inside, hurts and the wound grows without one’s awareness.

    Throughout the practice of sharing, I started to bring to the conversations the idea of an imaginary “Sensitive Vector” being the main tool of sharing personal experiences to co-fissuring the TRIAD. Thus, both participant and artist/researcher - me were engaging with a sensitive listening towards each other, practicing (self)care and understanding the connections of similar experiences. The simple act of sharing is a striking move to strive against the TRIAD because by doing that, emerges a “connecting knowledge” that one recognises oneself on other’s life story, and therefore, people raise criticality and awareness of their condition on subjugation and exploitation. In this way, the methodology has enabled to the Fissure art practice its “piercing” movement, breaking apart the TRIAD by claiming what Colonialism, Capitalism and the White Supremacy have caused on one’s lives.  

    The “Sensitive Vector” is the “how” that the conversation is done, meaning, embracing radical sensitivity to transgress exactly what the TRIAD emphasizes as “weak” or “fragile”.  To engage with sensitivity is not to be(come) weak or fragile. On the contrary, it requires much courage and resistance from numbness – a body state that the TRIAD always imposes on us - to state it on the system one lives. I’ve noticed that when the person evokes the trauma's memory and voices what one has experienced, the recognition of how that experience affects one’s life and how it is related to the TRIAD is re-(dis)-covered, resisting the inherent numbness spread out. As Cathy Caruth in “Unclaimed Experience” (1996) and Bessel van der Kolk on “The Body Keeps the Score” (2015) assert, traumas are experiences that can never be acknowledged at the actual time of the traumatic experience itself. It takes time to be processed by one’s body in its wholeness. Thus, in the process of recognizing them, it might happen similar experiences that saturate and even exploit through different angles the primarily core-trauma, leading to different traumatic experiences or even to the repetition of such pattern that expose the person towards the trauma’s vulnerability.

    The act of sharing experiences with someone has the greater value of voicing and listening to oneself, setting one’s voice free, but also finding out exchanges that lead to connect people. When one communicates what has been evoked by voicing it to someone, it creates a rupture of perception because the experience has been externalised – voiced and listened by the person who shares/speaks and to whom is addresed. Engaging with the “Sensitive Vector” means being attentive and caring with oneself and someone else’s vulnerabilities. I write vulnerabilities regarding the exposure of the self and triggering contents which might cause such vulnerable moment. By engaging with such tool, it’s possible to perceive people beyond their appearance, beyond their colour, beyond their religion, beyond their gender, beyond their wealth acquisitions. Radical sensitivity as a practice of listening and voicing during the sharing offers to look through and beyond the person, instead of “looking at” as the TRIAD teaches ones to behave. The motif on practicing such reciprocal radical sensitivity leads to a profound understanding of what it’s been shared in the individual sphere – micropolitical and in the societal sphere – macropolitical.

Any process of political transformation which does not contemplate the decolonisation of the unconscious is condemned to the repetition (even when there is a displacement) of the forms of oppression; (..) there is no possibility of a transformation of structures of government without the modification of the micropolitical devices of production of subjectivity (Rolnik, p. 15-16, 2018).

The colonial-capitalist-patriarchal-white supremacist mindset collude people to react on radical movements which focus on the macropolitical, instead of the micropolitical. By no means I want to trivialise radical movements, however I do know by experience that those leads on tragic endings.