In Conversation with Wallace Ferreira and Davi Pontes

Lurking Snakes

Modernity, the end of the world, and self-defense are some of the topics covered in an interview with Davi Pontes and Wallace Ferreira, who reveal the way their work decodes the signs of violence, transforming them through the body.

Repertoire, Wallace Ferreira and Davi Pontes. Photo: Matheus Freitas.

by Luiz Rangel

Tue 5 Oct, 2021

C&AL: Your paths in art are varied, and include dance, performance, video, visual arts. What brought you to the work, Repertory N.2?

Wallace Ferreira: My story began in my father’s dreams. He was my first and greatest life reference in art. Very early on, his passion for dance solidified within me the certainty that it was possible for my body to establish affective relationships through art. In my family, every encounter involves dance, so this path was made before I even understood it as a career. I studied different styles of dance for many years, I don’t remember stopping once since the day I started. Today my wish, as an artist, is that my work reflects my stories. I want to project other fictions that do not negotiate my existence and, along that path, bring me closer to allies, to conjure up these lifeboats.

David Pontes: I have trained in dance, not academia, since I was eight years old. In academia, dance has been divorced from the visual arts. My solo work in art began with my two-year stay in Portugal, a difficult experience that allowed for other things to happen. It was a painful time, due to the distance and the experience of being a foreigner and its implications with racism in Portugal. At the same time, I was very intrigued and focused on key ideas for my work, especially raciality and choreography.

C&AL: Who excites you and makes you think about art?

DP: There are two people who have been very important to what we’ve been developing with the Repertory series: Denise Ferreira da Silva and André Lepecki. I emphasize the idea of time developed by Denise, based on Marx and other authors, of the black body existing outside of time. This work is critical of the Marxist idea of primitive capital accumulation, according to which slavery loses importance in the diffuse transition from the pre-capital era to de facto capitalism. From Marx’s perspective on time, when capital accumulation dominates, the black body is irrelevant and therefore outside that time. André Lepecki’s ideas also dialogue with the work, mainly in the relationship between choreography and the ground beneath us, through repeated steps. The idea is not to establish pure opposition to “movement that doesn’t stop”, but to think of this movement effectively as self-defense for our bodies.

C&AL: What experiences or memories guide your work for Frestas – Art Triennial 2020/2021?

DP: Denise Ferreira da Silva and André Lepecki prop up the idea we developed for a choreography of self-defense. The objective is to create space for other procedures to emerge, with the power to escape the elasticity of the art market. At the Triennial, we presented the video of Repertory nº 2 – a choice that is well-suited to pandemic protocols. It is traversed by conversations we had with Thiago de Paula Souza, who follows our work closely, especially my research.

Repertoire, Wallace Ferreira and Davi Pontes. Photo: Matheus Freitas.

The idea is not to establish pure opposition to “movement that doesn't stop”, but to think of this movement effectively as self-defense for our bodies.

The interaction with the camera starts from the image relationship with the bodies’ sweat and nudity. Nudity surrenders something to the desire of the person watching, our Black bodies, so that a choreography of self-defense, among other connections, can take place after this initial contact. It’s a non-negotiable principle, since we are not yet past the moral and political issues about the naked body in art in Brazil, and this concerns not only artists, but also museums.

C&AL: How do you drum up the desire to make art in Brazil in 2021? What forces in the current moment drives you to search for other times and spaces?

WF: Making art in Brazil is no longer a matter of desire, but strategy. I can’t romanticize it. If I could be doing my work in another time/space, I would already be there and feeling very bad for Brazil. But that isn’t the case. The forces that inform me and guide my escapes to exist in this country aren’t all that different from the ones that guide and that guided those that came before me. For some of us, this country has always been a battleground.

C&AL: How do you perceive your positions in this world “between the singularity of having your living body and the collectivities that it incarnates”, as Jota Mombaça says?

DP: Talking about self-defense from the perspective of our bodies also requires addressing violence, with the clear task of talking about the redistribution of violence focused on Black, racialized, and dissident bodies. On the other hand, we aren’t interested in putting forward a metaphor for violence—it’s not an iconic appropriation, but rather they are signs that point to paths for talking about violence. The struggle is one of those signs and it is present precisely as an unpredictable power in the way it unfolds, not as a mimesis of attack and defensive gestures. It’s an answer to the question of how to deal with violence without destroying oneself all over again.

C&AL: What possibilities, not just for the end of this world, but also for the creation of other worlds, are put forward by Repertory?

WF: I’ve seen a lot of people talking about the end of the world. A lot of people responsible for its own ruin, but who always enjoyed themselves. Sometimes you have to betray words, to overlap and dispute meanings.

DP: This world needs to end and imagination is one way to get rid of it. While we strive to survive in this world, even with the tools at our disposal now, lives like ours are still without guarantees. So for that reason, the end of the world. Simultaneously, there is the challenge of rejecting this anxiousness to know and conjure up what will happen next. These creations are temporary and make it possible to inhabit the edge, the margin between this and other worlds.

C&AL: Both of you are part of the Frestas Triennial, entitled “The River is a Snake”. How did you choose to snake along this river that was opened by the exhibition in Sorocaba?

WF: We were very happy when we were invited to this Triennial, it’s been a long-standing wish of ours, since we first started to work together, back in 2018. The Repertory trilogy has been our biggest piece of research so far, and I feel that the more we look, the more pathways and detours are created. It’s research that stays on the move, that doesn’t aim at a final understanding. The work is always alive, at play. Imagining a dance of self-defense and a way to escape keeps us wishing…

DP: …like lurking snakes.

Luiz Rangel is a cultural producer, researcher, and translator. He acted as project coordinator, notably on the international initiatives “Episódios do Sul” and “Hubert Fichte: Love and Ethnology”. His research focuses on Brazilian film history and visual arts.