(Text for the book)

Poetic Prosaic Politics Seeking to Populate Urban Pop Mind

With art and with deception,
one lives half of the year;
with deception and with art,
one lives the other half.
— Popular proverb.

Artists who work with street actions are surprising because they take the unsuspecting passerby by surprise. Curious, the passerby suspends their step and, in a brief moment, comes into contact with the unexpected in the landscape. What they see and read emerges as a public and shared message, at the same time that it becomes an argument for individual perception. It seems shameless: how can it be there for me and for everyone at the same time?

The Coletivo Transverso does this: it interrupts the personal flow of everyday, frantic thoughts (the bills! the boss! the pain!) and causes a stumble at the curb, momentarily halting the continuous motion that numbs minds and hearts. The group offers antidotes for pain ("In case of pain, dance"), for forgetfulness ("It's never too late if you don't know what day it is today"), for the lack of love ("I am your loved one for three days"). And it embarrasses us by reminding us that we exist in community ("Life is a tangle of knots"), when every day we insist on forgetting ("If it weren't for tomorrow, what a busy day today would be").

Amid the constructive and communicative limitations the city imposes, the group produces small subversions of the day-to-day order. These subversions are akin to the destabilization caused by the feeling of falling in love: an emergency state that pulls us away from the supposed economy that demands obedience to an uninterrupted and continuous flow of thoughts loaded with pragmatism, generalizations, and alienation. The group calls us to action, in the style of conceptual instructions: "Find your place. Particularize. Be part of it. Leave contemporary scars. Cave paintings. Ephemeral tattoos. Be supportive. Transcribe, transmute. Make space for butterflies to fly over concrete." [1]

Tangled in words and graphic design since the beginning of their journey in 2011, poet, visual artist, and actress ventured into open spaces to provoke encounters in the gaps of the urban matrix, making extensive use of the semantic field where misspellings, confusion of meanings, and graphic-phonetic relations coexist, transforming poetry into free verse. The poems, stenciled drawings, posters, and installed objects are public propositions in the landscape, poetry, free verse.

Behind these poetic and aesthetic encounters, which appear fortuitously to the passerby, there are a series of elaborations created by the group and collaborators, highlighting issues that make up a generous spectrum of human interests, where there is room for both existential and mundane minutiae, as well as matters that consume the political and economic agenda.

The acts of Coletivo Transverso encourage the city's inhabitants to transform into lovers of the space and time in which they live, much like the Situationists, who, between the 1950s and 1970s, crafted situations driven by the desire to reinvent cities and fuel passions. Love, paraphrasing Slavoj Žižek, “is emerging as something dangerous and, to be more precise, subversive.”[2]

It is in this disposition of affections, manifested as a search for free love, that subversion happens, leaving traces in different urbanities (“How many cities do I carry inside me?” “Cuantas ciudades hay en mi?”) while reminding the other that, just as insertion exists, the trace left behind is ephemeral, as is the passerby’s step and life itself: “We are all foreigners,” “The poem changes the meaning of the path,” “May the fear of leaving not prevent me from changing.” The city has its own forms of organization, and urban intervention acts, claiming a space to produce a break in the logic of cities, where traditions and contradictions are evidenced, not only as pointers directed at the social body but also at what touches the intimate universe of each citizen.

In its first intervention in Brasília, in November 2011, affection and politics were already present for the group when it proposed to challenge the oppression to which the individual and their body are incessantly subjected, inserting phrases and drawings on benches, walls, and bus stops (“Everyone is born with an ass, take care of yours, I’ll take care of mine”; “State, don’t meddle with my uterus,” “My poems may lie, my pussy doesn’t”) [3].

And urban actions continued to emerge and relate to the space in many ways: loose, without thematic correlation with the space, identifying with all and each one (“Does affection affect you?” “The wall that blocks you is yours too,” “The Dream is the essence of what is left of the world”) and as site-specific inserts, invented to dialogue with the many and varied places they are introduced: schools, stairways, awnings, squares, parks, community and cultural centers, etc. In the series of interventions conducted between 2014 and 2015, in Brasília and its Administrative Regions [4], there is the Sebastião intervention, which was executed at the São Sebastião Brick Factory, DF, placed on bricks, with phrases made of earth, alluding to the historical situation of the place (“How many bricks, how many Sebastiãos”; “How many Sebastiãos for each city”) or the Provisional Health Post, which named a sign marking the herb garden with medicinal properties placed on the land in front of the health post (“take care of what heals you”).

Since the interventions are fleeting, lasting until the first rain or until someone removes or interferes with them, there was an early awareness that the circulation of ideas would be their most admirable substance: it is the instant that materializes in memory as remembrance. Forming this network of sharing and lasting invention is an integral part of the group’s actions, which make urban poetry and the stenciling technique resonate in workshops offered to different communities.

Coletivo Transverso bets on poetry and image as devices for communication with the other who is, at the same time, absent, but part of their creative alterity. The routes are drawn for this other, the reader/observer, placed in a situation of participant in this poetic action and urban intervention, capable of contributing to social and aesthetic sharing. The action unfolds as an invitation for closeness, to fall in love with oneself and the causes shared in the collective, and who knows, from the insight of the encounter, subvert oneself.

[1] Opening text of the group. January 2011.

[2] Slavoj Žižek: Love as a political category 16/05/2013.

[3] 1st Transarte Encounter. Art as a reflection of bodily issues. University of Brasília. Nov, 2011.

[4] Group of interventions sponsored by the Culture Support Foundation – FAC.