For a Permeable Place

A swarm of bees arrives making noise. It moves together, decides together, and refuses to go unnoticed. That is how I imagined the Paisagem Fair from the very first day, in Vinhedo, and that is how it crossed the ocean with me to Portugal, when I arrived with my bags full of publications by Brazilian artists and editors. A year later I set foot in Guimarães, where I came to begin life again almost by chance, after surviving domestic violence and months living in a women's shelter. It was a turbulent, uncertain process, one that made a very different sound from what I had expected, yet it pushed me to ask: to whom does the becoming of a place belong, and who has the right to imagine it? How does a swarm adapt to its new home? Paisagem and Futuro em Rede are the grounds on which I try to answer these longings in practice, making spaces permeable alongside those who feel left out.

After all, there are borders that separate countries and borders that separate people within a single street. Achille Mbembe wrote that the border has ceased to be merely the line between two countries and has become a mechanism that decides who has the right to circulate through the world and who is condemned to immobility. A border that does not stop at the checkpoint but follows the foreigner's body inward, remaking itself at every step, at every door that does not open. I arrived knowing no one, and I learned quickly what it means to look for space in the Portuguese cultural scene, marked by scarce resources and precarious labour, difficulties that multiply for the outsider. It was from that margin that I understood that the cultural projects I undertake could be tools of resistance in this territory, as a member of the earthly community1.

The purpose of resistance lies at the very genesis of Paisagem, which was born in 2016 in Vinhedo, a town in the interior of São Paulo besieged by predatory real-estate speculation. It began as a fair of graphic art and independent publishing that also became a critical platform on urban and cultural reality. A swarm that occupies space and makes noise; an event that gathers artists, publishers and diverse audiences so that something new may emerge from the encounter, what Édouard Glissant calls creolization, the unexpected third that is born when cultures relate without hierarchy. In this sense, diversity has always been its method. In the effort to bring together origins, techniques and generations that rarely meet, Paisagem proposes to turn the border into a zone of exchange, where difference inspires creation rather than exclusion. Since 2022 the project has taken place in Guimarães, where it has reflected on the need for plural communities and on how new technologies can contribute to collective life. This year the swarm settled into its element and took to the streets of Bairro C, in urban interventions under the theme of territories of affection.

If the swarm is the surface phenomenon, the work that sustains it happens underground, more slowly. Coming to understand myself as part of this place, the most reasonable thing to do was to found the Minhoca Utópica (Utopian Earthworm) association, a name that carries a programme: to work the soil discreetly and patiently, aerating the ground and decomposing what is ignored, creating fertility so that diversity can grow. Beneath that same worked soil runs another network, that of the mycelium, whose filaments link the roots of an entire forest and through which the trees exchange water, nourishment and warnings. A forest organizes itself through this underground network, with no centre and no owner, yet it is far from an idyll. Donna Haraway describes nature as symbiosis, a making-with, a sympoiesis2 in which to live together means staying with the trouble rather than fleeing it. In a forest, diversity does not erase conflict; it turns conflict into fertile ground. It is this image that guides the projects of the fledgling association.

It is the mycelium's technique that Futuro em Rede, the association's inaugural project, seeks to explore. It was born with the support of the Carbono Zero Cidades Infinitas programme and is based in Bairro C, a district of Guimarães with an emerging cultural vocation. Since the beginning of this year, solar totems with mesh-network nodes have been posing provocative questions to passers-by: “How do you imagine this place fifty years from now?” “What would change if you had a magic wand?” More than a thousand people have already answered, most of them under eighteen, asking almost always for the same things: more trees, more gatherings, fewer cars and more public transport. Here, imagination is the method. To gather desires about the future in order to act in the present inverts the logic of forecasting: instead of prolonging today's tendencies, one starts from a desired future and works back to the decisions the present must make to reach it, in an approach known as backcasting. And there is a concrete gesture in which these desires stop being mere answers. The open archive that grows day by day, together with the material from the design-fiction workshops, will take shape as the Manifesto para o Futuro, a zine to be launched in September, a collective voice turned into a document. This network is what Milton Santos would call horizontality: unlike the verticalities, the flows of capital and of the platforms that cross the territory without inhabiting it, it is made of the body-to-body of daily life and returns to residents the authorship of their own place's future.

The forest I spoke of is no idyll, and neither is Bairro C. Here conflict appears without disguise. This territory of industrial and working-class past, now in full urban transformation, has become the laboratory of the projects we develop. Public policy has opened space for experimentation, yet what is created there provokes mixed reactions. Claire Bishop warned of the risk that participatory art might turn into easy consensus, especially in a context of scarce resources, where critical thought can cost the few doors that still open. Against that danger, keeping local tensions visible and audible is what keeps the art from being reduced to mere decoration.

This real resistance, a veiled tension made of intolerance and of the refusal of a supposed threatening invasion, has been aggravated by the rise of extremist ideologies. In an episode impossible to ignore, in this latest edition of Paisagem, under the theme “In territories of affection there are no borders,” an urban artwork honouring Palestinian children was vandalized only days after it was installed. The episode hurt. I do not take friction as automatic proof of merit, but there a real limit was touched, and it deserves to be named.

Permeable does not mean living without any border at all. Intolerance cannot claim a place as if it were merely one more difference to be welcomed; it is the border itself, the gesture of raising walls and choosing who is left outside. To dissolve borders is precisely to undo that gesture. Permeability has a single refusal, and only one: of those who seek only to obstruct exchange, to block flows, to build walls.

bell hooks spoke of pleasure as a political act, of the joy of encounter and of learning together as a way of resisting social conformity. Ailton Krenak reminds us that imagining is one of the last available forms of resistance, and that to dream together is already to begin transforming. This is the wager of Paisagem and Futuro em Rede: to open a permeable space, crossed by mutual exchange and learning, against the grain of an age that prefers to raise barriers. Diversity, in the soil of a forest as in the life of a city, is the condition of what is still to come.

A swarm does not ask permission to exist, the mycelium recognizes no divisions beneath the earth, and neither of them keeps anything for itself alone. This was the possibility I found when I arrived, but it was never mine alone: the becoming of a place belongs to all who are willing to imagine it together, including those who came from elsewhere and belong here for good. To imagine together what this place can become is already, in some way, to begin building it.

References

Claire Bishop, Artificial Hells (2012); Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (1990); Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble (2016); bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress (1994); Ailton Krenak, Ideas to Postpone the End of the World (2019); Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (2019) and Brutalism (2024); Milton Santos, The Nature of Space (1996).

Notes

1  In his more recent thought, especially in Brutalism and the essays following Necropolitics, Mbembe argues that, faced with the planetary ecological crisis and the violence of borders, the only community that truly matters is the earthly community: all the inhabitants of the Earth, human and non-human, who share a single, finite, habitable world.

2  Sympoiesis comes from the Greek and means, literally, “making-together” or “making-with.” Donna Haraway develops it in Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (2016) to affirm a simple and radical idea: nothing makes itself. As she writes, “sympoiesis is a word for worlding-with, in company.” The concept is bound to her “staying with the trouble”: living and dying together on a damaged planet, making kin, and assuming that survival is always collective and multispecies.