Transcript

LUTO À LUTA

Do Luto à Luta
Luto a Luta
Do Luto à Luta
Luto a Luta

Dear comrades, my fellow citizens of every species—fellow humans, fellow plants, fellow animals: It feels healing to be together again, I share this sentiment with you.

I come to you today to take a moment to remember that time.

That time we can never forget neither forgive.

We know it is our duty to maintain a living history and transmit it through generations.

So we can always remember.

So our memories will never let it happen again.

We owe this to our ancestors, those who fought and disappeared and died in the resistance.

They are many. Their spirits are here with us today.

***

Remember, we saw how it began, with the Great Forest Fires.

Massive burnings scorching the land. Smoke plumes as huge as atomic bombs.

Never before we have seen an attack on the forests like that. It was far greater than the war over the forests of Indochina.

Remember the words of ecologist Ailton Werã: “We have seen the unfolding wings of climate change.”

The Yano people taught us the sky was falling.

Forests, habitats, and villages were completely destroyed.

Those who managed to escape the violence took refuge in Lacandona.

Remember that it was from there, from the forests of Santo Domingo, that resistance began.

Since time immemorial.

***

The Great Forest Fires were just a prelude to the devastation that followed.

Leaked files revealed that the fires were planned by the Military Council.

Political repression and censorship ensued.

The Militia State implemented a pervasive system of surveillance and fake news.

Professors, journalists, and activists were listed in secret anti-fascist repression programs.

The government took control of all data on deforestation. Scientists had to flee the country.

Remember professor Clarissa Vies Lombardi, persecuted because of her findings on the deadly effects of agro-chemicals.

Remember feminist anthropologist Aboréd Zinid, threatened with death because of her activism on women’s reproductive rights.

They are part of a long list of political refugees.

We are not allowed to forget.

*** 

Some historians consider the Great Forest Fires as the starting event of the Militia State.

Others date its emergence to the political murder of activist Eleiram Ocanfro by the clandestine paramilitary squads.

Remember who was Eleiram Ocanfro: a Black lesbian activist dedicated to abolition of the militia police and the prison system.

Ocanfro was shot to death when she became a voice to every one of us who believe that another world is possible.

That is why she had to be silenced. Her body was a threat to the social order of the neo-fascist regime.

And that is why we ought to maintain her legacy among us, for evermore.

***

Dear comrades, my fellow citizens of every species, we need to remember that the Militia State was not only a political system.

Its ultimate objective was to impose social norms that suppressed dissenting bodies and subjectivities.

It was the dream of a fascist patriarchal life.

Therefore the systematic attacks against art. Against imagination, which is the seed of politics.

Remember the closing of the Queer Museum. The curator was brought to trial; artists were viciously attacked by the State’s army of militia bots.

This happened when the Minister of Culture started dressing like Joseph Goebbels and spreading viral videos referencing Nazism.

Theatre, films and exhibitions were defunded or outright censored. The Cinema Archive was left to rot and criminally burned.

***

They called it the “meme wars,” the “bot wars,” the “cultural wars.”

Raids on science and art paved the way for the institution of the Militia State’s conservative cultural order.

The financial elites gave support, willing to compromise on human rights in exchange for reforms to liberalize the economy and dismantle labour laws.

They tried to convince us that precarity, patriarchy, and surveillance was the new normal.

***

Remember the massacre at the favela Ciudad del Sol. Remember the extrajudicial execution of twenty-nine young Black men during the most brutal police operation conducted in the history of Eldorado.

No one could still pretend we lived in democracy.

At this point we realized that there was no difference between police and militia, between state and terror.

***

The raids came amidst the devastating effects of the virus.

We counted one thousand, at times two thousand bodies per day. Many lost their jobs, and were pushed to poverty and famine.

The Truth Inquiry Commission revealed that the Militia State implemented a deliberate policy of contamination in order to keep the economy running.

Our communities became laboratories for a new type of neo-fascist, necropolitical neoliberalism.

The Truth Commission called it “genocide.”

The case is now being tried by the Forest Council and perpetrators will be held accountable.

Many of you lost beloved ones, and here today I stand in grief with you.

***

And despite all the attacks on our imagination and our bodies, there was resistance.

Dear folks, it is as much important to remember the history of our oppression as it is important to remember the history of our struggles.

All the peoples descended from the forests to occupy the streets.

The human people, the river people, the mountain people, the plant people, the jaguar people.

And many other peoples.

They took to the streets in an act of collective mourning. In São Paulo, in Bogotá, in Santiago, in Buenos Aires, in Brasília.

And mourning turned into resistance.

Remember the chants:

“Do luto à luta, luto a luta!”

From mourning to fight, from death to life.

Remember—ours was a struggle not to take power. But to dismantle power altogether.

We made presidency an empty seat, a void, a space never to be acquired nor exercised.

If I speak, it is through your voices.

We shall never forget.

“[O]urs was a struggle not to take power. But to dismantle power altogether. We made presidency an empty seat, a void, a space never to be acquired nor exercised.” 

In a speculative address by three performers, Paulo Tavares weaves a story of state repression and environmental destruction from recent histories in South and Central America. Collapsing past, present, and future, Tavares’ transmission highlights the need for movements to shift “do luto à luta” (from mourning to struggle): using remembrance and mourning as fuel for resistance and rebellion.

Paulo Tavares is an architect, writer, and educator. He is the author of Forest Law (2014), Des-Habitat (2019), and Memória da terra (2020), and runs the spatial advocacy agency autonoma. He teaches spatial and visual cultures at the University of Brasília in Brazil.

Speech delivered by arquivo mangue (camila mota and cafira zoé) and Cyro Morais.

Song credit: Excerpted soundtrack from Terra em Transe (Dir: Glauber Rocha), 1967.

ASL Interpretation