Casa M: Laboratory, Place, Encounter and Affect

[Casa M] welcomed the community of Porto Alegre and its neighborhood, mobilized a field of affections and exchanges, saw the birth of loves and marriages, gave its floor so that children could learn to walk, and served as laboratory, studio, auditorium, school, open kitchen, music studio, dormitory, community center, and playground.

Mônica Hoff¹⁵⁸

Casa M (literally M House or Home) was a cultural center inaugurated in a renovated residential house in a city center neighborhood as a social sculpture project of the 8^th Biennial. Opening four months prior to the official exhibition and closing one month afterwards Casa M became the experimental engine and heart of the Geopoetic biennial. The house had belonged to a local artist and teacher, Cristina Balbão. Remembered with great affection, her portrait hanging in the library/archive/discussion space seemed to ground and affirm the sheer creative locality of it all.

The three story shotgun style Casa comprised workshop, reading and café spaces, art commissioned installations including an outdoor installation featuring a red sand garden (Fernando Limberger), specially designed bookshelves (Daniel Acosta) and an ever present bell ring (Vitor Cesar) as well as a small vitrine with changing exhibitions. The Casa’s discussion/library space also opened the archive of Mercosul Biennial Foundation and its seven previous editions to the public for research for the first time.

158 Hoff, “Publicness at the Mercosul Biennial,” Revista MESA.

Programs featured talks, special events, workshops, courses, short residencies, and performances, along with the constant occupation by the Casa’s mediators who generated projects and engaged the neighborhood with the center’s activities or simply invited people to have coffee. If a transversal social praxis of “encounter” was only partially realized in Travel Notebooks, at Casa M it became its vital and dynamic modus operandi. Examples included: the Duetos project that brought together local artists of different disciplines to create collaborative works and performances; teacher workshops in philosophy, geography, history, literature and art that sought to geopoetically traverse curricula; and multiple gatherings inviting neighbors, families, artists and diverse practitioners to do everything from make gardens to sleep overs.

The sheer frenzy of Casa M’s programming seemed to anticipate or compensate for its imminent discontinuity. The specter of its temporality was a recurring presence throughout its seven month existence, particularly in the last two months, where its success was obvious to everyone and the campaign “Fica Casa M” (Stay Casa M) strove to make a case to the Biennial Foundation to continue to support it. Curators, producers, artists and educators involved constantly wondered and questioned if the crazy energy, dedication and affection pulsating through center’s every program would be sustainable. Did this very energy and motivation come from its temporal limitations? Could it exist as a social sculpture post the biennial? Would its permanence institutionalize the affective field built via the network of encounters crossing its doorstep? How might there be a way to think of all this agitation as a means to work toward the construction of a long-term project for the sustainability of the center? Some looked to Casa M to provide infrastructural support – nurture local and regional networks, provide presentation opportunities, or act as a lever or facilitator in local cultural negotiations. Artist and choreographer, Tatiana Rosa who participated in the Duetos project expressed this when she suggested that as part of the biennial program Casa M was a vital player in “provoking encounters” and “giving a hand” to the local art scene. While wishing that such encounters might have fostered even richer explorations across the collaborating group of artists involved she saw the Casa’s differential praxis as one that represented an attempt to operate on a scale that would guarantee an affective dimension to the relationships it set in motion.¹⁵⁹ Others pointed to the unique neighborhood context that made it an a/effective architecture to promote surprising encounters. It was, as Michele Zgiet, Casa mediator described, “geopoetics in practice:”

There was a workshop going on and the teacher was super focused. Suddenly a group of teenage skateboarders came in. They wanted to cross the house to see the garden, so they asked to pass through and as they walked by they saw that

159 Interview Tatiana Rosa. “Vídeo: Coleção dos múltiplas vozes: Casa M.”

there was graffiti on the slides that were being shown and so they stopped to watch. And they were very knowledgeable about graffiti. Indeed, one of them was a graffiti artist. And it started a really interesting debate which is something that I really don’t think could happen in another space.¹⁶⁰

Artist Tiago Gora who presented Entre, the first in a series of intervention/installations in Casa M’s vitrine similarly notes this sense of the house as a kind of “commons” and boundaryless territory that invites passerbys to check it out, without any kind of grandiose gesture:

Even more unexpected than the City Unseen interventions people pass by […]

and suddenly come across art exhibitions, studios […] people thinking about and creating art in a regular residential house, and they can come in or not, or just look in the window.¹⁶¹

The relationship with the neighborhood was, however, not always smooth. Dancer Luiza Mendonça described the rehearsals for her Dueto performance project, Geochoreography, as tense. The piece was a collective dance intervention on public steps ascending a hill into the center of the city directly opposite Casa M. Practicing with loud music and instructions for the dancers infuriated the neighbors who even sent the police to question them and on one occasion threw a bag of urine at them. Yet on the day of the performance, they put out beach chairs hours beforehand to reserve their space wanting to see what all that noise had been about and even opened up their houses for the group to film the performance.¹⁶² The buzz amongst the artists and their collaborators and their active use of social media brought over 2,500 to Casa M on the evening of the performance.¹⁶³ Afterwards the neighbors expressed how thrilled they were to have seen this abandoned public staircase so revitalized and filled with people. For Helguera:

These types of experiences, of conviviality, spontaneity, this is absolutely the most important, I think Casa M represents the best of what this biennial could have produced. For me, it’s core to the principles of critical pedagogy, you don’t just give people a product, you teach them to make the product so they can do it themselves.¹⁶⁴

The Casa M project, as assistant curator Fernanda Albuquerque noted, was a laboratory on multiple levels: experimenting with independent formats within institutional contexts;

encouraging cross-overs and collaborations between artistic languages; emphasizing process and

160 Interview Michele Zgiet. “Collection of Multiple Voices.” Revista MESA.

161 Interview Tiago Gora. “Collection of Multiple Voices.” Revista MESA.

162 Interview Luiza Mendonça. “Collection of Multiple Voices.” Revista MESA.

163 Interview Gabriela Silva. “Vídeo: Coleção das múltiplas vozes: Casa M.”

164 Interview Pablo Helguera. “Collection of Multiple Voices.” Revista MESA.

reflection over production; and alternative methods of approaching audiences. ¹⁶⁵ For her it truly constructed and “created its place.” What, she wondered, did Casa M bring that the biennial had not previously brought?¹⁶⁶ The emphasis, as Roca notes, in relation to the title of Casa M on the notion of “Casa” and not the Mercosul of the “M.”¹⁶⁷ It was an intimately scaled model, a space to be appropriated, a context for experimentation in art, pedagogy and life, a place for multiple encounters, and a kind of neighborhood school-cum-community center-cum studio.

However, Casa M’s infrastructure ended up being more ephemeral than bricks and mortar. Roca noted that the Mercosul Biennial Foundation only accepted Casa M when it was seen as a social sculpture, i.e. an artwork within the context of the 8^th Biennial.¹⁶⁸ While certainly the temporal vitality of Casa M would have transformed into something else as a permanent center, it was a shame that the Foundation could not see to exploring the possibility of continuing it. Not only as a context for ongoing activities but also, as Fernanda Ott, coordinator of the Mercosul Foundation’s archive at the time, suggested, as a place to house and socialize the evolving histories the biennial itself was producing. This disjunct between the pulsating and desiring energies of what the biennial was geopoetically generating locally and regionally and its administrative economic power structure was a source of visible frustration for those on the ground. Paula Krause, administator of Casa M remarked:

I don’t know if those who end up putting money into the biennial know much about what goes on. There’s a gap… for example here this project represents the Biennial Foundation for the city, I sense this with my contact with the public, everyone that comes by here gives us feedback on how this is important for the city not just as a project of the 8^th Biennial but linked to the Foundation […] in the end though, all these statements don’t end up really influencing a decision, we don’t really understand how that decision is taken […] It’s something I see with [various] biennials. Projects come with a lot of force, they traverse [each]

biennial during a time period, traverse the city, but they don’t manage to transform that larger structure, that thing that doesn’t have much form, the biennial leaves but that thing without form, that is the Foundation, the cultural policy of the city, continues without form.¹⁶⁹

Despite this sense of a geopolitical failure and disappointment amidst the 8^th Biennial’s geopoetic possibilities, the real infrastructural constructivity was the network of affection encompassing those closest to and orbiting around the Casa M experimental activities. In Touching Feeling:

Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick points out that “affects may have any

165 José Roca, Paola Santoscoy and Fernanda Albuquerque, “Casa M,” in Pedagogia no campo expandido, 406-408, 408.

166 Interview Fernanda Albuquerque, “Vídeo: Coleção das múltiplas vozes: Casa M.”

167 Interview José Roca. “Vídeo: Coleção das múltiplas vozes: Casa M.”

168 José Roca. “Vídeo: Coleção das múltiplas vozes: Casa M.”

169 Paula Krause. “Vídeo: Coleção das múltiplas vozes: Perspectivas e horizontes.”

object” be it “things, people, ideas, sensations, relations, activities, ambitions, institutions and any number of things, including other affects.” Their duration and impact is impossible to objectively measure, for example “anger may evaporate in seconds but can also motivate a decade-long career of revenge” or “hearing a piece of music can make [one] want to hear it repeatedly, listen to other music or study to become a composer.” They are also, “at whatever scale they are attended to […] irreducibly phenomenological.”¹⁷⁰ Grappling with affects lead us to the unwieldy tides of human emotions and motivations, they may be influenced or contagious but cannot be corralled. Yet if mobilized their affective agency is exponential. It is in this sense as Hoff remarked that Casa M’s smallness made it so “huge.”¹⁷¹

Shortly after the center’s closing, a collective of curators, producers and educators, many of whom were directly involved the 8^th Biennial opened their own “house” continuing the spirit of Casa M on a volunteer-run basis known as “Casa Comum” (Common House).¹⁷² The space, however, was also short-lived, as people left the city, costs rose, and energy abated, it closed. Yet, many of those involved still live in Porto Alegre and in different ways continue to embrace and

“rehearse” the experimental and collective spirit of Casa M as social sculpture. This network also extends to the multiple places, cities and contexts throughout Brazil where those connected with the 8^th Biennial moved, to the varied masters and doctoral dissertations in progress, and to the taste for experimental encounters and affective possibility that the project catalyzed.