Poema/processo. Poetic radicality and dissent

OEI # 66 2014: Poema/processo

Poema/processo Poetic radicality and dissent Fernanda Nogueira South Sun Salt Sip Sock Sack

America America America America America America

Americas (version) – Samaral1 Poetic experimentation has begun: it has started in a Brazil experiencing Petrobras, Brasília, concrete art, bossa nova, student unrest, lack of poetry, etc., etc. Álvaro de Sá On January the 26th 1968 new poetry burst onto the streets of Brazil. The debate that took place among the group that started the avant-garde poetic movement ­poema/processo and the public in the Fine Arts Academy of Rio de Janeiro on the occasion of the ‘2nd NATIONAL EXPO OF POEMA/PROCESSO’ unfolded in a heated protest that revealed at least two suffocating phenomena of the period: the normative standard of poetic experimentation enclosed in the orthodox procedures of concrete poetry; and the censorship imposed by the military regime in place at the time. In a fragment of the mimeographed folder that was distributed to the public and the local press, there is a demand for a decisive ‘radicalization ­of languages’. The group bases its assumptions on the assertion that ‘a poem is like a battery, when it’s used up it’s used up’. They also defend the need to ‘scare by radi­ cality’2 – a key idea that leads to the defence of an extensive avant-garde poetic practice. The action reaches its peak on the steps of the Municipal Theatre with the tearing up of classical books by discursive poets of the ‘gene­ ration of 45’ – such as João Cabral de Melo Neto and Carlos Drummond de Andrade amongst others – who, in spite of being well-known and appreciated, did not propose riskier formal experimentation. This premeditated act resonates in the national media and, as planned by the group that initiated the poema/processo movement, finds allies and attracts the attention of poets who were working in isolation all over Brazil. Exactly five months after the poema/processo manifestation, the massive ‘Passeata dos Cem Mil’ [March of the Hundred Thousand] would occupy Rio de Janeiro’s city centre in protest against repression and the probable privatization of public education supported with direct subvention from the USA. As well as demanding that a more assertive

position be taken by the government as regards public education, the constant acts and protests reflected a growing questioning of the military regime put in place with the coup d’état of 1964. Among the various protests taking place in 1968, the 28th of March ended tragically with the murder of the seventeen-year-old undergrad student Edson Luís de Lima Souto, during the storming of the Restaurant Calabouço by the military police. The crowd of people ­assembled for the burial of the first student killed by the military during the dictatorship paralysed the city.3 On that occasion, members of poema/processo distributed a critical notice supporting the manifestations: The poema/processo group protests against the ­assassination of students carried out by the anachronistic social structures in place, and makes common cause with the student movement. We were not surprised by this act [the killing of Edson Luís], because we have already understood that the struggle against the structures has reached the level of ‘all-in’. The ‘frente poético’ [poetic front] of the state of Rio Grande do Norte simultaneously distributed a solidarity manifesto in the local marches: § We are for the new (manifestation of protest, new theatre, new cinema, poema/processo, avant-garde music) against the archaic structures (in which the official dictators maintain political prisoners, censorship, students killed by the police, excess); § the death of the student Edson Luís confirms: we live in a MILITATORSHIP; § police X students, censorship X culture, comfort X struggle – how much longer? § for the freedom of creation, on the fringes of the militatorship.4 The mood of revolt extended all over the country and many ended up in jail and/or assassinated in police raids that aimed to contain the various forms of protest. Repression is intensified on December the 13th 1968, when the military government decrees the Institutional Act number 5 (AI5), giving wide-ranging powers of censorship to the president of the republic and lifting constitutional rights and guarantees.5 The potent irruption of poema/processo in the beginning of that same year engages in a process of simultaneous political and artistic radicalization aiming to highlight the communication value of the social act.6 The conglomeration formed by members of poema/processo and the public that participate in the production of poems leading from the works presented in the 2nd EXPO roam

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the avenues of the city with ‘cartazes/poemas’ [posters/ poems] of denunciation and protest-bearing cryptic slogans: ‘Down with the Dictatorship of Chant and Sonnet’, where the last initials, C and S, refer to the dictator’s name, Costa e Silva, de facto president between March 1967 and September 1969.7 Others posed the question ‘Es USted libre?’ [Are you free?] in Portuguese and Spanish with the capital letters referring to the US domination in Latin America in the context of the Cold War; or still ­‘Cassiano Ricardo8 for chief of censorship’ referring to the previous period of dictatorship, between 1930 and 1945, with Getulio Vargas as head of State. Apart from manifesting against specific parties within the repressive state, the group’s initiative tries to provoke the vital and transgressive logic of an occupation of public space that could interfere in each and any social body. It was a powerful manifestation in favour of disobedience that, through protesting, dared to imagine a radical poetic language capable of responding to the dictatorial regime in its gravest years by other means. The attitude of the group aims to denature the self-repressive mechanisms that were extended to all fields of life and tried to de-capacitate bodies and de-politicise subjectivities en masse. The act on the stairs of the Municipal Theatre made evident the indifference of the mainstream media and the specialized critical media of the time in the face of a new poetic movement in formation. The ‘rasga-­ rasga’ [tear-tear] act is conceived following the 1st NATIONAL EXPOSITION OF POEMA/PROCESSO in December 1967. Álvaro de Sá here shows the poem O LIXO [the litter] – a box fitted to a small shelf with around two thousand pages of discursive poetry on top. The picture of an arrow indicated a bin in which one should trash the poems after reading.9 This action operates as a real and potent demonstration: whatever was consumed in the reading of those poetic productions was way beyond the materiality of printed matter. If at first the action refuted the traditional forms of poetry, in ‘a second level of reading’ – declares Álvaro de Sá – the tearing of the poems also ‘referred to the tearing of laws, plans and documents that the system of the time poured on top of our heads. Along with the protest this ended up forming a ‘macro collective/poem’ that constituted ‘the first collective poetic happening’ of the group.10 As noted by Neide de Sá in a transversal reading, ‘the sign is the act’.11 However, the fact that the tearing of the books took place at the entrance to the theatre and not inside it, in the margins of an environment supposedly reserved for high culture, signalled the zone of conflict between the established and the emergent; the official and the alternative. The group chose to carry out the action in that space in order to contextualise the political aspect of the act.12 By doing so the group inaugurates a space in which the right to effect the re-writing and distortion of literary references is reaffirmed. The group feels the need to radi­ calize the struggle against multifaceted censorship. Politically antagonistic to single-directional poetic creation; against the rejection, obstacles, omissions and censorship, the participants of poema/processo engage in direct

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­ pposition against the defenders of a purist conception o of poetry. In so doing, they provoke a rupture with the prevailing models of creation, critique and communication in order to create space for new forms of poetic creation. For that, they promote collective work through exchange, the promotion of [the group’s] proposals and critical production. Not only to create alternative communication channels for circulating information, protests and denunciation – and thus disrupt the institutionalised logic – but also to incite appropriation and provoke new creative initiatives. Based on the dynamic of constant transformation (the valorisation of the process per se) they could subvert the distribution of roles and the dynamics of ­reception in order to ‘affect the social order’.13 In this context ‘reading’ is understood as a productive process that makes the discussion of disagreements possible and ­provokes real participation and public intervention. However, the ‘rasga-rasga’ act [tearing of books] was associated by the local press14 with the destruction and burning of Jewish literature and ‘degenerate’ books at Opernplatz, Berlin, during the Nazi regime.15 That distorted interpretation of the act shows, on the one hand, the modes of reception to the movement in official literary and academic fields, where there was little ­interest in directly confronting the idea of literature that was being consolidated at the time. And, on the other hand, it also reveals how slippery the socio-­ political situation pointed at by the complex actions of the poema/­p rocesso movement could be, which overflow the institutionalized order to generate other points of arti­ culation between poetry, politics, art and activism. In many other cities the ‘poem/­ collective’ induced the tactical appropriation of public space. On the 1st of June 1969, during the popular literature and art ‘Festival de Pirapora’, in Minas Gerais, a march ­ promoted by poets and local students titled ‘Desfile de Autores e Personagens da Literature Brasil­ eira’ [Parade of Authors and Characters of Brazilian Litera­ture] took to the streets in the form of ‘posters/­ poems’ showing some fragments of literary production from the colonial literature of the Jesuit José de Anchieta through to poema/processo. These proposed critiques such as: ‘we are convinced that literature, as all the arts, should not be confined to fine salons only to satisfy an

intellectual elite  . . .’16 A year later, in April 1970, a grand collective action takes the Recife Art Fair, in Pernambuco, by storm. Around five thousand people sat in a common space to eat the two-metre long ‘poema/processo bread’. The impressive happening proposed by thirty young ­artists, the Pernambuco Front, drew direct attention to the dramatic hunger in the northeastern region of the country. The posters featured messages such as: ‘Poema-pão feito por grupo de Boa Viagem de parceria com os ­padeiros’ [Bread-poem made by the Boa Viagem group in partnership with bakers], and ‘Esta obra de arte foi boicotada pela gloriosa Fundação Bienal de São Paulo’17 [This artwork was boycotted by the prestigious São Paulo Biennial Foundation] as an obvious allusion to the censorship that was then starting to become visible in that institution, and it would later result in the international artists’ boycott of the 10th São Paulo Biennial, in 1969.18

APPROPRIATION AND DISSEMINATION: THE ‘REALIST-REALITY’ OF POEMA/PROCESSO The new poetic movement spread all over the country. The will to decentralize was imperative from the outset of the first official poema/processo appearance on the 11th of December 1967, with two simultaneous and geographically distant exhibitions, in Rio Grande do Norte and Rio de Janeiro. The 1st NATIONAL EXPOSITION POEMA/PROCESSO took place in the School of Industrial Design of the University of Rio de Janeiro and presented works of twenty-nine poets from dif­ ferent regions of the country: Bahia, Espirito Santo, Mato Grosso, Minas Gerais, Pernambuco, Rio Grande do Norte, Rio de Janeiro, and São Paulo. On this occasion, two manifestos were distributed along with the proposals of the new poetic movement. In the city of Natal, Rio Grande do Norte, a document ­titled ‘new poetry, new process: 8 points’ signed by ­Anchieta Fernandes, Dailor Varela, Falves Silva, Fernando Pimenta, Frederico Marcos, Marcos Silva, Moacy Cirne, Nei Leandro de Castro, and Sanderson Medeiros, especially signaled the fifth point: ‘public participation as a dynamic agent in the creation of the poem is ­socially significant –­  installing, collaging, moving, ripping, destroying. posterpoems, object-poems, film-poems. immediate consump-

tion’.19 In Rio de Janeiro, the manifesto ‘Proposition 67’ sums up the main discussions on the practice of poema/ processo, among which one finds the following slogans: ‘everyday images transformed into acronyms’ and ‘only the reproducible attends, in this precise moment, the masses’ need for communication and information’.20 To disseminate the movement and champion a critical poetic practice; these were the fundamental prerogatives of the group, which demanded the advent of various strategies of occurrence and circulation. The envelope-magazines21 edited, published and ­distributed by members of poema/processo and other artists connected to experimental poetry are an example of the will to publicize their poetic production and equally a sign of the demand for the active participation of the reader. The issues were carried out through personal contacts and correspondence among those interested in producing and publishing ‘the new poetry’. The circulation of proposals was passed from hand to hand and through a mail network that would later, in 1971, be recognized as a mail art network.22 The poems were submitted via open calls announced by the editors and were mixed with paral­ lel­contributions, or even the reproduction of random mate­ rials received. Therefore, all pretensions as to the limits of poetry were already overruled. Some of the b ­ etter known envelope-magazines are: Processo (Rio de Janeiro 1968), launched by Lara Ramos and Neide Dias de Sá; Etapa (Pirapora – Minas Gerais, 1968), edited by the literary group of Inacio Quinaud; Levante (Campina Grande – Paraíba, 1970) by Regina Coelli and Adalberto Ribeiro; Projeto (Natal – Rio Grande do Norte, 1970; Rio de Janeiro, 1975) by Falves Silva, Anchieta Fernandes, Dailor Varela, Jalves da Silva, and Nei Leandro de Castro; Vírgula (Rio de Janeiro, 1972) by Wlademir Dias-Pino; ­Experiên­cias (Rio de Janeiro, 1975) by Belaboca Group [Samaral and João Carlos Sampaio]; Povis (Natal – Rio Grande do Norte, 1976) by J.  Medeiros; Urbanorganismo (Natal, 1976) by Unhandeijara Lisboa; Multipostais (­Recife, 1978) by Paulo Bruscky; Karimbada (João Pessoa – PB, 1979) by Unhandeijara Lisboa; Punho (Recife – PB, 1980) also edited by Paulo Bruscky; etc.23 Given issues of the same magazine were not necessarily identical. That is the case of Processo and Vírgula: the material at hand was exhaustively distributed until it was gone. It is not accidental that poema/processo presented itself as a communicational avant-garde;24 and this role was played in a convincing manner. In the text ‘Avant-Garde Against the Aura’ (1975), for instance, Álvaro de Sá critically ­updates the requirements signaled by ­Walter Benjamin in his essay ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’ (1936) and points to a few ­central strategies of the poetic avant-garde: The avant-garde’s job is to invite the consumer to parti­ cipate actively and creatively in the communication. This is the first step to demystify the aura, because the consumer is put at the same level as the author and the artist. The second step is to develop and generalize the use of the instruments of production of inform­ation, which are still underused . . .25

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Such an effort was at the core of the envelope-magazines that were compiled and then put into circulation via mail to multiple destinations around the world. Moacy Cirne indicates that ‘the use of the envelope as a “poor” medium for the circulation of poems was systematised by the poema/­processo movement from 1968 onwards as an alternative form of propagating materials that were produced in the context of (anti)literary experimentation’.26 The movement is proposed as anti-literary because its struggle is precisely against any restrictions that might come with belonging to the domain of literature. What mattered most was the new field of action that the movement was then developing, and the potency of the unpredictability insisted upon with experiences that exceed the verbal and the literary. Proposing a radically democratic access to [a form of] production that was capable of facing restrictions and other excluding forms of visibility and discursivity that distinguished the poem until then, Álvaro de Sá affirms in his text ‘Por que medo da ­Vanguarda? [Why fear the avant-garde?]: [Poema/processo] denounces, for its revolutionary processes, its revolutionary needs – by not avoiding political issues when artists wish to avoid them – it is not the ‘profiteur’ of a petit-bourgeois public that is self-appointedly leftist whilst discussing from their armchairs. [The movement’s] position is against copyright because it offers equally valued multiple versions that prevent the author from becoming representative and master of the work, which becomes part of the public domain. It is this democratic character that prefigures the conditions for the development of the ‘kingdom of liberty’. This is poema/processo, realist-reality of 1968.27 The artistic and political program of the movement conceives the poem as a ‘project’ for possible appropriation and modification by anyone. Version and project are ­essential concepts here. They are part of four basic postu­ lates around which the movement articulated its practice: 1) process: no production is definitive, and it is available for free appropriation and transformation. Language, whichever it may be, must function as ‘a factor of universal solidarity’; 2) for that, all creation must be understood as a matrix for new propositions, a ‘starting point’; 3) what­ ever stems from this matrix is the version, ‘discipline for appropriation’; 4) graphic is the final form of the poem, totally integrated in the general critical proposal, that is, it is a ‘project for new versions’.28 In the text ‘On the (anti) literary avant-garde and other questions’ (1977), Moacy Cirne states that to ‘politi­ cize the (anti) literary avant-garde is a historic choice’. Furthermore, in appointing the ways of working with the poem – experimentally, productively and politically – ­he notes: The anthropophagy of Oswald de Andrade is reconsidered from the perspective of poema/processo and the social and political conditions in the country ­today . . . The larger this [experimental] practice, the

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greater the effectiveness of the (anti) literary product with political aims; considering it will be naturally ­political. The simple chant about some political or ­social element will dilute or limit the aimed efficacy. Only experimental production (either through the ­poema/processo, or through other ‘poetic’ expressions) will politically respond to the political and social needs of the poet and the poem . . . The poet does not ­address consumers; [the poet] addresses readers – future producers.29 In poema/processo the formal outcome (or the sign) is not as important as the intention of production and what this could arouse (the process). It was presumed that the ‘consumer/participant’ would become a producer of new critical proposals.30 It was not only about participating in a superficial way, but as a ‘member of a collective [acting] body’31 capable of creating new modes of political enunciation and subjectivization. This assumption is clearly ­visible in the work of Neide de Sá in the 1st NATIONAL EXPOSITION OF POEMA/PROCESSO. The spatial poem A corda [the rope] (1967)32 consisted of an extended rope, reminiscent of the popular cordel literature [in the hinterlands of Brazil] – in which the ‘consumer/participant’ could subvert the information published in the mass media and elaborate their own writing by selecting a pre-selected group of cut-ups, verbal signs and images. The doubly transgressive proposal intended to elicit a critical reading in public space during the dictator­ ship. Such a will was directly indicated in the ­phonetic of the poem’s title, which was an emphatic calling: ‘acorda’ [meaning both ‘wake up’ and ‘to the rope’]. The material was composed by means of an ‘extended fragmented fringe’ fixed with pins and clips in the rope, thus configuring an inaugural space of manifestation and contestation that was made from the same material ­offered widely and on a daily basis by the media. However, most attempts to set up similar proposals in public spaces were faced with censorship, resulting in the ­confiscation of the material by the police.33

TO THE LIMIT OF VERSION One of the texts in the magazine Ponto 1 (1967),34 ‘Brazil meia meia’ (Brazil six six)35 by Wlademir Dias-Pino includes a montage of images of the main events of 1966 as highlighted in the press. The scientific character of the proposal, as thoroughly explained on the back cover, deals with a tactic of outwitting censorship and repression. The statistical method (and the semiotics) is employed in order to select the images according to prominent visibility and occurrence. This ‘visual annuary’ de-structures any possibility of stable meaning – something that is ironically pointed out by Dias-Pino as he problematizes the criteria of the composition of the images: The author’s intention is purely documental and open to any suggestion or criticism for any misinterpretation. This is reinforced by the reality of being informed by

the machine that only verifies precise data, whilst the human brain that interprets it is subject to the forecasting of future events, and there everything is said.36 Much-circulated images from the press are equally used as material for many of the poems included in the envelope-­magazines and circulated via post. On the cover of Ponto 2, for instance, a collage of newspaper fragments reads in big letters: ‘Cultural Revolution in China does not want the ‘red’ as stop in traffic’; ‘Vietcong launches great offensive against ten cities’, ‘Mao is now the chief of guards’, amongst cut-up images of youths manifesting in China, by way of inscribing in murals, protest images in Brazil, posters/poems with the expressions: ‘massacre’, ‘Down with the monogrammatic advocates of letters’, ­‘POETS AGAINST DICTATORSHIP’, ‘for the students’. As Ronaldo Werneck states in one of the fifteen folders that make up the box-­ magazine Processo 1, beyond the mere ­register, it was about facing ‘the urgency of the occasion with the instantaneously ­documental’.37 Various practices of the poema/ processo movement dealt with montage as a device with which to take a position against the pacifying appear­ances of segregated images and d ­ iscourses, as in the pre­ arranged s­paces of the news­ papers of the p ­eriod. This is ­diagnosed by Álvaro de Sá in the following statement: Nowadays publicity is used to naturalize, s­ educe and stimulate massification. It is important to fight against naturalism by fragmenting this publicity in an attempt to emancipate men from its influence and so provide us with an analytical mind. It is solely in this manner that a new reality might be composed, or that we can at least understand the reality to which we belong.38 Among the demands of the period, there are sharp complaints against that which we know well: the capitalist distribution of knowledge and the mass communication system that enclose all possibility of real communication as a participatory process – a situation that can only ­induce one to take part in a society of consumption and thus produce passive and homogenous spectators. In ­effect, poema/processo and other poetic-political movements already emphasised in the 1960s and 1970s that communication was not reduced to receiving information. In other words, a crucial aspect of their demands was the drive to provoke a critical responsibility of consumption in order to generate new creative possibilities ‘as opposed to the contemplative and alienating notion of good/bad’.39 The movement’s position ‘against the contemplative’40

served as motivation for asking how to activate – within the structure – the stimulus for a real appropriation and to promote (anti-system) production without ­restrictions. This is in order to give participation and critical intervention back to the public domain, including their possible and indeed desirable conflicts, debates, discussions and disagreements.

SOUTHERN CONNECTIONS In October 1969, a joint-edition of Ponto and OVUM 10 appeared, completely dedicated to poema/processo. The magazine launched by the OVUM publishing house in ­Uruguay shows the general synchronicity of the movement’s proposals with the ‘new poetry’ at work in other parts of South America. This project is initiated immediately after the couple Neide and Álvaro de Sá travelled by car to Buenos Aires in March 1969 taking with them some material to be shown at the EXPO/­ INTERNA­ CIONAL DE LA NOVÍSMO POESÍA/69, 41 organised by the Argentinean artist, poet and inventor ­Edgardo Antonio Vigo in the Visual Arts Centre of the Torcuato Di Tella Institute in Buenos Aires, Argentina. On their way back to Rio de Janeiro, on the advice of Vigo, the couple decided to visit the artist, p e r fo r m e r and experimental poet Clemente Padín, in Montevideo, Uruguay. Padín was the initiator of various poetic initiatives that involved many people connected through the publication Los Huevos del Plata, an independent alternative magazine published between 1965 and 1969 that created a new space of visibility, relying on its own means of thinking and expression that were parallel to the institutional ­literary spaces occupied by poets and partisans of the ‘generación de 45’. A similar situation encountered in Brazil. The joint publication PONTO-OVUM 10 marked the end of Los Huevos del Plata and articulated the new publication edited by Clemente Padín, OVUM 10, and Ponto, edited by Álvaro and Neide de Sá and Wlademir Dias-Pino, in Rio de ­ Janeiro. The prolific discussions ­during this encounter and the mutual access granted to their respective publications strongly connected Padín to the poema/processo group, mainly because they ­coincided in the intertwining of avant-garde aesthetics with political agitation.

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The special edition was composed of copies and samples of process/poems that were sent from Rio de Janeiro via mail. The kraft paper cover printed in Monte­video featured in red the poem Liber­arse II by Clemente Padín, which was a montage of inscriptions made from ­ fragments of stamps and LETRA-

S E T marks insistently repeating the word ‘liberarse’ [free oneself] in cross sections.42 The use of the verb was by no means accidental, considering that it was connected to other actions triggered by Padín. Two months before, from August 12 to 22, a second exhibition organised by the publishing house OVUM 10 took place in the Students Hall of the Humanities and Science University. The exhibition was titled ­‘Liberarse’ and paid homage to Líber Arce, an odontology student killed by the police in August 1968, during a huge student manifestation.43 Both the exhibition and the ­publication of the poem intended to highlight the practices of the new poetry and further connect the poetic ­radicalization in Uruguay and Brazil with the revolutionary demands that supported social transformation.44

COUNTER-LITERARY TERRITORIES Even though the text ‘Parada: opção tática’ [Halt: tactic option] might suggest that the poema/processo movement ended in 1972, the declaration actually meant ‘the closing of the collective activities, without ruptures or ­dilutions, [. . .] leaving room for possible ulterior planned actions, in new conditions’.45 The opting for a public ­address functioned in some cases to obscure the clues that led to members of the group at the time. Following the Institutional Act 5, the country lived in a generalized ‘freedom under surveillance’. The couple Álvaro and ­Neide de Sá faced countless situations where they had the police knocking on their door due to the vast amount of mail they received. The police agents looked for ­evidence that could connect them to the leftist move-

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ments acting both within the country and abroad, given the sheer amount of material they received from artists and poets that lived in the Soviet bloc.46 However, even though the State apparatus had put in place repressive forms of control in these territories – both in countries that suffered under right-wing dictatorships and those that had repressive leftist governments – it lost control over the alternative cultural and artistic production that took ­advantage of all means of reproduction and technologies available (photocopying, video and photography, cassette tapes, mimeograph, offset, rubber stamp, etc.), among other instruments and products, in order to rip apart the ­severe censorship imposed on cultural production.        As desired, new initiatives connected to poema/­ processo sprung up and gave continuity to its poetic practice. In March 1977, Paulo Bruscky and ­Unhandeijara Lisboa disseminated, from Recife, the project POESIA VIVA under the banner: ‘VIVA! VIVA! 1967–1997 P ­ OEMA/ PROCESSO 10 ANOS’. This ‘event’ that anticipated the anniversary of the movement would materialize on the national poetry day, the 14th of March, in order to emphatically propose the body as the space of poetry: This ‘event’ that we are realizing is an homage, written in our body, spoken in our gestures, gagged in our silence, reoccurring in our daily life. We are the actual work, we are the moving letters, we are the bottom of the pages, we are the damn-verbs (the damned). Do something before poetry suffers in the course of ­letters or dies in the literary supplements. Let the ­poetry live through you, alive in the open streets . . .47 In the city of Natal, during the ‘Expoética 77’ exhibition in December 1977, equally marking the ten-year anniversary of poema/processo, one of the organisers of the event, J. Medeiros, presented the project Auto/Poema, pre­ viewed in the following topics as featured in the exhibition catalogue: ACONTECIMENTO / HAPPENING: PROJETO – AUTO/POEMA (J. MEDEIROS 11/12/1977) DESENVOLVIMENTO: 1. CORPO; AUTO-EXPRESSÃO 2. AMPLIAÇÃO DO PROCESSO; IMPRESSÃO COM SANGUE 3. PARTICIPAÇÃO COLETIVA DO PÚBLICO PRESENTE ( ) ENVIE PROPOSTAS UTILIZANDO O CORPO: PROJECT – AUTO/POEMA DEVELOPMENT: 1. BODY; AUTO-EXPRESSION 2. PROCESS AMPLIFICATION; EXPRESSION WITH BLOOD 3. COLLECTIVE/PRESENT PUBLIC PARTICIPATION ( ) SEND PROPOSALS UTILIZING THE BODY: J. MEDEIROS RUA ARTUR BERNARDES, 761 ALECRIM, NATAL – RN 59.000 BRASIL48

In the event, J. Medeiros presents an action/poem: knelt on the floor, he cuts himself with a Stanley knife in front of the public and makes a poem of his own blood.49 The proposal alters the configuration of the body as a medium of oppression to intensify practices that might declare it political territory and a centre of resistance. In this ‘event’, J. Medeiros manages to alter the possibilities of agency that are expected from (traditional) literature and its regu­lated spaces. What is then produced is a perversion ­capable of disrupting all that was predictable in terms of space/poetic body or body/political space, ­supposedly natural, and it incites other modes of enunciation and non-segregated action. The body becomes the platform of political imagination. It becomes the territory of counter-­literary enunciation. Already one year before that, right after launching the POVIS magazine (1976),50 J. Medeiros is arrested following the delivery of his collaboration to the II Exposição Internacional de Arte Correio’, organised by Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago in Recife.51 His poem made reference to Vladimir Herzog, a newspaper editor that was tortured and killed in October 1975 by agents of the dictatorship.52 This occurrence reveals the cultural, social and political entanglement that connects poema/processo and mail art in the 1970s. A text in the catalogue of ‘Expoética 77’ signals: ‘it is important to consider the mail not only as a public service provider, but rather as a vehicle emitting proposals of Contemporary Art  . . . the contemporary avant-garde is related to the mail (the sense of surprise when the post-office enables the circulation/redistribution of new explosive products of Contemporary Information.’53 Poema/processo and mail art beat to the same urgent drum. The long reach and prolific exchange between partici­pants based in Latin America during the dictatorship periods, and countries under Soviet rule, make those ­materials veritable bombs in contraposition to spaces dominated by a type of docile art that spreads under circumscribed and hierarchized regimes of circulation and reception, moved by the interests of capital. Its potentially open circuit diversifies and enables alternative modes of access to information.54 Spread open calls, denouncements, critical proposals capable of fissuring the solid and conservative pillars of an enclosed circuit that maintains the self-satisfied art system. The poema/processo movement, on its own account, meant a radical incision in the commercial logic of authorship in the arts and literature. It activated, by those who intended to keep a channel of relations and exchanges open, a circulation of critical and creative productions. Such a practice promotes alternative circuits of long-distance communication in Brazil.

resonate. Poema/processo’s ways of acting remind us that when possibilities of public protests are shut down with waves of violence and assassinations in the name of an authoritarian State ‘order’, when manifesting in the public space means the risk of death, the tactics of e ­ scape and resistance are deterritorialized. Both poema/processo and mail art end up taking care of this political body that dislocates, that goes from the streets to other communicational circuits. It never shuts up. In that light, we could ask ourselves today: “How can the potency of those acts be reactivated today? Into which critical micro-histories could they be incorporated? Or even beyond that: What is essential to make viable, to read, to incorporate, to incarnate today? And how? In their moment, the members of poema/processo r­ eplied: The avant-garde action is to deliver the new to human practice. It fits the struggle against limitations i­mposed on the consumer and resolves the problem of creative participation  . . . version from participation is not granted by poema/processo. It is above all the right of access to creativity – a right as important as that to education and shelter, and for which the consumers must fight, with the knowledge that they are part of a bigger struggle for democratic f­reedoms.55

Translation from Spanish: Leandro Nerefuh

A first version of this text was presented in the Meeting Margins International Conference. Transnational Art in Latin America and Europe 1950-1978, at the University of Essex (Colchester, England), 2010. This extended second version was first published in the magazine Tercer Texto (the Spanish version of Third Text), n. 2 “Irrupciones al Sur. Nuevas formas de antagonismo artístico-político en América Latina” [Southern Irruptions. New forms of artistic and political antagonism in Latin America], edited by Miguel A. López and Ana Longoni, June 2011.

The poetic and political nature of the movement’s radicali­ zation towards social activism and production provoked drastic changes in the processes of collective emancipation that integrate technical and formal tools with the ­criti­cal demands of transforming, in an irreversible m ­ anner, the conditions of poetic production and reception. It breaks with the traditional forms of distribution of spaces and roles to point towards possibilities of action that still

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NOTES

1 Version of Sergio Amaral (Samaral), Poema/Processo Archive (Neide de Sá), Rio de Janeiro. Oswald de Andrade’s poem that was the basis for Samaral’s version was published in Poemas Menores (1945) and draws attention to the visit of the US president Herbert Clark Hoover to Brazil: Hip! Hip! Hoover! Poetic message to the Brazilian people South America Sun America Salt America From the Ocean Open the treasure of your Guanabara And receive the cannons of Utah From the elected president of the Great Democracy of America Convoyed on air In flight And by all the birds Of Brazil . . . 1929 2. The fragment of the original mimeographed folder had the following message: ‘The fact intended to raise the following issues: 1) a public protest against the secretive literary policy of exchange of favours (igrejinhas); 2) the necessity to demonstrate the qualitative rupture in the development of Brazilian poetry; 3) against the eternity character of the poem that always tends to stability, impeding the emergence of the new; 4) the strong belief of the new poets that the poetry contained in those books that were ripped apart cannot serve as model for them, because they are surpassed and consumed; 5) a poem is like a battery, when it’s used up it’s used up; 6) It is paramount to scare by way of radicality. To a radical poem corresponds a radical action. A struggle already reached levels of Oswadian [Oswald de Andrade] all-in. 7) the gesture constitutes a fact inside Brazilian reality and cannot be seen outside of its general context.’ In ‘Brief synopsis of poema/ processo’ (1968), Álvaro de Sá, Vanguarda – produto de comunicação (1975), Vozes, Petrópolis, 1977, pages 177–178. 3. In the storming of the Students Central’s restaurant (popularly known as Calabouço) to repress student demonstrations in downtown Rio de Janeiro, the twenty-year-old student Benedito Frazão Dutra was also shot to death by the police. 4. Both quotes are taken from the text ‘Contato’, as published in a photo-booklet that reviews some of the relevant events of the poema/processo movement. The booklet was distributed as part of Ponto 2 1968.. 5. The Institutional Act number 5 was one in a series of decrees from the military regime in Brazil during the government of the president Costa e Silva in the years following the 1964 coup d’état. This AI-5 allowed the president to recess the

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National Congress, which would only resume its activities if and when called upon. The president could decree municipal as well as provincial (county) intervention without the limitations previously guaranteed by the constitution. He could also lift political rights of any citizen, for the duration of ten years, and suspend political terms at the federal, provincial and municipal levels. The applied measures included ‘surveyed freedom’, ‘prohibition of frequenting certain places’, ‘identification of place of residence’, among ‘other restrictions or prohibitions of any other public or private rights whatsoever’. The Institutional Act number 5 suspended the possibility of habeas corpus in case of political crime against national security, the social and economic order, and the popular economy. At that moment, press, music, theatre and cinema censorship is highly intensified. The institutional acts were only revoked in January 1979, still under the dictatorial military regime, during Ernesto Geisel’s government, which initiated the transition towards a political openness that would only be concluded in January 1985, with no democratic elections. Democratic elections were only possible in 1989. 6. Two crucial books for the recuperation of the movements’ proposals and theoretical development examine communication in relation to the modes of social and artistic production. They are PROCESSO: Linguagem e Comunicação (1 edition 1971), edited by Wlademir Dias-Pino; and Vanguarda – Produto de comunicação, written in 1975 and published in 1977, by Álvaro de Sá. 7. Costa e Silva represented the Aliança Renovadora Nacional [Alliance for National Renewal], a political party created with the intention of maintaining the democratic façade of the military government instituted with the 1964 coup d’état, cynically named ‘democratic revolution’ by the governmental office. 8. Cassiano Ricardo was a literary critic, member of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in the 1930s, and director of propaganda for the government of São Paulo. Later in that same decade, already as an adviser to Getulio Vargas in the Press and Propaganda Department, he was requested to co-direct, in collaboration with an army officer, the State-owned newspapers A Manhã. 9. This explanation is part of an interview made by the critic ­Antonio Sergio Mendonça with Álvaro de Sá titled ‘Processo: o poema reprodutivo dos anos 60’ [Processo: the reproductive poem of the ­ 60s], Rio de Janeiro, 1983. It was allegedly published in the Revista Brasileira de ­Língua e Literatura, but this magazine has not yet been localized. Poema/Processo Archive (Neide de Sá), Rio de Janeiro. 10. Ibid. The ‘collective/poem’ is also cited in the interview made by Joaquim Branco with

Wlademir Dias-Pino, ‘Processo em Questão’ [The question of process], Ponto 2, Rio de Janeiro, 1968. 11. Neide Dias de Sá, ‘Uruguay: POESIA INOBJETUAL’ (1971), in: Clemente Padín, De la representación a la acción [From representation to action], La Plata, Al Margen, 2010, p. 127. Commenting on the ‘new poetry’ that was developing in South America, Neide de Sá points out that they dealt with ‘the emission of a message through a given action’. See: Neide de Sá, ‘Vanguarda Argentina, Chile, Uruguai’, a special booklet that accompanied the Cultura Vozes magazine, year 65, # 7, September 1971. 12. Interview by Antonio Sergio de Mendonça with Álvaro de Sá, op cit. 13. Álvaro de Sá and Antonio Sergio Mendonça, ‘Poesia de Vanguarda no Brasil’ [Avant-garde Poetry in Brazil], Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, ca 1983, (Neide de Sá) Poema/Processo Archive, Rio de Janeiro. 14. Unknown author, ‘Os Espantalhos’ [The Scarecrows], Indústria & Comércio, Rio de Janeiro, 20-21 April 1968. (Neide de Sá) Poema/Processo Archive, Rio de Janeiro. 15. Christian Zentner and Firedmann Bedürfitig (ed.), The Encyclopedia of the Third Reich, Da Capo Press, New York, 1997, pp. 98-99. 16. [Frente Mineira], ‘O II Festival de Pirapora: 1 Junho 1969 (resposta coletiva)’, in Wlademir Pino-Dias, PROCESSO: Linguagem e Comunicação, Vozes, Petrópolis, second edition, 1973. 17. Unknown author, ‘Pão poema-processo com 2m é comido por 5 mil pessoas na Feira de Arte de Recife’ [A 2-metre-long poema/processo loaf is eaten by 2 thousand people in the Recife Art Fair], Jornal do Brasil, Rio de Janeiro, 7 April 1970, in Wlademir Pino-Dias, PROCESSO: Linguagem e Comunicação, Vozes, Petrópolis, second edition, 1973. 18. The violent act of closing down the exhibition in the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de

Janeiro that would represent Brazil in the Sixth Biennial of Young Artists in Paris, in 1969, finds a counter-action with the artists’ boycott of the Tenth São Paulo Biennial in that same year. The action against the censorship, arbitrariness and violence imposed on Brazilian artists at the time finds ample support from international artists. The police stormed and closed down exhibitions on a regular basis and the artworks were taken out of circulation. The situation is made evident when the São Paulo Biennial changes its regulations barring what it sees as ‘political or erotic themes’, and thus signals complicity with State censorship. Several artists refuse to participate in the event. Countries such as France, Holland, Sweden, Argentina, Mexico, and the USA did not send their representations. And Spain, faced with the artists’ refusal, sends a collection of drawings and prints from a governmental institution. See: author unknown, ‘Boicote à Bienal. A Bienal (se houver) será mutilada e inexpressiva’ [Boycott of the Biennial. The Biennial (if it happens at all) will be crippled and inexpressive], Correio da Manhã, 30 August 1969, São Paulo Biennial Foundation Archive, São Paulo, Brazil. 19. The text was published in the catalogue of ‘Explo-2’ [1 EXPO NACIONAL POEMA/PROCESSO], inaugurated in December 10, 1967. The exhibition took place in the Sobradinho Museum (current Café Filho Museum) and marked the launch of poema/processo movement in the city of Natal (Rio Grande do Norte), in the north-east part of Brazil. 20. Manifesto published in the newspaper O Sol, Rio de Janeiro, and in one of the magazines of the group, Ponto 1 (1967) (cf. ‘Proposition’, p. 7–8 in this issue of OEI). 21. Concerning the ‘envelope-magazine’, I mean the publications constantly launched from 1968 onwards, where the envelope is an essential component, not only as a vehicle or a support. The magazines usually included loose and interchangeable pages, which decomposed the reading order and allowed for various articulations. This radical subversion of the structure creates space for a complex composition and demands intervention from the reader/consumer who can actively chose the sequence to follow: discontinuous and/or linear, circular or conclusive, by chance.   22.   A panorama of mobilizations and action related to the ‘mail art in the Brazilian context can be accessed in the following texts of the period: Paulo Bruscky, ‘Arte Correio e a grande rede: hoje, a arte é este comunicado’ (1976/1981), in Gloria Ferreira and Cecilia Cotrim (ed.), Escritos de Artistas. Anos 60/70. Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 2009, pp. 374-379; Julio Plaza, ‘Mail Art: arte em sincronia’, in BIENAL INTERNACIONAL DE SÃO PAULO, 16, Mail Art

catalogue, 1981; Antonio Sergio Mendonça and Álvaro de Sá, ‘Arte Postal (informail)’, in Antonio Sergio Medonça and Álvaro de Sá, Poesia de Vanguarda no Brasil. De Oswald de Andrade ao Poema Visual, Antares, Rio de Janeiro, 1983, pp. 255-262. 23. Other similar publications would be: A Gaveta (1975-77) edited by Marconi Norato; Telegramark (1978); Buracoarte (1979); POVIS/PROJETO (Natal – RN); A Margem (Natal RN), by Falves Silva and Franklin Capistrano, no more information available. 24. Álvaro de Sá, Vanguarda – produto de comunicação, Vozes, Petrópolis, second edition, 1973. 25. Ibid, p. 48. 26. Moacy Cirne, note ‘Envelope’, in Moacy Cirne and Álvaro de Sá, ‘Do poema/ processo às linguagens experimentais’ [From poema/processo to experimental languages], Cultura Vozes magazine, Rio de Janeiro, year 72, # 1, January/February 1978. 27. Álvaro de Sá, ‘Por que medo da vanguarda?’ [Why afraid of the avant-garde?] (1968), a triptych text distributed as part of the magazine Ponto 2, Rio de Janeiro, 1968. 28. Wlademir Dias-Pino, PROCESSO: linguagem de comunicação, Vozes, Petrópolis, second edition, 1973. 29. The mimeographed copy of the text circulated with the inscription ‘1967/1977: dez anos de poema/processo’. (Neide de Sá) Poema/Processo Archive, Rio de Janeiro. 30. In the context of the seminar ‘New Productivisms’, Marcelo Exposito signals that the relation between art and politics in the Russian-Soviet avant-gardes is especially located in the productivist and factographic models. This argument coincides with poema/processo’s proposal: ‘the political function of art  . . . does not consist – or not exclusively – in the agitation and the induction of a gained conscience, but in the production of mechanisms and devices of political subjectivization that do not necessarily coincide with the classical figure of the artwork as an object with defined contours and bearer of an essential and recognizable aesthetic condition’. In Marcelo Expósito (ed.) Los Nuevos Productivismos, Barcelona, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona y Servei de Publicacions de la Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, 2010, p.17. 31. Jacques Rancière, ‘The Emancipated Spectator’, [Artforum, March 2007], Fotocopioteca, lugar a dudas, Cali. 32. The spatial poem A corda (1967) is represented in the Expo/Internacional de Novísima Poesia’ organized by Edgardo Antonio Vigo in the Institute Torquato Di Tella, Buenos Aires, in 1969. In this same year it is presented in the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro as part of the festival Arte no Aterro, organized by Frederico Morais. In 1978, it was also presented in an updated version with press clippings in the 38th Venice Biennial. 33. Interview by the author with Neide de Sá, February 2010, Rio de Janeiro. 34. Wlademir Dias-Pino, ‘Brasil meia-meia’ (1966), Ponto 1, Rio de Janeiro, 1967. 35. The word ‘meia’ is the abbreviation of the expression ‘half-a-dozen’. In Brazil, the word is also equivalent to ‘six’, which in this

case is a direct reference to the year 1966. 36. Wlademir Dias-Pino, ‘Brasil meia-meia’ (1966), op cit. 37. In the ‘box-magazine’ Processo 1 (1969), edited by Sebastião de Carvalho and Wlademir Dias-Pino, Ronaldo Werneck’s envelope (external structure x internal structure) features the following sayings in the external part: PROCESSO: making the project viable / Ordination / Layouting / Unleashing / Pure Information: The rationale’s direct; The functional’s direct; The direction of the Process is the very condition of being a channel. 38. Álvaro de Sá, ‘Por que medo da vanguarda?’ [Why afraid of the avant-garde?] (1968), a triptych text distributed as part of the magazine Ponto 2, Rio de Janeiro, 1968. 39. Wlademir Dias-Pino, ‘Poema de processo / 1’, O Sol, # 9, November 1967, and in PROCESSO: Linguagem e Comunicação, Vozes, Petrópolis, second edition, 1973. (Cf. ‘Poem out of process / 1’, p. 19–21 in this issue of OEI.) 40. ‘Processo: desencadenamiento crítico de estructuras siempre nuevas’. [Members of poema/processo], ‘PROCESSO – LEITURA DO PROJETO’ [‘Process – reading of the project’], in Wlademir Dias-Pino, PROCESSO: Linguagem e Comunicação, Vozes, Petrópolis, second edition, 1973. 41. The Brazilian representation in the exhibition was broader: it had works of twenty-four members of poema/processo, as well as posters sent by the concrete poets of São Paulo – Décio Pignatari, Ronaldo Azeredo, José Lino Grünewald, and the brothers Haroldo and Augusto de Campos. Additional information available in Boletín Informativo # 1 from ‘EXPO/ INTERNACIONAL DE NOVISIMA POESIA/69’, Centro de Artes Visuales – Torquato Di Tella Institute, Buenos Aires. (Neide de Sá) Poema/Processo Archive, Rio de Janeiro. 42. Clemente Padín observes that the poem Liberarse II featured on the cover of the joint publication PONTO-OVUM 10 (1969) refers to ‘the ways one finds, the crossroads, the possibility of liberation in the encounter, and the encounter as effective communication’. Interview with Clemente Padín by the author, May 2010, Montevideo, Uruguay. 43. The social and student agitation continued in the streets of Montevideo in 1968. The eighteen-year-old Líber Walter Arce Risotto was the first student assassinated by the police in Uruguay, in August 14, 1968, when a group of biology students organized an instant manifestation against police raids in the University of the Republic to confiscate confidential documents of teachers and students, infringing the university’s autonomy. Since June Uruguay experienced a state of exception decreed by the president of the republic, Jorge Pacheco Areco, that would last for months. The students’ manifestation was intercepted by the agents of the police who opened fire against the group, resulting in the death of Líber Arce, student of odontology and militant in the Bachelor Students Federation of Uruguay and member of the Communist Youth Union.

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44. The # 7 of the OVUM 10 magazine, in June 1971, among other productions of poema/processo include the edition of Alfabismo (1967) by Álvaro de Sá. The work is based on the slogan: ‘Compete, today, the poet to demonstrate and check that the alphabet is only a convention that can be manipulated in all directions, and can be atomized  . . .’ In the same issue, the magazine features in its editorial the visual poem ‘COCTEL LIBER ARCE’, a drawing of a molotov cocktail that features the USA flag at the top and a hand holding real matches. The question written in bold is placed in the bottom of the bottle: ‘When this miserable peace of today has been broken, what will we do to free ourselves at any price?’ As a whole, the magazine manifests a disruptive trajectory of poetic, and also political, radicalization. 45. Álvaro de Sá, op cit, p. 182. From 1971 a ‘tactical shift’ begins to take place. The poets/process begin a didactic action on several academic fronts, organising classes, lectures, seminars, exhbitions and debates. See: Álvaro de Sá & Moacy Cirne, op cit. 46. In this context it was necessary that Álvaro de Sá and Neide Dias de Sá got rid of all marxist and leftist literature they possessed. Even years later, following Clemente Padín’s arrest in Uruguay, in August 1977, the police agents visited them and inquired about Padín’s publication in the house, according to Neide de Sá’s testimony to the author (interview 25 March 2010). There are reasons to believe that this was part of the most perverse strategies of the Condor Plan: an operation that facilitated direct interventions of USA through the CIA in countries under military dictatorship between the 1960s and the 1980s in South America with unilateral agreements, military bases and military training of local police forces. The aim was to definitively eliminate any influence of socialism and communism during the Cold War. The police and agents from different countries clandestinely organized in order to implement the practice of State terror, strategically ignoring the frontiers between those national territories to chase down and make disappear political activists. The repression and assissinations that took place in their respective countries were accelerated and skillfully used in the propaganda of fear in order to oppress the opposition to the dicatorial regimes. 47. Paulo Bruscky & Unhandeijara Lisboa, ‘POESIA VIVA’, a project that celebrated 10 years of poema/processo, (National Poetry Day) 14 March 1977, material consulted in the Centro de Arte Experimental Vigo, La Plata, Argentina. 48. ‘ExPoética 77. Exposição comemorativa dos 10 anos do poema/processo’, 11 to 17 December 1977, Biblioteca Pública Câmara Cascudo, Natal – RN, organised by Poema/ Processo Team: J. Medeiros, Anchieta Fernandes, Falves Silva, exhibition catalogue, (Neide de Sá) Poema/Processo Archive, Rio de Janeiro. 49. VVAA, ‘Antologia de poemas processo’, BROUHAHA magazine, vozes na cultura potiguar, Natal – RN, year 3, # 10, Sep/Oct 2007, p. 32.

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50.   Povis (contraction of the words ‘poem’ and ‘visuality’) quickly joins forces with Projeto magazine, also from the city of Natal, published by Falves Silva. The edition of Polvis 2/Projeto 18 (1977), which was based on the ‘Poema/Processo (10 anos)’, also counts collaborations from Julien Blaine, Paulo Bruscky, Unhandeijara Lisboa, Carlos Humberto Dantas, Marciano Lyrio, Leonhardt Frank Duch, Aristides S. Klafke, Moacy Cirne, Eduardo A. Gosson, Diógenes G. Metidieri, Pedro Osmar, Joaquim Branco, Vania Lucila Valério and P. J. Ribeiro. 51. The ‘Ist International Mail Art Exhibition’ took place in Recife in 1975, organised by Paulo Bruscky and Ypiranga Filho. The ‘IInd International Mail Art Exhibition’, in August 27, 1976, in the hall of the Post Office headquarters in Recife was closed minutes after the opening due to problems with the censors. According to Paulo Bruscky, the exhibition, summing up three thousand works from twenty-one countries, was seen only by a handfull of people. Furthermore, Paulo Bruscky and Daniel Santiago, organisers of the event, were taken to the Federal Police quarters and left uncommunicated. ‘The works were only released a month later and, apart from damages to the works, several pieces from Brazilian and international artists were confiscated and are held to this day’. Paulo Bruscky, ‘Arte Correio and a grande rede: hoje, a arte é esse comunicado’ (1976/1981), in Gloria Ferreira & Cecilia Cotrim (coord), Escritos de Artistas. Anos 60/70, Rio de Janeiro, Zahar, 2009, p. 374–379. 52. The jornalist, teacher and dramatist Vladimir Herzog takes over the news department of TV Cultura, São Paulo, in the 1970s. In October 24, 1975, he was called to the DOI-CODI (Destacamento de Opera­ ções de Informações – Centro de Opera­ ções de Defesa Interna) – an organ of intelli­gence and repression against the leftist organizations during the dictatorial regime in Brazil – to explain his relation to the Com­mu­nist Party of Brazil (which was by then declared illegal). Herzog’s declaration was made under torture and in the following day he was found hanged with his own tie. Even though the official death certificate attested ‘suicide by hanging’, several evidences make clear that he was murdered. 53. ‘ExPoética 77. Exposição comemorativa dos 10 anos do poema/processo’, 11 to 17 December 1977, Biblioteca Pública Câmara Cascudo, Natal – RN, organised by Poema/ Processo Team: J. Medeiros, Anchieta Fernandes, Falves Silva, exhibition catalogue, (Neide de Sá) Poema/Processo Archive, Rio de Janeiro. 54. Concerning other tactics of resistance activated by mail art in Latin America, see Fernanda Nogueira & Fernando Davis, ‘Gestionar la precariedad. Potencias poético-políticas de la red de arte correo’, ARTECONTEXTO, Madrid, #24, vol. 4, 2009, pp. 32–37. 55. Final fragment of the text ‘A VANGUARDA CONTRA A AURA’ (1975) in which Álvaro de Sá comments on some of the contradictions of Walter Benjamin’s ‘The artwork in the age of mechanical reproductibility’ (1936) in the 1970s Brazil, in Álvaro de Sá, op cit, pp. 43–44.

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