Gaia Revolt

In 2012 and 2022 the Floresta de Cristal collective, conceived by artist Rivane
Neuenschwander in collaboration with filmmaker Mariana Lacerda, participated in nine public protests in São Paulo, in order to, through a political performance, fight for the rights of nature and denounce the risk of a democratic rupture in that critical political moment in the country. To alert about the urgency of climate issues, they created outfits, masks and costume heads to dress as plants, fungi and animals. In the introduction, the authors write: “Through our little moving forest that walked around São Paulo, we ended up documenting one of the harshest years in the country's political trajectory, when the possible reelection of the far-right candidate would result in an intensification of the humanitarian tragedy and in the complete destruction of socio-environmental policies.”

Reviravolta de Gaia features 132 photographic images of the characters they created amidst street protests, as well as two interviews, one with Cameroonian philosopher Achille Mbembe and another with researcher João Paulo Lima Barreto Tukano. The volume also features essays written by Lisette Lagnado, Coletivo Centelha, Déborah Danowski, Peter Pál Pelbart and Inês Grosso, about art, performance and the political struggle lived in Brazil at that time, as well as the urgency of discussing the effects of climate change on nature and society, in Brazil and abroad. The edition is organized based on the protests, chronologically and by organization, and includes entries written by researcher and professor Sabrina Sedlmayer about the themes approached and the sayings in posters raised in the streets, as a guide to better understand the debate. Among them, there are entries about: Cosmovisions, Capitalist Hydra, Olive-Green Inferno, Flying Rivers, Symbiogenesis.

About the artists and authors
Rivane Neuenschwander was born in 1967 in Belo Horizonte (MG). Since the 1990s, she has elected as the matter of her production elements of social exchange, memory or consumption. In her installations, Neuenschwander translates the intercommunicating character of living systems. In drawings, paintings, tapestries and video, the artist crosses her plastic repertoire with science, history, psychology, linguistics and literature, in order to articulate pressing issues in contemporary politics. By coupling the action and presence of human and inhuman bodies that participate in the formal elaboration with conceptual substrate, Rivane’s oeuvre includes the groups that led to the format the works have acquired. The other is always presupposed in the structure and execution of her works, and caring for the form always implies caring for the audience. Among her recent individual shows are Sementes Selvagens, Museu de Serralves, Porto, Portugal (2022); Knife does not cut fire, Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz, Liechtenstein (2021); Rivane Neuenschwander, East Tank, Tate Modern, London, UK (2021).

Mariana Lacerda is a documentary filmmaker. She released her first feature in theaters in 2020-2021. Gyuri draws a connection between WWII and the demarcation of Yanomami indigenous land, by narrating the story of Claudia Andujar and her meeting with shaman Davi Kopenawa. She has also directed the series Histórias de Fantasmas Verdadeiros para Crianças (CineBrasilTv, still unreleased) about childhood and the military dictatorship. Alongside Glicéria Tupinambá and Patricia Cornils, she has a film in development about the Tupinambá indigenous land, in the south of Bahia. Alongside Neuenschwander, she has directed the film Eus ou uma arara, shown at Fundação Serralves, in Portugal, a documentary that, through the forest, took the environmental agenda to the streets in public protests prior to the 2022 elections. She is currently finalizing the feature Mapear Mundos, in collaboration with the Instituto Socioambiental (Isa). From November 2023 to April 2024 she will be a fellow at the Research Institute for Sustainability (IASS, Postdam, Germany), to develop the feature script Jararaca. This work has been conducted in dialogue with the Instituto Socioambiental and the Federação das Organizações Indígenas do Rio Negro, in the Amazon, where the research is located.

Specifications
Title Reviravolta de Gaia [Gaia Revolt]
Authors Mariana Lacerda and Rivane Neuenschwander
Language Portuguese and English
Page count 240
ISBN 978-65-5691-126-7
Design Joana Amador
Size 21 x 28 cm
Format Hardcover
Year 2023