The sirens sound, the warnings come from everywhere: “Our time is disoriented. Damned is the fate that made me be born one day to fix it!”. From oppressive suffering to fervent anger, in the classic of English tragedy, it was Hamlet – even he, a prince – who said: “There is something rotten in the kingdom of Denmark”. From the Napalm girl to the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq; from the prison at Guantanamo Bay in Cuba to the genocide in Rwanda; from the media coverage of September 11, 2001, in New York, to the silence about September 11, 1973, which marked Latin America’s anti-democratic reality with the assassination of Salvador Allende in Santiago, Chile; from the sadistic voyeurism of our reality shows to the perversion of our video games, in which shots are fired in the first person, organizing the players into teams of terrorists battling each other; from the stabbing of Salman Rushdie to the murder of Marielle Franco and Anderson Gomes, there are plenty of images, news, facts, justifications, reasons, motives, and causes to deform the world. What is the power of an image?

Lucky for us if this were the only question to be answered: What is a life? Which ones are treated as statistics, data, mere representatives, with no right to a biography? Which lives do we regret losing? Recognized with delay, the precarious norms that feminist, counter-colonial, and queer studies have alerted us to are fundamental for us to recognize — and above all, to take responsibility for — the bankruptcy of the known, absolute, and assertive models of this form of the world. Who are the ones allowed free creation, poetry, experimental enjoyment of images and ideas? Who has been given the opportunity to learn the techniques and concepts of art? Faced with self-taught painters, there remains a more specific question, which has resonated since 2019, in the first exhibition I held with self-taught painters: Who has been granted the right to represent, imagine and interpret the world in their own way — also through colors, brushes, supports, paints, production, composition?

There are many voices for those willing to listen. Gayatri Spivak, an Indian woman, asked us "Can the subordinate speak?". Donna Haraway, an American feminist theorist, calls us to realize how we are already cyborgs, how urgent interspecies solidarity is — our only alternative, our only possibility. While political leader and philosopher Ailton Krenak invites us to “postpone the end of the world”, we are warned of its fall, of the “fall of the sky”, by Davi Kopenawa. Judith Butler has shown that government violence is justified, normalized, formalized through narratives that claim to defend national security, social order, or the preservation of culture. Stuart Hall, a British-Jamaican sociologist, revealed that “culture” is a process that is not fixed; it is continuous and in a constant state of hybridization and change. Michel Foucault warned us that museums, like all institutions that discipline the docility of our bodies, are also instruments of classification, exclusion, and segregation. Sueli Carneiro emphasizes the importance of recognizing otherness, that is, the difference and diversity regarding individuals and groups, indicating that the deconstruction of prejudice must involve anti-racist education. Lélia Gonzalez denounced racism and sexism in Brazilian culture, pointing out that the language experienced in our bodies is “blacktuguese”. Bell Hooks reminded us that in the midst of so much hatred and violence, we must insist on ideas once called platonic — simple and fundamental ideas such as that of love. Audre Lorde warned us about the uses of the erotic, about the uses of anger. Angela Davis has shown that there will be no social solution without an overhaul of the prison-industrial complex, without international solidarity.

The “state of emergency” in which we live is actually the general rule, it is its own motto, the historian reminds us with attention to the tradition of the oppressed. “We need to create a concept of history that corresponds to this truth.” German philosopher Walter Benjamin, a victim of the Nazism of his time, formulated: our struggle is also for “crude and material things”, without which there are no “refined and spiritual things”. He also warns us that it is they who manifest themselves in this struggle “in the form of confidence, courage, humor, cunning, firmness, and they act from afar, from the depths of time. They will always question every victory of the dominators”. It was such insubordinate energy, from a fallen, disorganized, broken world: in an disoriented time, we turn our bodies to what is created in the depths of time. While they preach respect for discipline, here we intend to relish on the joy of blurring boundaries, mixing, merging towards a collective body, a body outside the norm, an indiscipline of those who did not have formal training. May we have eyes to see the beauty created by those who, hostages and protagonists of their own stories, insubordinately graduated far from the “great masters” — however without ceasing to learn.

Aversion, hostility, or hatred towards foreigners or people who are seen as outsiders is called xenophobia. Along with racism, ethnic wars, prejudice, segregation, and discrimination, which are based on the concepts of race developed by modern disciplines, are phenomena that are widespread in the world and involve high degrees of violence — both physical and symbolic. Against the backdrop of this battle, stigmas are perpetuated: from the French word for naïve, the term naïf, here, once again, shows its limits. How can the indignations, private truths, and subjective perspectives of an individual be supposedly naive? This doubt corroborates the survival of this collection, of the works selected, despite the closure of MIAN in 2016: it is urgent that we face our ignorance, dismantle the parameters boosted by an idea of progress that perpetuates the maintenance of forms — which ultimately invite us to the pleasurable process of falling in love with the other, with otherness, with the recognition of the value that differences have.