The poetics and politics of Frente Três de Fevereiro collective

Abstract

This article analyzes the anti-racism actions “Monumento Horizontal” (2004), an urban intervention carried out in São Paulo, and “Bandeiras” (2005), a series of flags opened in different soccer matches. Both were carried out by the collective Frente Três de Fevereiro, a São Paulo art and activism group that emerged with the aim of confronting structural racism. Starting from interviews with the group, we try to understand the “poetic character” tributed to collective activism, seeking to underline how it emerges in opposition to political conceptions based on communication. For this purpose, some of the theoretical subsidies of Jacques Rancière, supported by authors like Jean-Luc Nancy, Silvio Almeida and Judith Butler, are mobilized. Thus, we depart from that “poetics” to understand, within the scope of the collective’s political strategies, the intertwining between the notion of dissent and the idea of event, as thought by Jacques Rancière and Michel Foucault. Finally, we juxtapose the expectations of political efficacy, which underlies the collective’s actions, to what Jacques Rancière would call “models for the effectiveness of art” in his aesthetic regime.