Frente 3 de Fevereiro

Brazil can be understood, from the point of view of blackness, as an anti-black project. on the other hand, we can understand blackness as the stubborn and tireless practice of trying to live when you were not supposed to have survived. Zumbi dos Palmares, constantly taken up again in the radical artistic work of the Frente 3 de Fevereiro, especially in Zumbi somos nós [We are Zumbi], appears here, then, as the mystery that unites these two formulations, putting the world that produced them in check. these two formulations intersect with the history of the Frente, which emerges as a way to avenge the death-life of Flávio Ferreira Sant’Ana, a young black dentist cruelly murdered by military police officers in São Paulo in 2004. 

Through a practice that merges direct action and aesthetics, moving between image, music, performance, literature, and an infinity of forms, the Frente 3 de Fevereiro develops radical artistic practices of social intervention as a way to not only denounce the brutal situation faced by Black people in Brazil, but to promote their unpredictable force of creation and transmutation. For the choreographies of the impossible, using voice cloning and deep fake technologies against its own ends, the collective creates a complex sonic-imagetic environment, reanimating the movements, gestures and sounds of Dona Marinete Lima (1942–-2018), a member of the collective and ancestral matriarch. In addition to this animation, the video installation includes sound files and images of the collective, records of its radical interventions that both denounce the death plan as well as machinate the combination of life. 

The experience of this video installation intersects past-present, life-death, revolt-joy, like a technological spell to avenge black life in its ungovernable performance of infinite resurrection. 

abigail campos leal
translated from Portuguese by philip somervell

Frente 3 de Fevereiro is a transdisciplinary research group on Brazilian racism that has been active since 2004. Among their direct action, one notable is “Bandeiras” (2005 – 2006), carried out during football matches with phrases such as “Onde estão os negros?”. These phrases have recurred in other interventions by the collective, including the poster that is part of the collection of MASP (São Paulo, Brazil).