In the current globalized context of exhaustive zoomification, digitalization of movements, and cybernetic contagion of fake information, the dispute as to how we produce knowledge and how knowledge produces us becomes even more acute, even more sensitive, even more pressing for our collective survival.

Juliana Streva reads and listens to and thinks with Beatriz Nascimento, Marielle Franco and many others as she improvises, experiments and learns with women engaged in various grassroots movements. “We will not be interrupted” is a reference to the last speech given by Marielle Franco on 8 March 2018, when she said: “I will not be interrupted. I will not be interrupted by a citizen who comes here and doesn’t know how to listen to the position of an elected woman!”. In agropoetic grounds, Black and Indigenous feminists revindicate Franco’s legacy by invoking the vocabulary of semente (seeds) to address the ancestral and ongoing struggle for re-existence and coexistence.

Seeds encapsulate the organic and the spiral cycle of life, the fertility of the soil, also evoking the Ubuntu notion of interconnectedness and togetherness – “I am because we are.” Thus, a perfect storm cultivates seeds that, when growing and spreading, radically transform the entire body-territory. The perfect storm announces the end of the world as we know it.

Quote:

More than reading the body as a colonial map (often reduced to a mere representation), Nascimento is concerned with other ways of drawing its lines and reclaiming its physical and symbolic territories. Such an insurgent gaze implies the active and inventive process of re-existence, which interrogates the political violence while transforming it, moving the institutional structures from below and within towards a “new political aesthetics” as envisaged by Marielle Franco.

Please find the video essay here: https://aperfectstorm.net/we-will-not-be-interrupted/