Subaltern Practices-Oriented Program (POPS) / Programa Orientado a Práticas Subalternas (POPS)

Between January 14 and March 4 of 2021, the third edition of Frestas – Triennial of Arts, realized by SESC São Paulo in its Sorocaba unit (in the interior of the state of São Paulo), presents to the public the Subaltern Practices-Oriented Program [Programa Orientado a Práticas Subalternas (POPS)]. With eight online meetings, each one two hours long, the program brings actions connected to the proposal of this Triennial—entitled The River is a Serpent—and functions as a critical space of thought and collective creation, coordinated by the artistic collective Ayllu. The meetings are free and taught in Spanish by Latin American (Abya Yala) instructors, with mediation in Portuguese.

The subjects addressed pass through themes such as coloniality, gender, and sexuality. To apply, fill out the registration form by December 23, 2020, available here (in Portuguese) and here (in Spanish) with your personal information and two paragraphs of up to one thousand characters—one containing a biography, and the other, your motivation to participate in the meetings, highlighting the importance of being part of this space of co-learning and critical pedagogies.

The program’s aim is to unite bodies, subjectivities, and knowledges of the diaspora that are sex and gender dissident, to connect and reactivate ancestral technologies, critical community epistemologies, and deauthorize the voice of white supremacy, multiplying voices and sonorities of the resistance to the colonial order. The meetings’ division is sustained by three axes: Inhabiting the colonial metropolis, comprising of three meetings; Ancestral sexualities and other sodomite abominations, also three meetings; and Watch out, the savage dogs have arrived, comprising of two meetings.

According to the program's idealizers, it was composed as a collective territory for co-learning, from a multidimensional epistemic disarticulation, which proposes reopening fissures to revive critical radical thought that is inseparable from the past, and to “glimpse at instants of possibility”—as defined by the North American writer and academic Saidiya Hartman—to imagine an anticolonial future from the memories of resistances.

About Frestas – Triennial of Arts
Frestas is an initiative made up of three axes: a public program, publications, and an exhibition, which compose the wide cultural program organized by SESC São Paulo, a private entity that has been supported for over 70 years by entrepreneurs in the commerce of goods, tourism, and services. Through its educational actions, SESC São Paulo aims at providing well being and quality of life to the workers in this sector, as well as to the community at large.

The third edition of Frestas – Triennial of Arts (2020/2021), under the title The River is a Serpent, introduces a cosmovision of the strategies and negotiations that constitute its curatorial process. By questioning the limits between the negotiable and the non-negotiable in the realization of a contemporary art exhibition during the times that we live in, the platform investigates the possibilities, potencies, and challenges that transit through several natural, spiritual, and subjective ecosystems. It gathers a set of technologies that have been forged by other bodies, which in distinct historic times and spaces were conditioned into providing permanence and access as the only means of guaranteeing the maintenance of their existence.

In this edition of the Triennial, curated by Beatriz Lemos, Diane Lima, and Thiago de Paula Souza, a program of activities, debates, and workshops will be made available to serve as a transdisciplinary platform, promoting actions related to contemporary art and other fields of knowledge, as well as an exhibition project envisaged for 2021.

Frestas has been collaborating to the amplification of the contemporary artistic scene in the state of São Paulo. It has also contributed to the training of Art Educators, creating networks of professionals of culture outside the capitals.