Remembering Arte Guerrilha in postdictatorial(ising) Brazil

Abstract

This article explores memory activists’ uses of past forms of artistic expression in relation to the opportunities and constraints of the present. In the wider context of Brazil’s ‘turn to memory’ (2007–2012), the article examines contemporary activist art collectives’ appropriations of 1970s avant-garde aesthetics, particularly the works defined by art critic Frederico Morais (1970) as arte guerrilha, to address the country’s dictatorial legacies. I argue that the creative decisions made by activists in adapting historical art practices – which were originally created in direct reaction to State censorship and violence during the dictatorship – reflect the contradictions inherent in the postdictatorial governments’ reconciliation efforts. Finally, the article calls attention to the limitations of such creative forms of memory activism in effecting systemic change in Brazil, while emphasising their important role in fostering participatory forms of, and affective engagement with, transitional justice in postdictatorial(ising) contexts.

Introduction

One year before Brazil’s first National Truth Commission, the artistic-activist collective CPQ (Coletivo Político Quem) released their first manifesto, beginning with the following question: ‘The dictatorship is still present! What to do?’ (CPQ, 2011). To understand this apparently anachronic statement, it is important to remember that the end of the dictatorship in Brazil in 1985 was negotiated by the military government. In contrast to other countries in Latin America, such as Argentina, Chile and Uruguay, the slow transition to a liberal democracy in Brazil was accompanied by guarantees for impunity to all perpetrators of human rights violations under the dictatorship, making it the last South American country to install a truth commission (Quinalha, 2012; Schneider, 2013). The democracy that followed the military dictatorship (1964–1985) was built over the silenced memory of political repression. Contemporary democratic institutions have been marked by the ‘institutional and judicial perennity of economic and security apparatus created during the military regime’ (Teles and Safatle, 2010: 11). Consequently, the dictatorial past not only continues to haunt the present; it is constantly repurposed to serve current political goals, as exemplified by the 2018 Presidential election of former military Jair Bolsonaro marked by celebratory discourses of dictators and repressive agents and followed by the increased militarisation of public management (Martins Filho, 2021). As philosopher Edson Teles (2018) has suggested, the dictatorial past is still very much alive in postdictatorial(ising) ¹ Brazil.

From the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, official accounts of transitional justice in Brazil, such as reparations for families affected by State violence, have been produced following the logic of national reconciliation and governability: that is to say, they have involved a ‘top-down’ approach that has placed the work of social movements and other non-state actors at the margins (Santos, 2015; Teles and Quinalha, 2020). This narrow focus on reparations changed in 2007, during what Rebecca Atencio (2014: 17) calls the Brazilian ‘turn to memory’ when the State started to slowly abandon ‘its previous discourse of reconciliation by institutionalised forgetting in favour of a new one based on reconciliation by institutionalised memory’. Consequently, the Federal Government of Brazil launched the first official report of its Special Commission on the Dead and Disappeared (CEMDP) entitled Direito à Memória e à Verdade (CEMDP, 2007); 2 years later, the government launched its Third Human Rights National Plan (PNDH-3) recommending the creation of a National Truth Commission (NTC); and in 2012, during the Presidential term of former torture victim Dilma Rousseff, the government initiated the country’s first NTC to examine past human rights violations (CNV, 2014).

This article explores the practices of memory activists during this ‘turn to memory’, focusing on the period around the initiation of Brazil’s NTC in 2012. In particular, I examine how third-generation activists were impacted by this broader discursive shift and how they established aesthetic-political dialogues with the artistic experiments developed under the dictatorial repression of the early 1970s to raise awareness, engage broader audiences and help expand governmental approaches to transitional justice. Drawing on scholars working at the intersection of collective memory and political activism (e.g. Assmann and Assmann, 2010; Rigney, 2020; Zamponi, 2018), this article examines the ways that non-state actors use memory as ‘the crucial way of intervening in the process of societal change from below’ (Gutman and Wüstenberg, 2023, emphasis in original). While I recognise the importance of the literature on human rights and memory studies in Latin America (da Silva Catela, 2015; Jelin, 2003), this article focuses on the ways that postdictatorial activism has drawn on symbolic resources connected to past forms of artistic resistance against the dictatorship to broadcast their claims. As such, I consider the role of memory in activism and place contemporary scholarship on memory activism in dialogue with theoretical approaches to the dynamics of cultural memory (Erll and Rigney, 2009) to understand how activists engage with representations of Brazil’s dictatorial past to respond to the political challenges of the present.

The first part of the article draws on then-contemporaneous Brazilian art critics (i.e. Gullar, 1978; Morais, 1970) to provide a brief examination of the ethical and aesthetic precepts of Brazilian 1970s arte guerrilha. Second, drawing on semi-structured interviews made in 2020 with two founding members of distinct contemporary activist collectives (also addressed here by their participant number P1 and P4), ² I examine how memory activists were affected by ‘larger scale social and cultural developments’ during Brazil’s turn to memory (Rigney, 2021: 12), but also how past experiments of arte guerrilha informed the artistic procedures used in their memory activism in their attempt to ‘reactivate and re-embody more distant political and cultural memorial structures’ (Hirsch, 2012: 33). While many scholarly discussions of art and memory focus on artworks within major art circuits (e.g. Huyssen, 2022), I am concerned here with un-authorised artistic practices, informal practices of creative disobedience, or what Sholette (2011) calls creative ‘dark matter’. The project Ex-sem-voto, produced by the collective Aparecidos Políticos (AP) in 2010, and the Banknotes Project, created by the CPQ in 2011, each provide examples of ways that arte guerrilha works have been revisited by non-state actors to encourage quotidian participation in transitional justice in Brazil.

Arte Guerrilha and the Brazilian dictatorship: from the galleries to the streets

In a book about the aesthetic avant-garde and political revolution, art critic Ferreira Gullar (1978) argued that after the Second World War, the influence of international aesthetic tendencies became more acceptable in Brazil. This influence led to the predominant ‘concretism’, which valued form over discourse and ultimately emptied artworks of explicit political content. However, he also argues that ‘[from] 1961-1962, the Brazilian social process [. . .] made unbearable the defence of merely aestheticist positions’ (Gullar, 1978: 8). By the ‘Brazilian social process’, Gullar is referring to the emergence of a large working class actively engaged in struggles for better living conditions. In opposition to formalist concretism, artists started exploring the participatory dimensions of art by taking artistic production to the favelas, peasant associations and unions.

The military coup d’état of 1964 was directed against a range of popular emancipatory movements, including working-class social movements and union organising. Claiming to free the country from corruption and communism and to restore democracy in the name of ‘Western Christian moralism’, the new regime started to disseminate ‘a discourse permeated by threats and by the mobilisation of fears’ (Bauer, 2020: 176). The military governed through Institutional Acts, which involved norms or decrees more powerful than the Constitution. Signed in December 1968, Institutional Act Number 5 (AI-5) would be remembered as the beginning of the leaden years, for it ‘served as the basis for the installation of the apparatus that structured political repression’ (Fico, 2015: 67) and paved the way for the increased repression of civilians. The AI-5 gave almost unlimited power to the president, who was authorised to shut down parliamentary institutions, revoke terms, suspend civilians’ political rights and censor the press. According to Motta (2018: 202), the Act ‘provided the State with the means to punish and frame rebel leaders and segments of its own camp, such as parliamentarians, judges and the press’. The intensification of censorship involved greater State intervention in museums and galleries, media outlets and universities. The Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, for example, was invaded and closed by the military in 1969 for intending to show artworks with political connotations (Calirman, 2012). In this sense, Gullar affirms that ‘while the new regime deliberately tried to depoliticise the country (eliminating political leaderships, parties and controlling the Congress), the theatre, cinema, popular music, and poetry, and even painting, took the role of re-politicising it’ (Gullar, 1978: 8). Against this backdrop, artists of the Brazilian 1970s avant-garde started responding to the constraints of the military regime by adopting the strategies of urban guerrilla groups in the clandestine production of artistic experiments (Calirman, 2012; Shtromberg, 2016).

Artists’ use of unconventional and creative tactics to confront the military regime was labelled by art critic Frederico Morais as arte guerrilha (guerrilla art). In his essay, Contra a Arte Afluente, Morais (1970) questioned the idea of ‘artwork’ and argued that the work of art no longer existed, having merged with everyday life:

The artist today is a type of guerrilla fighter. Art is a form of ambush. Acting suddenly, where and when it is least expected in an unusual way (because everything today can become an instrument of war or art), the artist creates a permanent state of tension, a constant expectation. Everything can be transformed into art, even the most ordinary everyday event. The spectator, a constant victim of artistic guerrilla, finds themselves obliged to activate their senses. (Morais, 1970: 49)

For Morais, (1970) the artistic ambushes promoted by the Brazilian avant-garde confronted the formalities of an art history that deals with finished artworks and generates ‘schools or isms’ (p. 51). Instead, guerilla artists participated in a subterranean history created through unfinished or uncategorised works. These ambushes were derived from the movements of antiart initiated by Dadaists (exemplified by Morais through the drawing of a moustache over the Monalisa’s painting) ³ and could be related to other ‘antiart’ movements (see Home, 1991; Sholette, 2011). In this context, Brazil’s arte guerrilha developed a specific set of aesthetic tools adapted to the constraints imposed by an atmosphere of dictatorial violence and censorship.

In the book Brazilian Art under Dictatorship, art historian Calirman (2012) traces the transition from permanent artworks to street actions in response to dictatorial censorship. In particular, Calirman analyses how the 1970s production of conceptual artist Cildo Meireles encouraged participation and collaboration by exploring circuits of exchange (e.g. newspapers, reusable bottles of soda and banknotes) to anonymously disseminate political messages (e.g. ‘Yankees Go Home’, ‘Down with the dictatorship’). In 1975, following the death (framed as a suicide by military officials) of journalist Vladimir Herzog ⁴ at a military headquarters, Meireles revisited these works and started stamping banknotes with the question ‘Who killed Herzog?’. For Calirman (2012: 140), the question was ‘a rhetorical proposition underlining the fact that the official explanation given by the government was falsely generated to mask the real causes of Herzog’s death’. By asking ‘Who Killed Herzog?’, Meireles was doing more than inquiring about a specific individual who might be held responsible for murder: instead, he was questioning the validity of official statements offered by the military about the Herzog case and all similar cases. The seditious character of the banknotes became useful for the propagation of the work: Meireles’ banknotes ‘did not last long in the hands of the recipient; people would neither keep them in their pockets nor rip them up, so they kept circulating quickly’ (Calirman, 2012: 140).

The initial impact of Meireles’s project derived from its capacity to create unexpected encounters with antidictatorial propaganda. In this sense, art historian Elena Shtromberg (2016: 33) argues that:

(. . .) by opening up a symbolic space of dissent and straddling both the unconventional modes of artistic production associated with conceptual art and the more underground tactics of urban guerrillas, the bills represent an important step in constituting resistance.

The experiments produced by Meireles and other artists from the ‘generation AI-5’, such as Artur Barrio and Antonio Manuel (see Calirman, 2012), not only drew on the tactical approach used by urban guerrillas but also reinforced their opposition to the dictatorship. By demanding the engagement of everyday people with political issues and by stimulating clandestine criticisms of the military regime, actions such as the ‘Who Killed Herzog?’, banknotes ‘kept moving the ethos of opposition to the regime’ (Napolitano, 2001: 79).

At the same time, Brazilian artists were also responding to international trends and the main concerns of 1960s participatory art – activation, authorship and community (Bishop, 2006). Artists such as Helio Oiticica updated these trends to leave institutionalised art spaces and foster popular participation. According to Calirman (2012: 54–57), events like Domingos da Criação (1971) and Apcalipopótese (1968) were born ‘of Oiticica’s desire to break down the boundaries between the public and the work of art’. Challenging the distance between art and people while using the city’s spaces as a support, these events happened in Rio de Janeiro on the grounds of the Museum of Modern Art and at Flamengo’s beach, respectively. Oiticica encouraged spectators to interact with artworks and artists, demanding de-institutionalisation and popular participation in his time’s social and political issues.

The social and political circumstances set by military repression influenced the shape and function of the aesthetic experiments developed during the late 1960s and early 1970s, characterised here by the expression arte guerrilha used by art critic Frederico Morais (1970) and by the participatory works of Cildo Meireles and Hélio Oiticica. Forty years later, these experiments were revisited by young activists protesting the alarming persistence of dictatorial elements within Brazil’s democracy. Below, I will explore the initial works of two different collectives, AP and CPQ, across the period leading up to the NTC. I consider the ways that past political struggles can affect later generations of activists (Daphi and Zimmerman, 2021) and ask the question: Which political and historical circumstances shaped the emergence of the aesthetic-political expressions of the 1970s arte guerrilha’s as resources within the wider practices of contemporary memory activism in postdictatorial(ising) Brazil?

Memory activism and the Brazilian postdictatorship: from official reports to the streets

The years between 2007 and 2012 in Brazil represented a period of active interplay between State government initiatives around memory and truth-telling and renewed engagement from younger generations with the country’s dictatorial past (Atencio, 2014). As explained in the most recent publication by AP (Soares et al., 2021), the collective was created in 2009 in Fortaleza (CE), by a group of university students who witnessed the funeral of another student, Bergson Gurjão Farias, 37 years after he was killed by the military regime. The funeral ceremony was held at the Federal University of Ceará with the presence of members of the Federal Government, reinforcing the government’s commitment to processes of reckoning with the dictatorial past. At the same time, the students realised that the ceremony was being held next to an auditorium named after the first military President-dictator, Castelo Branco. The impact of that episode of belated justice regarding State violence, juxtaposed with an explicit example of how those responsible for such violence are still celebrated in the present, had an affective weight on the group, who considered this to be the moment when the collective ‘germinated’ (Soares et al., 2021).

The encounter at Farias’ funeral allowed AP to experience the inconsistencies of Brazil’s State-led initiatives towards transitional justice, which philosopher Edson Teles (2018: 56) describes as ‘constructions over abysms’. Another example of such constructions over abysms is the book Direito à Memória e à Verdade (Right to Memory and Truth), published in 2007 by the Federal Government’s Human Rights Secretariat (SEDH). Within its almost 500 pages, the book presents the results of the CEMDP work since 1995 and its attempts to ‘find solutions to the cases of death and disappearances of political opponents by State authorities’ (CEMDP, 2007: 17). However, as noted by Atencio (2014) and Santos (2015), the report uses the term ‘justice’ only once and equates it to ‘financial reparations’. Thus, while remaining important as documentation of the victims of State violence, the report’s embrace of ‘the discourse of reconciliation by memory’ (Atencio, 2014, 86) appears to exclude efforts towards substantive justice. Furthermore, Santos (2015) notes that the report does not discuss the families’ demands for justice and that such omissions of non-state actors are common in Brazil’s official accounts of transitional justice. Thus, the term ‘abysms’ by Edson Teles (2018: 56) is used as ‘the more one projects themselves towards the so-called truth, the more it is confirmed that little will be unveiled’.

During the ‘turn to memory’, the State-led initiatives developed in Brazil started to be questioned by younger generations, such as members of the collective AP, who began to explore creative ways to address inconsistencies within the reconciliation discourse. The project Ex-sem-voto, developed by AP in 2010, consisted of pasting victims’ photographs and summarising biographic information on specific urban spaces connected to the dictatorial period. Next to the images, AP members hung wooden objects taken from the religious imaginary of that region known as ex votos, which represented body parts in allusion to the practices of torture commonly employed by the State during the military regime. Combining mnemonically charged elements in a site-specific installation, the project denounced both the State violence of the dictatorship and the dictatorial remnants within Brazil’s then-contemporary democracy.

The choice to focus on ex votos is also significant. As Didi-Huberman (2007: 8) observes, votive objects are objects touched by ‘a symptom: the suffering of misfortune or the sudden transformation of misfortune into a miracle, illness into health, and so on. (. . .) and acquire psychic significance by the fact of being given’. In Catholic culture, the ex votos are commonly displayed in places of worship as signs of gratitude for divine intervention and attempt to make sense of traumatic events by blurring the line between private and public (see Ponzo et al., 2022: 91). But ex votos can also be removed from their religious framework and be repurposed to produce new meanings. In the context of AP’s action, the critical events that ‘touch’ the ex votos refer to the different forms of torture practised by the dictatorial State, and instead of places of worship, they were displayed in places connected to the authoritarian past (e.g. former torture centres) and next to victims’ photographs. While photographs materialised victims’ humanity, the ex votos alluded to the techniques used by State agents to de-humanise victims. By presenting photographs and the ex votos side by side, the collective aimed to publicise the episodes of torture commonly restricted to private spheres but also to denounce the continuities between the authoritarian past and the democratic present.

In the interview, AP members explained their choice to perform these interventions in the daylight to generate dialogue with passers-by. The project was meant to shock and demand ethical responses to past atrocities beyond ‘truth and memory’ and towards justice. This intention was also evident in the action performed in front of the Military Police Courts, in which the AP collective included the phrase ‘Out judge inspector! For crimes during the dictatorship’, denouncing a military official accused of torture who was continuing to work in the Military Police Courts. The project confronted the inconsistencies of Brazil’s official accounts of its authoritarian past. As I demonstrate in the following section, its aesthetic choices were informed by activists’ impressions of representations of dictatorial violence disseminated mainly through official accounts, specifically by the aforementioned 2007 CEMDP official report, and by the aesthetic tools connected to the 1970s arte guerrilha.

The photographs used in project Ex-sem-voto were black and white standard profile (3 × 4) pictures in which victims naturally, sometimes smiling, stare at the camera. The AP collective explained that all photographs and basic information about the victims and the circumstances of their disappearances were taken from the CEMDP (2007) report. Although impacted by the dictatorial violence documented in the report, these young activists went beyond the report’s stated purpose of ‘registering for history (. . .) the atrocities of that unfortunate period (. . .)’ (CEMDP, 2007: 18). Instead, AP used artistic practices to generate discussions about past atrocities and the continuing issues around the police and the military in Brazil’s social and political life. This appropriation of materials from official reports speaks to the ways that objects of memory, or the ‘repository of memory (a set of mnemonic products)’, can be re-worked to elaborate their ‘repertoire of memory (as a set of mnemonic practices)’ (Zamponi, 2015: 176). Specifically, AP drew on the report to raise awareness about the problems with the policy of impunity for perpetrators of State violence, therefore challenging the CEMDP report’s discourse of reconciliation.

I asked AP member Alexandre (P1) for deeper clarifications about the photographic images chosen for the Ex-sem-voto. While talking about the importance of photographs, he recalled the moment he read the CEMDP (2007) report in 2010, some months after he attended the funeral ceremony of student Bergson Gurjão Farias. While reading the report, Alexandre felt that the photographs had the power to humanise the victims of the dictatorship:

There is this thing in the photograph of these faces. Something about the person’s gaze. You stare at that black-and-white image and think about the person, and then you read about what happened to them. Photographic records have the materiality that we want to communicate. (. . .) There is something about the black and white that I think relates to the disappearances, and I think moves us affectively towards seeing that these people are still disappeared. So, it has something to do with the record of that person and our desire to say, ‘Look, even after 30, 40 years, this person is still disappeared (. . .) we are searching’. Although we all know these people are gone, there is a ‘search’ within these images. (Alexandre, P1)

The ‘search’ within these black-and-white images corresponds to the encounter between memory and forgetting – or shock and self-protection (Hirsch, 2012: 119). The disappeared victims, seen as chronologically distant in the black-and-white pictures, remind us of their unresolved disappearances just like the State violence that killed them reminds us of its ongoing impunity.

The reproduction of faces to trigger emotional responses can be seen widely across other human rights contexts. For example, Assmann and Assmann (2010) explore the case of Iranian protester Neda Agha-Soltan, whose assassination in 2009 by a militia group was captured in video and circulated the globe. Assmann and Assmann draw on the work of art historian Aby Warburg to understand the mnemonic power of Neda’s image as a now familiar symbol for human rights struggles. More specifically, they turn to Warburg’s concept of ‘emotive formulas’ (Pathosmorfeln) to discern the dual structure of the symbol: pathos (passionate energy) and formula (the visual packaging), or ‘power along with a graphic representation of it’ (Didi-Huberman, 2016: 121). The pathos formula is a ‘visual form that condenses a high amount of passionate energy’ (Assmann and Assmann, 2010: 233).

In her study of the mediations of outrage, Ann Rigney (2020) analyses how individual victims give a face to the memory of protest. According to Rigney, (2020) victims’ memorability ‘is observed in the intensity and frequency with which their lives have been recalled in songs and poetry and (. . .) in photographs’ (p. 720). In Brazil, due to the censorship of books, songs and theatre plays, it was only during the transition period (1974–1985) that victims’ names and photographs began to circulate publicly and with more frequency. These stories were often published in posters and reports produced by relatives and allies who had been reunited in associations such as the Commission of the Relatives of the Dead and Disappeared for Political Reasons (CFMDP). However, compared to State investment in silence and forgetting, relatives lacked the means for large-scale symbolic production and circulation. As emotive formulas, victims’ photographs ‘survived’ generations because of their relatives’ efforts to ‘prove’ the legacy of their loved ones (see Dias, 2021; Quintão Guerra, 2021; Teles, 2009). The development of memory policies since the late 1990s, particularly during Brazil’s turn to memory, stimulated a much wider circulation of victims’ and relatives’ discourses through reports, memorials, monuments and exhibitions, incorporating them in Brazil’s official representations of past atrocities. The images used in AP’s Ex-sem-voto can, therefore, be understood both as appropriations of visual materials from the CEMDP report and as new chapters in the longer lifecycles of images that may initially have been preserved in personal archives or through survivors’ networks.

Finally, these site-specific installations appeal to spectators’ empathy. Ex-sem-voto recognises the temporal distance between viewers and the victims represented in the images but also demands a moral positioning and political engagement in the present, ‘certain conjunctions of affective and critical operation’ or an empathic vision (Bennett, 2005: 20). While the action communicated a didactic message about the crimes committed by the military dictatorship, the project also made its audience aware of the traumatic relationship between the country’s past and present. To generate such an affective experience, AP drew on artistic experiments and discourses found in the intersections of creative practices and political activism, including 1970s arte guerrilha and its ability to create situations that ‘oblige the spectator to sharpen and activate their senses (. . .)’ (Morais, 1970: 49). This strategy was described as relational art by one AP member:

We were influenced by Brazilian artists such as Cildo Meireles and Helio Oiticica with his parangolés and relational public art (. . .) but also by contemporary writers such as Hakim Bey and Jacques Ranciere. (. . .) We were inspired by the research group we participated in while studying visual arts. We studied the so-called public relational art that comes from the context of Hélio Oiticica, of the 1960s and 1970s artists, that [explored] the work when placed in the city. Not only the support but the work itself becomes part of it. Not only the text you write on the wall but that wall is also related. (Alexandre, P1)

For context, relational art was defined by Bourriaud (2002: 113) as a ‘set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space’. The AP collective’s practices align with Bourriaud’s focus on how art produces, represents or prompts inter-human relations. The important Brazilian antecedent here, for these artists, is the aforementioned Hélio Oiticica, whose disruptive works aimed for ‘total participatory creation’ (Oiticica, in Bishop 2006: 108). Collective AP was inspired by the memory of past attempts to explore ‘structural spaces that are free both to the participation and to the creative invention of spectators’ (Oiticica, 2006[1966]: 108) but adapted these approaches to help expand the scope of Brazil’s turn to memory beyond the walls of governmental institutions. If, as suggested by Gullar (1978), the collapse of the distance between the artwork and the spectator was a response to the dictatorship’s attempts at depoliticising cultural institutions, then contemporary memory activism, represented here by AP’s first action, seems to respond to the effects of depoliticisation in postdictatorial climes. AP’s Ex-sem-voto can be understood as an act of memory that draws on Brazilian avant-garde to remediate the ethical and emotive weight of official reports’ aesthetic materials and uses them as political tools to collectivise debates around transitional justice.

The banknotes project and Brazil’s NTC

The CPQ was created in 2011 in the city of São Paulo (SP) by students of the University of São Paulo (USP) to raise awareness about dictatorial legacies through artistic-activist interventions. As explained by CPQ’s founding member Rafael (P4) in an interview, the social and political context set by the PNDH-3, approved in 2009, generated discussions inside and outside government institutions about transitional justice, mainly due to its recommendation for an NTC. Schneider (2011) demonstrates how the Brazilian mainstream media (famous for its support of the dictatorship) and military sectors opposed the PNDH-3 and its ‘crazy’ or ‘bolshevik’ intention, as labelled in some media attacks (Schneider, 2011: 168), to improve human rights in Brazil. These reactions ignited responses from young activists, as Rafael (P4) explained, but the idea to create the group originated after a visit to the 29th Biennale of São Paulo in 2010. There, Rafael saw for the first time the work ‘Quem Matou Herzog?’ (1975), in which artist Cildo Meireles stamped the question ‘Who killed Herzog?’ on banknotes before putting them back into circulation. Building on my previous analysis, I will now turn to another memory activism project, the CPQ’s Banknotes Project, and their use of Meireles’ banknotes to question past State violence and back the government’s initiative to establish an NTC to investigate it.

Meireles’s original banknotes were developed to ‘circulate alternative and subversive information’ outside the art world (Shtromberg, 2016: 9) but were later exhibited in mainstream art circuits, such as the Biennale of São Paulo. Despite its initial purpose, the banknotes can be understood as an established artwork that brings the emotional weight of the dictatorial fear (of censorship, persecutions and tortures) to be witnessed in the present but also as a repository of memory, both contributing to provide an encounter between the spectator and its traumatic past. At the same time, their tactical relevance allowed them to be incorporated into the repertoires of third-generation memory activists in their attempt to collectivise debates around the NTC. As in AP’s encounter with the CEMDP report, CPQ’s encounter with Meireles’ question on a banknote led the group to other interrogations.

In an interview, Rafael (P4) affirmed that after researching the question ‘Who killed Vladimir Herzog?’ and taking it to members of the generation directly affected by the dictatorship, he was faced with the complexity of subjects who were victims of and implicated in, past atrocities (i.e. not only individual victims who were tortured and killed for their political ideas but also society as a whole that was affected by a culture of fear; and not only who tortured and killed but also who provided financial and other forms of support to such atrocities). Such complexity resonates with Michael Rothberg’s (2019: 202) understanding of implicated subjects and its proposition that we should ‘enlarge our understanding of the actors involved in injustices beyond the most often invoked figures of victims, perpetrators, and bystanders’. For these students, the complexities around accountability and responsibility – both past and present – were signalled in the choice to name themselves CPQ, or ‘Political Collective Who’. The group explain this choice:

‘Who wants to combat the dictatorship and what is left of it must have the courage to question the myth of Brazilian democracy. (. . .) If the civil-military dictatorship came to guarantee the failure of an attempt to restructure the production regime over a new basis, the succeeding democracy is nothing more than this objective’s realisation. Who are those who never left the power and negotiated reconciliation among themselves? Who tortured, who killed, who occulted corpses? Who is interested in the consolidation of this type of democratic regime?’ (CPQ, July 2011) ⁵

The group deliberately plays on the linguistic confusion caused by using the pronoun ‘who’ as the collective’s proper noun and to address the ‘political, economic forces, corporations, and ideological interests supporting the dictatorship’. ⁶ This confusion invites reflection on the ways that Brazilians may both have resisted and supported the military regime in the past and present. Their linguistic experiment had a clear political goal: questioning the multiple interests behind the past dictatorship and encouraging numerous voices to participate in the discussions about transitional justice. Instead of exploring a self-critical recognition of collective responsibility and a depoliticised notion of implicated subjects, which can risk reinforcing the relations of power that enable human rights violations in the first place (Rothberg, 2019: 158), they called for a courageous questioning of the ‘myth’ of Brazilian democracy emphasising it as the victory of the dictatorship against attempts to restructure the country’s production regime or, as mentioned earlier, against a range of popular emancipatory movements.

CPQ’s courageous questioning, combined with their use of an aesthetic-political tactic developed by the 1970s arte guerrilha, led to their first project. Thirty-six years after Meireles stamped banknotes with the question ‘Who killed Herzog?’, the group stamped banknotes with the question: ‘Who tortured Dilma Rousseff?’. It is widely known that in the 1970s, President Dilma Rousseff (2011–2016) was arrested and brutally tortured in 1970, being released only in 1972 (Comissão Nacionalda Verdade (CNV), 2014). It is also widely known that no one was held responsible for such crimes. By replacing the question ‘Who killed [journalist and victim] Vladimir Herzog?’ with ‘Who tortured [President] Dilma Rousseff?’ CPQ’s project created an unexpected affective encounter. The viewer is questioned about a human rights violation, particularly the brutal torture of a President, and consequently in the debates around the government’s plans to investigate past human rights violations through an NTC.

Returning to the metaphor popularised by Morais (1970), the success of the tactics of urban guerrilla depends on ‘taking the enemy by surprise’ but also on the mobility, speed and the elimination of ‘tracks’ that would provide information to the enemy (Marighella, 2003: 19). While taking advantage of currency as a necessary site for material social exchanges, the marked banknotes confronted users with surprising and uncomfortable questions, using art to leave us ‘in the place of the other’ – as noticed by Bennett (2005: 152). I asked CPQ’s founding member Rafael (P4) about the intended effect of this approach:

The idea was to provoke. At least to cause discomfort or a quick questioning – it must be quick. . . For a passer-by or someone who received the banknote, we can’t over-intellectualise. (. . .) We didn’t explore abstraction. (. . .) There is a political dispute to be made, so we can’t get too ‘crazy’. (Rafael, P4)

Like Meireles, the CPQ exploited the capacity for banknotes to be quickly produced, circulated and understood. Their appropriation of Meireles’ banknotes can be understood as a tactical manoeuvre, in the sense suggested by Michel de Certeau (2002), in which the institutional territory of the banknotes is ‘hijacked’ by a question that takes the viewer by surprise, disrupts the everydayness of financial transactions and demands not only an answer but, as in AP’s Ex-Sem-Voto, also an ethical positioning.

But there are also significant differences between the original work and its reiteration. In 2011, the country was no longer under a military dictatorship and subject to the restrictions of the AI-5. In this context, CPQ’s banknotes generate impact less by denouncing dictatorial crimes directly (as Meireles had done) than by denouncing the continuing silence around them. The banknotes were initially circulated at events and parties at the USP, but they slowly started appearing in other cities. CPQ encouraged this by providing an online how-to guide for developing the stamps. Building on Meireles’s original approach to participatory art: ‘when the object of art becomes a practice, it becomes something over which you have no control or ownership’ (Calirman, 2012: 142). For his part, Meireles had been exploring communication that could not be controlled or tracked by the regime, given that it had been illegal to ‘disseminate via any media, press, radio, or television, the news (. . .) about torture in Brazil’ (Fernandez, 1973 quoted in Shtromberg, 2016: 33). In postdictatorial Brazil, it is not illegal to talk about torture, although perpetrators of State violence are still protected by impunity. For this reason, different forms of State-sponsored violence persist in Brazil, and so do Meireles’ banknotes. In the 2014 issue of the magazine Artforum International, Meireles stamped a five-reel bill asking, ‘Where is Amarildo?’ ⁷ , and in 2018, another one asked, ‘Who Killed Marielle?’ ⁸ . The persistent force of such questions corresponds to the silences that follow them – they are, for all intents, unanswerable. Alongside CPQ, Meireles continues to interrogate the abysms of Brazilian postdictatorial democracy.

Conclusion

The two projects of memory activism considered in this article adapted the aesthetic tools of 1970s arte guerrilha to the changing circumstances and opportunities of Brazil’s turn to memory (2007–2012). By exploring their artistic and political choices, we can better understand how third-generation memory activists engaged with past artistic experiments to address the inheritances of authoritarianism within Brazil’s democracy and the rise of State-led reconciliation initiatives (e.g. the CEMDP report, the PNDH-3 plan and the NTC). It was observed that while stimulating important public debates, the contradictions underpinning Brazil’s reconciliation initiatives have been interrogated by younger generations frustrated by the prescribed avenues of parliamentary deliberation and political advocacy. The CPQ’s manifesto outlines their solution: ‘The dictatorship is still present! What to do? Rescue, update, and reconfigure artistic manifestations against the dictatorship’ (CPQ, 2011). This statement corroborates this study’s findings regarding the potential of art as an ambush, or what art critic Frederico Morais (1970) termed arte guerrilha, for contemporary memory activists seeking to activate the spectator’s senses to the remnants of Brazil’s dictatorship.

It is important to acknowledge the aforementioned actions’ limitations in producing systemic changes, as exemplified by the election of former military and admirer of the dictatorship Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, along with the increased militarisation of public management during his government, as analysed by Martins Filho (2021). However, I argue that such creative engagements with the past allow for disruptions of dominant frames of memorialising and historicising and provide potential resources for future memory activisms. The affective experiences produced by CPQ and AP have enabled a particular mode of comprehending and disputing the past. Through their unexpected disruption of everyday life, they provided opportunities for an embodied encounter with the country’s traumatic past, which, drawing on Bennett (2005), can lead to critical awareness. At the same time, their approach to ‘total participatory creation’ (Oiticica, in Bishop 2006: 108) demands a redistribution of the social roles commonly identified with historical knowledge-making by empowering ordinary people to participate in memory work outside of institutional spaces. If, as James Jasper (2014: 98) argues, ‘protesters push the boundaries of what can be thought, articulated, and felt’, then the symbolic efficacy of such artistic protests can be understood in relation to their ability to produce small disruptions in Brazilian civil society, or what Rigney elegantly describes as a ‘micropolitics of reading, viewing and reacting with repeated small movements gradually acquiring larger-scale consequences’ (Rigney, 2021: 17–18).

Much of the recent memory activism in Brazil also remains under-researched. Further studies might consider the influence of other Brazilian visual artists from the 1970s – Artur Barrio, Antonio Manuel, Paulo Bruscky and playwriters such as Augusto Boal – on the artistic and aesthetic strategies of contemporary memory ‘artivism’. Future research might also consider comparative approaches between contemporary practices of memory activism in Brazil and other countries, including collectives such as Grupo de Arte Callejero and HIJOS in Argentina that also reckon with past and present State violence. For its part, this article has examined Brazilian activists’ engagement with historical art practices, such as arte guerrilha, as one among many possible examples of artistic practices linking together different historical periods for the purposes of illuminating political challenges in the present.