22-23 October 2026 - Institut National de l’Histoire de l’Art (Paris)

Organizers: 
Eric C. H. de Bruyn, Freie Universtät Berlin
Sonia de Laforcade, Radboud Universiteit, Nijmegen

At a time of widespread far right attacks on emancipatory forms of culture and education, accompanied by the rampant spread of media disinformation, this program proposes to reexamine the connections between media, pedagogy, and resistance. Taking as our point of departure the media practices that emerged during the Brazilian dictatorship, we aim to develop a set of genealogical strands for pedagogical and screen-based works that are closely connected to current debates within the art world concerning questions of decolonization, self-organization, and assembly.

In the 1960s and 1970s, filmmakers and artists working in the midst of an authoritarian political climate made works that queried the relationship between projection, pedagogy, and liberation. For example, Léon Hirszman’s censored film Maioria Absoluta [Absolute Majority] (1964) opens with a Freirean, collective exercise in phonetic reading and gives a voice to disenfranchised illiterate Brazilians. Zózimo Bulbul’s experimental short film Alma no Olho [Soul of the Eye] (1973), which circulated in schools and community centers during his exile in the United States following its censorship, critically distills perceptions of blackness in Brazil. Contemporaneously with these filmmakers, the artist Anna Bella Geiger and the critic Frederico Morais each proposed new models of projection-based art historical pedagogy that responded to the inequities of Brazilian society. Taken together, these works evince a shared investment in the pedagogical potential of the situation of projection.
Artists working with film and video in more recent years have continued to draw from this period of pedagogical experimentation. Jonathas de Andrade’s video Olho da Rua [Out Loud] (2022) draws inspiration from Augusto Boal’s Theater of the Oppressed, itself developed during the dictatorship in dialogue with Freire’s pedagogy. Ana Vaz’s film Apiyemiyekî? (2019), meanwhile, excavates the archives of Brazilian educator and indigenous rights militant Egydio Schwade, which includes drawings made during literacy training by the Waimiri-Atroari in the Brazilian Amazon during the dictatorship. Denilson Baniwa’s videos, in turn, produce a critical reflection on his relationship with film, which began at an outdoor screening event organized to encourage Indigenous people to vote. In these works, screen-based practice is once again mobilized towards an exploration of situated pedagogy.
This program includes works that were conceived as collective events, where what is performed in front of the screen–whether a cognitive “conscientization” or a corporeal re-education of the senses–is as important as what appears on the screen itself. Rather than attempting to replicate these situations, we will animate the screenings with presentations and discussions. The international symposium with invited lectures will expand the scope of the program to current research on the intersections of art, media, and pedagogy in Brazil and beyond.