ghettodowntownghetto
Autor: Anjo Sub | Publicado: 2012-12-14T04:01:00-08:00

Ghettodowntownghetto

(writed by Pedro Cost and translated by Hugo Molina)

"The ghetto people need no approval from the centers.
All the copies made of the movements arisen in the big centers
have become something else: neither what they were, nor what they have been.
The transit between downtown and ghetto and the lack of resources to invest in ghetto products have made the creation underestimated. I defend that today what comes from the ghetto is new. Old is what lies downtown. New ghetto sound.

The copy will never be a copy and much less the original. It is something else, it is another creation… but if we name everything differently, they will be infinite names, for infinite creative qualities that materialize as a product, art, a concept.
Tired of being on the fringes, they make the fringes the center.
And from the center, they make the center the fringes. A contrary motion?
No. I believe that it is a movement for. For all of those who get tired of waiting. Leave Gigi and Gogo waiting for Godot. They, eternalized in the anguish of waiting, can have this role. And period! They’re enough.

The policy of revolution is already. Now, present, not so smiling, but with effects which surpass the control and the censorship of the media, of the entertainment industry, of the great study centers. They flee because they do not need them to exist. Anguish, hunger, loneliness, abjection turned into creation, into music, into dance, into intervention. Perhaps we are too punk: in attitude. If we are slaves and landlords in the writing or of the language, let’s be in it and for it, contaminated by what is interesting. What is interesting is to make myself be heard by myself and distribute the so many voices I have heard and have been hearing for so long.
Leaving the condition of victim and becoming the author of oneself, at the same time in which I can acknowledge the limit of the words and of the exposed cultural conditions that affect me directly, it is the work that is done in the language to find, maybe, a way out of it. If it is possible, it will exist.
But, it’s by the ways that moments are built. It’s still not possible to be sure of the radical marginality of the language. To leave her, to plead ( in the sense of getting by and litigating), is a fact?

For everything, it is necessary to acknowledge. The acknowledgement frees me of the heavy burden of providing ready answers to not-yet-known questions. It is a questioning, maybe one of the thousands more, with no obvious answers.
Maybe I could answer circularly, but neither vertically nor horizontally.
The need of answering a question is what makes many researchers lay their valuable lives to reach a satisfactory question. At my intent and at my taste, I admire things that go hand in hand with life, with the day-to-day, with the many invisible stories.
And, by being invisible, something turns them into lives with that characteristic. A technology of thought (I listen to Foucault while I listen to Dead Things, by Philip Glass). But, if this technology wants them like this, it is because there is something not submissive, not inferior, of not-value. For, if so many apparatuses are created to hide, to kill, to repress the invisible ones, it might be so because they try to look beyond questions and answers. Maybe they create, and to create is to be! 

To create is like giving birth: something comes out of me, which is not yet and never was a copy. It is to create with what you have, with the conditions involved, with the dance of active Shiva (to destroy for constructing): to move, to play, to search, to perceive curiously, to be attentive. And out of so many verbs, and out of so many other ones, products are born, seductions are born. Product is not everything that is going to be consumed by the current market (capitalist, neo-liberal, globalized, exchange currencies…), but product as something that exists. It exists, created, with no conjugated values. And, the price of an idea does not exist. They stipulate, they auction, but concretely, there is none. Ideas find space beyond the prices, beyond the walls, beyond the centers. And so be it, a prayer, a purge, a caustic fever, for being an idea that does not stop.

Stop! I’m not a diva, I’m a bitch!

Who was wrong, raise your hand.
Dressed like a diva to get the sex that is going to satisfy the whore who exists in me. This is interpellation: raising the hand comes loaded with a YES. A taste can also represent what Geertz develops in the encounter between culture and semiotics: every gesture, in each specific culture, has a meaning. Nothing is for nothing. Or is it? Although he might have been deceived by the natives, who discovered his game before he discovered the natives’ game (and who until today has not realized or admitted), he created his own theory, even so.
Perhaps there was no meaning. Perhaps it was something invented in the moment and, with a twitch to deceive whoever wants to understand me, it earned a great explanatory representation of how the world of those people works. Lévi-Strauss could confirm that and, in fact, he did: the Nambiquaras wanted his power: the writing. It started then a process of literacy. They did not want to be illiterate anymore. And not because they catechized them, but because they realized, through the wickedness in their hearts (that they can name as the way of being and that has its positive value), that the pen and the notebook compose an intrinsic value of power, of differentiation and of command. To know something I do not know is power. It is to open the doors for negotiation. It is to say that there is a proposal of affinity, and of wanting to be what the other one is, but in my way. To be the other one like I am is revolutionary.

It is not to lose what I have, and from me on, it is to have more: what is mine and what is the other one’s. To get to know is never too little and never too much. I will never be Judith Butler, but being closer to Nízia Floresta, I am satisfied with the cultural translation I can do from Butler and her theories, in a creative unfaithfulness that surprises me and creates something new. Maybe to be unfaithful is a strong character to be explored with more insistence. And from it, from the unfaithfulness, the representations pass through a vulgar, hypothetical filter, and which satisfies me. Because I have learned how to gain experience with spoken things that were bad, ugly, of low value. But, from this point I can speak and compensate: if you did not like it, swallow me! What would be made of me without the Rio funk, formulated and created so many times as the number of existing songs is. The lyrics of Rio funk break taboos and do not establish other ones. When you think that there is a new regulation being established, there comes the Rio funk and says that there are other moments and that the experimentation is far gone from the mark. 
It is like creating by what I live. Reproducing: sexisms, antagonisms, illegalities… but everything is a point of view: it depends on who speaks and who listens. It can be a law, too, but I believe that little works. What is the coercion of the law before the strength of desire?

The law escapes from the mouths, as the faithful and absolute certainty of a perfect and democratic society. But life, mainly in the ghettos, has other flexibility, other compliance, other pitch of voice and of body structures.
I lower my head and listen to what the lords of power say. But it is by lowering the head that I can look at the sound system on which I am going to play and to create the beats and, from there on, to change the look. It is a guerrilla that simmer philosophically in the dictatorship and which continues philosophical nowadays. To be direct or indirect is the same thing, the difference is that some understand because they live and others because they read. The risks are different, but the change that causes it is the same. Political attitude or acceptance of frustration is revolutionary. One because it goes and does and shouts and throws a tantrum and makes use of intellectual weapons or any other ones for such a thing. And the other one is because it does not meet the social civic duty to make a nation happy and stronger. I can not make a nation stronger if it is the first one to weaken me. So, my nation I recognize in my brother, in the ones who value me and who stimulate me and acknowledge me as a subject. Maybe the price of that is a death at twenty, an incurable disease at fifteen, an arrest at nineteen. Or maybe it is the ticket to have money, to construct with the same speech, the speech of valorization of beyond-expanded acknowledgement: to other worlds named countries."


published in the artbook from Brazil:
"perpendicular cenário#ambiente"
Org. Wagner Rossi Campos
Belo Horizonte: Instituto Cidades Criativas 2010
ISBN 978-85-61659-14-1