recent activities
As teleperformances do Perforum Desterro enquanto pesquisa artística
(2025)
Yara Guasque
Desenvolvimento de investigação artística em teleperformance entre os anos de 1999 e 2001, quando não existia uma taxinomia adequada.
As teleperformances do Perforum Desterro partiram da pesquisa da linguagem intermídia da telecomunicação síncrona. As teleperformances foram a prática artística e, paralelamente, subsidiaram o levantamento teórico sobre telepresença realizado como parte de meu doutoramento no Programa de Pós-graduação de Comunicação e Semiótica da PUCSP (COS).
O Perforum nasceu em São Paulo das ideias de Artur Matuck acerca dos “Colaboratórios de Mídia e Performance” a serem criados em diferentes cidades. No segundo semestre de 1998 cursei a disciplina Escrituras Eletrônicas, ministrada por Artur Matuck na pós-graduação da Escola de Comunicação e Artes da Universidade de São Paulo, ECA/USP. Entre minhas idas a São Paulo, passei a fazer parte do grupo de pesquisa da disciplina, antes mesmo de ingressar oficialmente como doutoranda em um Programa de Pós Graduação. Parte dos integrantes atuaram no início do projeto Perforum. Paula Perissinoto e Ricardo Barreto, fundadores no ano de 2000 do Festival Internacional de Linguagem Eletrônica, FILE, Tereza Labarrère, Otávio Donasci, o artista criador das videocriaturas, Edson Luiz de Oliveira, Cesar Barros, Suzana Moraes. Outros, como Daniel Seda, aderiram ao grupo mais tarde. O Perforum no ano de 1999 se bifurcou em Perforum Desterro, coordenado por Yara Guasque pela Universidade do Estado de Santa Catarina, UDESC, e Perforum São Paulo coordenado por Artur Matuck pela USP. Os dois grupos desenvolviam colaborativamente scripts como proposição de interação e performance a distância.
Warping Protest: Increasing Inclusion and Widening Access to Art Activism Utilising Textiles
(2025)
Britta Fluevog
Art activism is powerful. Also known as activist art, protest art, visual activism, artivism and creative activism, it changes lives, situations and is and has been a powerful weapon across a whole spectrum of struggles for justice. Teresa Sanz & Beatriz Rodriguez-Labajos(2021) relay that art activism has the unique ability to bring cohesion and diverse peoples together and it can, as Zeynep Tufekci notes, change the participants (2017). As Steve Duncombe & Steve Lambert (2021) posit, traditional protesting such as marches or squats are no longer as important as they once were. As a result of my own lived experience in activist activities, I very much agree with Andrew Boyd & Dave Oswald Mitchell (2012) that the reason people use art activism is that it works, by enriching and improving protest.
In the past, when I lived in a metropolis and was not a parent, I used to be an activist. Now I no longer have immediate access to international headquarters at which to protest and I have to be concerned with being arrested, I am hindered from protesting. This project is an attempt to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism. By devising methods which include at least one of the following: that do not require on-site participation, that can take place outside the public gaze, that reduce the risk of arrest, that open up protest sites that are not “big targets”, that include remote locations, that involve irregular timing, my thesis aims to increase inclusion and widen access to art activism to those who are underserved by more mainstream methods of conducting art activism.
Textiles have unique properties that enable them to engage in subterfuge and speak loudly through care and thought(Bryan-Wilson, 2017). They have strong connotations of domesticity, the body and comfort that can be subverted within art activism to reference lack of this domestic warmth and protection(O’Neill, 2022). Being a slow form of art-making, they show care and thought, attention in the making, so that the messaging is reinforced through this intentionality in slow making.
Take a picture with me!
(2025)
Plhák Vojtěch
I grew up in a family full of hunters. I used to go on hunting hunts and was generally pretty in touch with the death of animals. So I'm interested in everything surrounding this topic. At the same time, we are in an era where we share and photograph everything. I question why hunters take pictures with their kill. I also want to point out that these often distasteful photos, they share on Facebook, and or websites where they pat each other on the back. I'm exploring the connection between the camera and the gun.
recent publications
Voices, Noises, and Silence in the Political Soundscape of Belarus
(2025)
Pavel Niakhayeu
This article provides an overview and analysis of transformations of the Belarusian political soundscape. Based on the author’s archive of audio recordings made in Minsk and other Belarusian cities in 2016-2023, the article analyzes how protesters and the authorities used voices, noises, and music during the major political protests of recent years. The field recordings became the starting points for a further discussion on the multifaceted role of sound, music, and silence in contesting for urban and political space in Belarus. The “loudest” period in the country’s recent history is then put in a wider context of studying the clashing ideologies of the authoritarian regime and the democratic, pro-independence movement. The study of audio materials is accompanied by participant observations, interviews, and an extensive analysis of Belarusian and international media that reveal various sonic practices used by the country’s and its critics. The primary goal of this article is to address the gaps in studies of the contemporary Belarusian political soundscape and independent music scenes.
“Songs of despair and freedom”. Interview with Sashko Protyah.
(2025)
Vadim Keylin
Sashko Protyah is a film director and activist from Mariupol, Ukraine. He's a co-founder of Freefilmers, a collective of artists and filmmakers. In his films, he works with topics of memory, otherness, and alienation. Now Sashko is based in Zaporizhzhia and volunteers for IDPs and the Ukrainian army.
This interview was taken in February 2024 over email.
A Butterfly Akin to a Bird: Imagining New Jazz in Leningrad
(2025)
Sam Riley
Drawing from samizdat literature, contemporaneous interviews, and musical recordings, this paper investigates the reception and creation of “new jazz” in late socialist Leningrad. Figures of interest are critic Efim Barban and pianist Sergei Kurekhin. In my analysis, I read an understanding of “freedom” in this instance as more than simply a freedom from state socialism and position these works in a larger discourse regarding “the emancipation” of European jazz from African-American hegemony. This analysis reveals that new jazz was an amorphous concept in its circulating from Barban to Kurekhin and back again, its meaning shifting between the aesthetically universal and culturally particular. This enlivens understandings of avantgarde jazz in the late Soviet imagination – most often framed as a part of the “imagined West” (following Yurchak 2006) – by illustrating that new jazz carried a more complicated imagination variously projected as a universal, a European, and a Soviet/Russian musical form (rather than an American importation).