Translated by Denise Pierrotti

Since last March I’ve been “frequenting” the city of Salvador every week. For reasons which are not meant to be taken into consideration here, the capital of Bahia already seemed to me an alternative contact with artistic engagements provided with legitimated action and discourse.

During the first months, when I was still bold amongst the turbulence created after choosing to live with no fixed location, I’ve climbed the slopes of the city seizing concrete and invisible data onto which I could hold.

Bit by bit the foreigner look broke down giving rise to the binocular view. Beyond contemplation I could focus on details which enhanced contrasts and tensions between the beautiful, stirring, exotic Salvador and its other mediocre and prostituted side.

Representing such a tense stage, the famous Pelourinho was and still is a challenger mystery, a mixed oracle sometimes empty and sometimes on its complete energy full of histories and hidings. It was there, on Rua das Laranjeiras, number 46, where I found the highly expected GIA’s headquarter.

GIA stands for Grupo de Interferência Ambiental – Enviromental Interference Group. It was formed by a group of friends from the Fine Arts School of Universidade Federal da Bahia and became one of the biggest icons among diverse artist collectives which together have prospered in Brazil since later 20^th century.

In general terms, as a non-nominated movement, more than 50 artist collectives emerged in a direct or indirect resistance posture against a validation system marked by a market of marchands, collectors and institutions responsible for reducing the circulation and overestimating the artist as a remarkable entity of the society.

Inspired by a life experience that surpasses this questioning, most of these artist collectives have elected streets and public spaces as an efficient way of expressing their artistic, ethical, poetic and political aspirations while trying to also break accessibility barriers which the framed art had imposed.

For now I have no room for closely enquiring aspects of all contradictions and paradoxes which permeated the survival of the collectives, but it’s still worth to note how the consolidation¹ of the urban intervention as an artistic language, assumed even on fomentation and circulation edicts, has followed the development of this movement appealing to the collective while making viable large-scale actions from participating on a bigger quantity of agents.

However, the collective action was not necessarily associated to the mass as a participant number in the streets. Assuming the collectiveness meant to be looked as a legitimating group of its own discourse/action that allowed a certain autonomy and secure attitude including the dissolution of an authorship which is focused on the individual whose status quo may be measured and compared. Thus, being connected² and presented as such in the public space involves willpower to cause a destabilizing energy³ of a homogenous and hyper-synchronous⁴ routine in which individual contexts became aesthetically hyper-oriented. Involved in this routine aesthetic – term also used by GIA to describe its works –, artivism and spectacularity presume a new tension reestablishing contradictions inside the collective and the intervention ambit itself. A characteristic style has been established in the urban intervention: a priori any visual surprise or any object/action dislocated from its initial context now complies with the intervention as in a “trick” to the accelerated looking rhythm. Therefore, I wonder: to what extent our strategy hasn’t lost its power as a banalized micro-resistance⁵? While a fleeting happening, how is it possible to minimally make it perpetual in the depth of the accomplices sharing the action? How is it possible to mobilize a rational questioning or an aesthesia⁶ and an inapprehensible uproar through the oral discourse? How to conquer a breach in the sensorial space beyond recognizing the aesthesia? I’ll give you a cookie if you guess it right.

Not in vain, GIA claims to be a group of friends. There are no guarantees of its persistence without the affinity to keep its relationships alive and updated. They live as a group, meet and go different ways with the generosity from the beloved ones. If the music wanders by some and cries out its presence, everybody takes on the samba.

I came to Pelourinho for GIA’s samba on a Thursday feeling anxious and curious. Then I came back home feeling the serenity that makes you walk and sing. The headquarter is situated in a street connecting a big car parking lot and the most popular areas of that tourist point. The passage is guaranteed and the door is always open. For those with affinity, the shifty samba soon becomes a game of joy after taking part in the swing holding a tambourine or a beer offered by a strange. There is no sale or commerce.

The musicians take turns just like the “chipping in” to buy drinks. Like in the old “samba-de-chave” from Bahia on which musicians and dancers pretended to look for a key (“chave” in Portuguese) lost in the middle of the circle of people in order to be substituted, the intermediations are formed without predefined orientation.

Some compositions from the group are already known by the closest ones, like “Cerveja Gia” and “Degrau”, which are sung for motivating and gathering around freshmen in the yard or any eventual passer-by. The powerful lyrics are assured by the common belief that mostly depict and register intervention actions made by GIA mobilizing the audience and merging into other classic Brazilian samba songs from Bahia or Rio de Janeiro.

I never thought about the music as a register of an action. I was intrigued by its posterior comprehension capacity and how it perpetuated itself in my daily life. I woke up singing and even taught a samba: “To whom keeps dreaming, thinking, planning / trying to find a way of changing the situation / enjoying this expanded register, I tell you, my friend, you change opinions / modifying what is beside you, you change the whole world, believe in your actions”⁷.

Not only resistance as a local or national identity, the samba also resounded the urban intervention affected by the swing and the sweat. The rhythm was now influenced by the city life and mixed with collective sensorial experience and reflection becoming a “condition to the other stop simply being an object of projection of predetermined images in order to become a live presence through which we build our territories of existence” ⁸.

***

There are some controversies about the origin of the word samba. Some believe it appeared as a direct reference to some of the many African languages⁹, possibly from quimbundo language in which sam means “to give” and ba means “to receive”. In Brazil the term ”samba” is believed to be a variation of “semba” (“navel-ling”) – a dance consisting of two people banging into each other while jumping and touching their navels in the air.

I feel instigated to imagine the urban intervention happening, or expanding as a matter of fact, while being a description played by two navels in the air. Maybe it is a possibility of keeping the capacity of the action linking the pore to this invisible contact apprehending and keeping us suspended.

I’m not able to determine exactly when the samba in headquarter began. What I know for sure is that I’m waiting for the next time. Let’s dance samba in GIA?