Cibele Lucena and Joana Zatz Mussi share the start and experiences of Grupo Contrafilé. Collaborating with different institutions, but maneuvering autonomously they generate pedagogical devices within institutional spaces and contexts, actively engaging in decolonial pedagogical methodologies.

From the Archive re-surfaces pieces that have previously been published as part of Urgent Pedagogies Issues.

Action from The Children’s Rebellion project, started in 2005 in São Paulo. Photo: Collection Contrafilé Group

A pedagogy for decolonizing life

Cibele Lucena and Joana Zatz Mussi

“The self-invention of a space, a time and a political body – individual and collective – had to do with the invention of the means by which we started to be able to talk about certain things, always asking ourselves what we are doing, how, why, with whom and where. None of this involves easy answers, precisely because it results from an existential proposal in which everything is yet to be created.”

Grupo Contrafilé (Contrafilé Group) was formed in the early 2000s in São Paulo, Brazil. At the time, we were a group of students and needed to create a collective space for action and thinking, different from what was offered to us by the logic of the labor market, structured by the idea of ​​individual careers. We envisioned the creation of a collaborative, shared space, a place of existence.

As students, we always heard the questions: what will you do with your life? Where do you intend to work? It was even more difficult for outsiders to glimpse the density and permanence of this collective experience, and to believe that it was not just a set of occasional meetings between friends, to make “protests”. In this sense, the group as a living space was a true invention. It started with the urgency of being together to act on certain social situations that were present, and it developed as an awareness of how much it could transform both ourselves and reality. In this process, we created our own ways of doing and saying spaces and times that could only exist through a collective body.

One of the first situations we dealt with was the perception, physically, of an emptying of public space. We were still very close to the end of the civil-military dictatorship that took over the country from 1964 to 1985. When we started to deal more deeply with this emptiness, we met the thinker Suely Rolnik[1]. Rolnik taught us to always be attentive to the simultaneous relationship between micro and macro politics. And it was with this learning that we realized that our fear of going out into the social space, of confronting the public space, was directly linked to the fact that we are “children of the dictatorship”.

This fear was – and still is – very present in urban territories, embodied in the figure of the Brazilian “Military Police”. With one of the highest killing rates in the world, the Brazilian Military Police targets mainly young and black people who live in the peripheries of large cities. Taking this into account, the first exercises we did as a group were very much related to an awareness of how such a context is established in our own bodies, in the form of a fear of manifesting/expressing oneself.

Our first public action took place when we were part of the MICO group[2], in April 2000, at the exhibition Brasil + 500 – Mostra do Redescobrimento (Brazil + 500 – Exhibition of the Re-Discovery). The latter celebrated the 500th anniversary of Brazil based on a false subversion of the idea of ​​“discovery”[3]. The exhibition´s title addressed itself as an act of “rediscovery”. In order to do that though, it would be imperative to directly mention and take a stand against the continued genocide and slavery of indigenous and African peoples in the Americas. The action started during the assembly of the exhibition, when young people who were preparing to work as educators noticed several “inconsistencies” in the event.