Humanizing art: Landless culture was center stage at the 5th Agrarian Reform Fair
The 5th National Agrarian Reform Fair in São Paulo showcased the vibrant cultural expressions of Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (MST) that promote social transformation through culture, music, dance, theater, and art
By Flora Villela/ Text team of the 5th Agrarian Reform Fair*
From Peoples Dispatch
Throughout the entire program of the 5th National Agrarian Reform Fair, those who visited Parque Água Branca in São Paulo were able to learn not only about the products and struggle of the MST, but also about the Landless Rural Workers’ Movement culture, expressed in its most diverse manifestations.
“With the fair, in this cultural dimension, we are showing a country project, a Popular Agrarian Reform project to end hunger, to produce food, to build other relationships with nature, work and between human beings,” highlighted Dandara d’Araçá, from the state directorate of the culture sector for Minas Gerais.
The big shows featured musicians that partnered with the movement and livened up the cultural nights, but the Sem Terra artists were present in all the spaces of the fair, presenting music, dance, theater and visual arts of peasant culture.
The MST’s music group, João do Vale, which brings together Landless Rural Workers’ Movement artists from all over Brazil, kicked off Saturday, waking up the Fair with a beautiful parade. The Pisa Ligeiro carnival group, which uses hoes as a musical instrument, livened up the local cuisine area on Saturday afternoon. The Movement’s cultural events focused on valuing the local popular cultures of each region and preserving traditional artistic knowledge that is threatened by a homogenizing mass culture.
Building bridges between the countryside and the city
According to Dandara, the movement’s project foresees a structural transformation in the way of life and, therefore, in social relations, in the set of values and in culture. “The Fair, as a whole, is a cultural action, since the Popular Agrarian Reform is a cultural project of the MST for society. We understand culture as a way of life, a human production in relation to its environment, culture as work,” says the activist.
For Anderson de Souza, member of the Cândido Portinari visual arts front, culture and art play a fundamental role in building bridges with urban society.
Art helps create these connections, so that people from outside can see that what they are buying here did not fall from the sky and was not easy, it was the result of struggle, organization, and achievement. From the image, built through a political process, of discussion and conversation, it is possible to make others aware of our agenda.”
Another point raised by Dandara is the value of true participation, present in the MST culture, in contrast to the cultural industry that tends to standardize existences and separate individuals into consumer niches. “The MST is organized in this culture of true participation, of different generations and individuals. This also builds a culture that is more diverse: there are no different standards for different individuals, on the contrary, all this diversity that individuals bring to the organization meets and is systematized in what is perhaps a Landless aesthetic.”
Ornamentation
Another element that was present in all the spaces of the fair is the Landless Workers’ decoration, made up of various elements of visual arts produced by the MST cultural collective. The interventions beautify the spaces and demonstrate the diversity of the movement. In addition, the s, flags, banners, pictures, decorations on the stalls, and visual interventions represent issues of struggle such as the internationalist defense of the Palestinian people, the importance of land occupation, and the threat of violence in the countryside.
“We work on form based on content, because art and culture reach our sensibilities in other ways. The idea of this fair is to create, through posters, banners, posters and visual arts, a bridge so that people can perceive the connection between what they are seeing here, the conquest and the process of struggles,” explained Anderson.
In addition to beautifying the various spaces of the Fair, the decoration also included an urban occupation, in partnership with the Tricontinental Institute, based on a projection on the Minhocão. The projected art was produced by men and women of the MST. “The idea is to popularize agrarian reform as a struggle for everyone,” said the member of the visual arts collective.
The Landless artistic identity
“Art is a central dimension as it is very humanizing, the enjoyment, but especially the possibility of producing art. A very important axis of the Popular Agrarian Reform project, and of the Fair itself, is culture as a way of cultivating humanity, other values, other relationships, other beauties, the sensitive dimension of our struggle,” Dandara pointed out.
According to her, the artistic production present in the Movement is part of the construction of identity and belonging of people in the territories. Incorporating its values into cultural work and productions, the MST understands culture as a dimension of material life, which emerges from work, from the ground, from the relationship with the territory.
“The connection of the Landless with the territory and the community comes from the struggle and the desire to return to the land. Often, the people who live on MST encampments or settlements are not originally from there, but at the same time has a deep connection with the land. Every culture that emerges from a territory organized by struggle is a culture of struggle; the characteristic of our artistic production is very much based on this,” reaffirms the coordinator of the culture sector in Minas Gerais.
Therefore, artistic construction in the MST adheres to the values of collectivity, solidarity, and care, in the search to overcome the logic of individualism, and also understands culture as work. This emanates a profoundly collective artistic production, as Anderson exemplifies.
“I can develop an art form, I have my own perspective, but it is enriched by the perspective of others; it is necessary for art to truly contemplate the collective. My hand goes as far as one point, but the other person’s goes further, this empowers us.” In the same sense, he also highlights the relationship with everyday activities: “For example, the mural painting workshop develops alongside the school’s painting.”
A society project
In that way, the Movement’s cultural sector synthesizes the project of society that the MST wants to build: fair, diverse, critical and free, based on a shared sensitivity and the possibility of artistic development for its activists.
“We want each artist to be free to express themselves; we have to encourage this originality. To do this, we created a process where the person, before arriving at the painting, the execution, the creation, establishes the relationship with other people. Because it is my body that will deal with the other’s body, and this body has to be welcomed, this body has to be well,” concluded Dandara.
*This article was first published on the website of the Landless Worker’s Movement (MST) in Portuguese.
