Open Microphone

Abstract

Open Microphone is an art device of soirées that take place in the outskirts of Fortaleza, Ceará – Brazil. This text weaves happening writing drawn from ongoing research with artist collectives that gather at this place, where a politics of re-existence unfolds. There, the words are incorporated, imaged, and transmuted into chanting to echo the State margins and its institutions, modern-colonial-capitalist architectures, beyond the fortresses that tie the politics and the criticism to present-time colonial architecture, linear and repetitive time of necropolitics gears, power fictions which constrain outskirters’ voices. We think of voices not as abstract conceptions or as property of “voice landlords”, the “owners of sense and critics”, who come to “give voice to those forged as others”. This text draws from Poetics of Relation, by Édouard Glissant, from the radicality of fugitive Black performance, the concepts of escrevivência and re-existence, at an atmospheric thought of freedom and imagination. Hence, the text builds crossroads joining arts and the making of a poet-to-be among a sociology that is chant and flight on the marks of a moving land of “in-common” creation.