POSTER

O BRANCO DOMÍNIO DA TERRA

(THE WHITE DOMINION OF EARTH)

{ the graphia in this text

is a nod to Glauberian EZTETYKA

and a gesture to the theatricality of the coloured texts

written by José Celso Martinez Corrêa,

co-founder of Teat(r)o Oficina;

Glauber Rocha and Zé Celso, both honoured

in Antropocénica 3 }

Kinema Scene: the Investor Herald lands in this New World and thus bellows (brama)*: — Eu vim para trazer a Paz! Não para trazer a Vitória! A Paz Mundial, a Paz Universal! Com o Ouro desta cidade… Gold! Gold! My name is GOLD! ** [Maurício do Valle as John Brahms in A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth), by Glauber Rocha]. Much Gold comes from illegal, clandestine activity, in the multiple mining sites devouring the Forest: they contaminate rivers with mercury, invade Indigenous Lands. There is a variety of Gold throughout the World, for example (and perhaps the most coveted), Black Gold... It is still exploited, with growing vigour (capitalists ignore Climate Change), such as the desired oil exploration at the mouth of the Amazon.

The Techno-Sphera is the Urban Planet, whose history reveals itself through colonial dominion, with roots penetrating the memory of civilisations, when extractivism—of materials and of beings—was exercised as an essential factor for power concentrated in the hands of warrior elites of divinised sovereigns: war and civilisation walk together [Lewis Mumford]. But in the Modern Age, the Age of the Earth is compressed by the epoch of ruin production: time is the instant [Paul Virilio], the non-time of illusory spectacular life [Guy Debord] experienced in all those non-places of the contemporary hegemonic urban landscape.

In this epoch, extractivism is total: everything is devoured, consumption is complete. The clock regulates the rhythm, devours time: the hands turn, the machine's propeller wounds. Earth subjected to omnipresent capitalism reproduces the incessant turning of the millstone, machinic symbol, wheel-gear of the Progress of Order that marches and activates the technical mechanism of the global mill️, deepening the ABY$MO, in the same rotation of the drill.

The Geo-Necro-Politics of the current SY$TEM is exercised through multiple forms, amongst them, wars, with figureheads supported (and promoted) by Nuclear Capitalist Powers. In the history of global hypocrisy amongst nations, the chapter of the Zionist genocidal war in Palestine reveals the tragic execution of this politics.

Gaia is enveloped in Trance provoked by the might of White Imperialist Elites, global predators. Remember the empires of Christendom ♁ expanding in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, elites inheriting ancient patriarchal culture. The image was constructed from a fragment of a sixteenth-century painting by Andrea del Sarto (c. 1528): extracted from its original sacred imaginary, the fragment assumes another meaning in the art elaborated for this poster, to denounce the physical and symbolic violence of colonising faith's propagation, an instrument that acted as moral sanction for the historical extractivist slave-holding process, which subjected diverse ethnicities to the mercantile-colonial Christian civilisation of expanding European empires, inaugurating the Modern Age; and also denounces, in the present time, the Christian nationalism of the warmongering far-right, with its theology of dominion, whose ideal imaginary envisages establishing something like Gilead [Margaret Atwood]. The hands represent, in this visual art, three distinct generations, suggestive image of succession, continuity, reproduction of power: masculine hands, allegory of violating patriarchy, which dominates and enslaves; power that envelops the Earth.

The graphic piece, provocative, was imagined as a synthesis of multiple forms of violence, such as that which devours Woman: to exercise dominion, the predators who establish the supremacist Machosphera act to maintain inequality, aim to submit and render invisible the Feminine. Black Colour: the enslaved human beings, called Negros da Terra (Blacks of the Land) in colonial documents from Brazil, were all marginalised in the devastating and most violent process that framed life within brutal extractivism. PREDATORY SY$TEM: the history of capitalist exploitation is the history of subjugating and enslaving beings.

The Sphera TƎRRÆ was scrutinised, measured, expressed in the planisphere, in technical drawing of the World Map, just as everything was subjected to human measure-will: Vitruvian Man [De Architectura Libri Decem, by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio], as represented in Leonardo's celebrated drawing. Delirious nationalist-racist-supremacists subjugated diverse ethnicities, who were subjected to the most varied 4N7HROPØMƎ7R1C measurements, principally of skulls: each "collected specimen" constitutes the memory of colonial violence 💀.

The image is revealing of the dominating patriarchy of the Great Blue Sphera (our collective K✺SMIK dwelling), possessor, violator of its riches, of its inhabitants: the golden CRUX (GOLD!) marks the dominion exercised through Iron, Fire, Blood & SYmbols, over all beings, human and non-human. God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun beneath the Anthropocene. Human Being: plural character, protagonist of its own drama, ambivalent, ambiguous subject, creator and destroyer, who elaborates and interacts in its own scene. The Titãs sing: — Ninguém sabe falar Esperanto / Miséria é miséria em qualquer canto / A morte não causa mais espanto / O sol não causa mais espanto / Miséria é miséria em qualquer canto***. Make Art, Not Wars. I was a bassist in a rock band in the '90s: after a long time, I heard ☾ NOTURNA [my music, Piu's lyrics, PB's arrangement]: — Qualquer outra noite vai passar / Lindo dirigível de ilusões / Vai preencher seu céu / Aquecer seu mar / Vai dar vida a tudo o que sonhar...**** The music speaks of the common individual-being, typically exploited in contemporary society, oppressed by the SY$TEM, who confronts the emptiness of disenchantment: to (sur)vive, without time for dreams, today chases money.

Glimpsed at a glance, the image suggests a solar symbol… Recalls Corisco staring at us with his dagger forward [the cangaceiro portrayed by Othon Bastos, on Rogério Duarte's poster for Glauber's film]. But it is fire on Earth. The Pyrocene, another neologism, in resonance with others that seek to comprehend the new epoch. Red Colour: incendiary scenes, blood. The tragedy of sustaining capitalism's mantra of Economic Growth reveals itself anywhere: glacial melting, warm oceans, flooded territories, recent deserts where forests once existed, which were burned. The rays are scythes. The scythes symbolise the harvesters of the poisoned transgenic industry of Agro is Pop. They here symbolise violence and death. But might they also be scythes symbolising the memory of peasant resistance? How to struggle in the world of    White  Dominion    ?

The Rayed Crown of (White) Liberty is Neoliberal Imperialist Military, devourer of Earth. Still at a glance, the image suggests a VORTEX: — É a Cloaca do Universo! Nós estamos condenados, as nossas estruturas foram destruídas, os nossos alicerces foram abalados! Houve uma implosão atômica no Centro da Terra! Uma Guerra entre seres desconhecidos. A qualquer momento poderemos ser tragados pelo ABY$MO***** [Tarcísio Meira as Military Christ in A Idade da Terra (The Age of the Earth)].

Metallurgy is a revolutionary symbol of civilisation: the improved plough, the scythe, the sword, the lance, the coin. Electronics elevated human potential. The Elite-Elect wants to colonise other Spheras: for this it perfected the missile and thus built the space rocket. Robotics and telematics expanded horizons, but the instantaneity of networks imprisoned the human in the ELEKTRONIK SCREEN.

Expanded city, METROPOLIS is the revealing image of the process that consubstantiates the Planet-Urb. The CITY is the greatest artefact socially constructed by humans: urban culture is civilisational climax. The founding risco (trace)******, as the erudite architect said, "nasceu do gesto primário de quem assinala um lugar ou dele toma posse: dois eixos cruzando-se em ângulo reto, ou seja, o próprio sinal da cruz (was born from the primordial gesture of one who marks a place or takes possession of it: two axes crossing at right angles, that is, the very sign of the cross)" [Lúcio Costa in his Memória Descritiva do Plano Piloto de Brasília (Descriptive Memorial of Brasília's Pilot Plan)]. Contemporary urban life mode is voracious: artificialised environment to the extreme, the city expands, highly polluting, with impacts transcending borders. This mode expresses the benefit of very few, at the cost of multitudes' poverty: — For 500 years my slaves have been building this Pyramid; — In truth what exists is the Rich World and the Poor World [Maurício do Valle as John Brahms; and Glauber Rocha, both in The Age of the Earth]. In time, an exemplary synthesis: "the society that shapes everything around it has constructed a special technique for acting upon what sustains these tasks: the territory itself. Urbanism is capitalism's taking possession of the natural and human environment which, in developing its logic of absolute domination, can and must now remake the totality of space as its own scenery" [Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle, Thesis 169, my emphasis].

Whilst such ideas move towards the composition of human art—conceived by this writer here, there is no use whatsoever of AI algorithms celebrated by multiple variants of 7R4N5UM4N1$7 religion—two colours, used in the flag of that violent and shadowy ideology, assume themselves here as historical memory of fascist genocidal violence, but, above all, as potency of Struggle against the same supremacist, racial, nationalist delirium, against the genocidal agents and promoters of beings' extermination and Earth's devouring: the Urucum and Jenipapo of indigenous body painting are colours that, in this piece of graphik art, represent the Struggle against the faithful adherents of the White Dominion of Earth, who advance with total extractivism; Struggle that strengthens alongside the centuries-old Struggle of Original Peoples and all oppressed Peoples-Beings. Together we affirm they SHALL NOT PASS.

Itanhaém (ancient colonial village on the southern Atlantic shore of Brazil)

1 October 2024

Silvio Luiz Cordeiro

* In the original Portuguese text, there is a wordplay between the conjugation of the verb bramar (to bellow/roar) and the character's name John Brahms, untranslatable in English.

**  — I came to bring Peace! Not to bring Victory! World Peace, Universal Peace! With the Gold of this city… Gold! Gold! My name is GOLD!

*** — Nobody knows how to speak Esperanto / Misery is misery anywhere / Death no longer causes alarm / The sun no longer causes alarm / Misery is misery anywhere. Miséria (Misery), music by Arnaldo Antunes, Paulo Miklos and Sérgio Britto on the Titãs album titled Õ Blésq Blom (1989), expression in language invented by Mauro, repentista in Recife (Pernambuco, Brazil), northeastern singer alongside his partner Quitéria. As Branco Mello, the band's vocalist, reveals, in his words during a rehearsal at Rádio Transamérica in São Paulo, broadcast by TV Cultura to promote the newly released album at the time: — Eu fiquei sabendo que o Mauro, que é o autor dessa frase, um cara que faz rock and roll lá na Praia da Boa Viagem, ele falou que Õ Blésq Blom é "os antigos seres que andavam pela Terra, os primeiros seres que caminhavam pelo Planeta"; isso é Õ Blésq Blom (I learned that Mauro, who is the author of that phrase, a guy who makes rock and roll there at Boa Viagem Beach, he said that Õ Blésq Blom is "the ancient beings who walked the Earth, the first beings who walked the Planet"; that's Õ Blésq Blom).

**** — Any other night will pass / Beautiful airship of illusions / Will fill your sky / Warm your sea / Will give life to all you dream.

***** — It's the Universe's Sewer! We are condemned, our structures have been destroyed, our foundations have been shaken! There was an atomic implosion at the Centre of the Earth! A War between unknown beings. At any moment we could be swallowed by the Abyss.

****** In Portuguese, the word "risco" means both line / trace (as drawing) and "risk" (as danger), an untranslatable double meaning evoking both the act of drawing and the peril inherent in founding gestures.