Art as Breathing

In Brazil we feel breathless. The country has been severely impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic, a disease that can affect people's breathing capacity, and by a brutal increase in the number of fires in the Amazon rainforest -often called the lungs of the world - and in the Pantanal - a natural region encompassing the planet's largest tropical wetland area, with little governmental control. Along with these phenomena, a psychic epidemic of fake news and misinformation took over the country, generating a smoke screen that camouflages the seriousness of the environmental and health crises.

In an atmosphere that suffocates animals, humans and their subjectivities (etymologically psyche - ψυχή - is breath), visual, literary, musical and dance artistic manifestations have emerged. They play a therapeutic role and express, in a compensatory way, a collective need for a civilizing change.

The virtual exhibition Atenção a Tensão (Attention the Tension) created by the artists Henrique Santian and Caio Augusto Ribeiro is based on an understanding of the indigenous myths that have addressed the relationship between humanity and fire since time immemorial. Sentences taken from the poem of this latter artist - ‘fire is made in breath’ and ‘call the shaman to destroy the myths’ - reveal the denunciation, by indigenous communities, of the environmental destruction generated by uncontrolled slash-and-burn practices on their land; their work conveys a message seeking transformation of the myths of contemporary Western civilization. It is important to note that several studies have pointed to deforestation as a cause of the emergence of epidemics on the planet ().

Still within the scope of visual arts, within a large virtual exhibition called Arte como respiro (Art as breathing) (), which inspires the title of this text,