MOVING BEINGS - MIS COLLECTION

“Is it up to the artist to anticipate the future?” “Have you ever tried to grasp the multitude of information that is being lost due to the lack of an archive?” “How to explain the Museu da Imagem e do Som?” The future heralded by the film Nasce o MIS [The MIS is born], directed by Eduardo Leone, has come for all who, in 1970, embraced the mission of making documentary records of the unavoidable transformation processes going on in Brazilian culture and society. It is important to remember that today is also the future of all those who the Museum wanted to address: the housewife, the artist, the children, the secretary, the mechanic, and others who are repeatedly present throughout the short film. We are about to enter the second decade of the 21st century. This force full of desire for recording and sharing perceptions and experiences that moved many of the cultural projects implemented by the Museum provided the displacement of its protagonists, resulting in works that brought people, places, and things closer together.

Gradually, MIS’s Photography Collection intentionally and authorially built its collections with the generous participation of those who allowed themselves to be captured and the bold work of photographers who were interested in registering and making public what which had moved them—a word that indicates the power that some situations have in engaging the feeling of empathy that brings us closer to that which renovates our worldviews. In this context of ideas, the exhibition Moving Beings presents itself as the result of an exercise of poetic investigation in the Museum’s collection, seeking photographs on situations of displacement and itinerant work across different professional occupations. The word moventes [moving beings] encompasses varied meanings surrounding the quality of that which moves, of being “a moving entity” and, in linked gestures, can move other entities. In the photographs and films that make up the exhibition, we can find rural workers, grocers, truck drivers, porters, circus performers, street vendors, human billboards, wagoners, and many others. They present themselves to the public gaze as mirrors as well as flashbacks of fragments of human survival, with the implications and subtleties of everyday processes. The exhibition also shows children, young people, adults, and the elderly who were—or perhaps still are—daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, loved or disliked by others.

What we don’t see in the images are the ones behind the lenses, showing us with their records how they saw everything they found along the way. The photographs and films that make up Moventes evoke the countless Sisyphi and Phoenixes that create and recreate movements, displacements, and gestures that demand endless efforts on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels, giving rise to life-death-life cycles. By living, humans build meaning and value for the cycles of life from the apparent banality of existence, consuming, in pain and pleasure, the potency of their own bodies, one day at a time. We must not forget that everything we perceive in the images can reveal to us our ideologies and worldviews. In this sense, the exhibition’s interest lies in sharing some of the ways photography shapes everyday displacements, often unnoticed and therefore invisible—waiting for someone to catch a glimpse and bring them into existence as narrative potency. Precisely like the many photographers whose works are part of the MIS collection have achieved with precision and poetry—whether it’s those who have been here before us, the many who are with us, or the ones who are yet to arrive after we are gone. Like all of them, we perpetuate the movement of shaping and predicting the future. With actions and worldviews. Valquíria Prates Curator

The Names of Things Are Helena Tassara, Pedro Ribeiro, Denise Abrantes, Rogério Correa da Silva, Marcio Mazza, and Samuel Moreira meeting people in Tabocas (SP) and São Paulo.   What do
children know?

What do adults fear?

Situations, worldviews, ideas, and ideologies.

Children know how to wait. They believe.

They interpret what is lived.

Adults can measure displacements in units of
time and space.

What moves the freedoms of those who are free
and their displacements?

What does a photograph inside another celebrate?