Banca de DEFESA: SIMONE REQUIÃO

CARTOGRAPHY OF MEMORIES IN PRISON AND IN OTHER TOTAL INSTITUTIONS.

Prisons, Aesthetic Processes, Theater of the Oppressed, Theater of the Oppressed, Cartography.

The present thesis traces the memory of the experiences and choices of doing theater in the custody and prison system. It is divided into introductory axes, five Pathways and the sharing of my conclusion and final thoughts. The axes bring support and structure to the thesis in the sense of presenting the author, explaining the desire to research and how the procedures of the paths followed were organized. Still on the axes, facts that happened in the external and internal world during the writing of the thesis were contextualized, because it makes perfect sense as an apprentice cartographer and researcher/inventor to explain the influences, the “perfectos” and “afectos” in which the research is implied. In terms of procedures, the proposal was to map the memory and materialize it in writing.
The clues were the drivers of the process, they are part of the experiences over these almost fourteen years doing theater in prison. The rhizomatic procedures were compasses that negotiated the desires and needs of the path, so I took the Aesthetics of the Oppressed and the Oppressed as “South” as a principle. I named devices, lines of flight, which made it possible to invent and reinvent creative powers within prison, to release thinking and creative doing. The Images/generators and the Narratives/generators made it possible to follow the traces during the writing of the thesis and, at the same time, are part of the triggering power of scenic creation and possibilities of reinventing life, whether through minority narratives, dreams, or even letters.
I attribute to the dramaturgism of coexistence the possibility of creating fissures in the scene and in real life. The five Pathways are independent and each one of them tells the experiences of how we made theater and the creation processes in total institutions, in different periods and contexts. These Pathways took place at the Custody and Treatment Hospital, Jequié Penal Complex, an Experience in Córdoba - AR and at the Female Penal Complex at different times, as those are the places where my encounters with creation still take place. Finally, I share the main idea of the thesis and try to ground the learnings from this experience, as they do not cease, they continue with each reading and rereading that I do, and with each new clue that materializes in the memory/body. Exactly for this reason they are not conclusive, but alternatives to a conclusion.
Regarding the problem of the thesis, the tools that were pursued during the journey, I can say that each Pathway has its own, but the stumbling block, the one that made me look for alternative routes externally and internally, was trying to discover, verify, or even affirming the possibilities of human inventiveness/creativity even in adverse situations, of how to maintain ethical, social and political commitment and transform hard lines into becoming, of transgressing the harshness of prison with art, of fighting against hegemonic thoughts by experimenting with ethical and aesthetic alternatives.