Arte e Educação - Fundação Bienal do Mercosul

elationship between the productions of the
mentally ill displayed in a communication
medium (which is not to generalise here, but rather
recognise some aspects that do not vary) and the
forms of deconstruction in the social web. Our
xenophobic, excluding, discriminatory conduct
forms part of the aim of deconstructing, in the
sense that “this” speaks. Deconstruction would be
to create silence so that difficulty can speak. We are
not concerned with raising anyone’s awareness; we
do not believe that to be education in the sense of
the enlightened avant-garde.
As people involved in this pathway of constructing
ties and health, we do not know the truth, or rather
do not hold the truth, nor embody it as a
normalising dimension. Diagnosed people take the
word and the communicators, people running
radio spaces in the community, “make room” or
“no-room”, in the first act of solidarity inclusion.
The media provide the opportunity not just to
listen to the words of excluded minorities, but also
to listen to the reason/unreason of our conduct
and thoughts. These are opportunities not just to
discuss “madness”, but also the fears associated with
it, the fantasies that support it, the projections of
others in questioning the human: ways of making
room for the collective community’s desired
communication, not just to speak, but to do, to
construct, question their knowledge, their pursuits,
their creative capacities etc. These ways are used to
produce spaces of health, to encourage its being
approached through connecting feelings.
Is “difference” the threat that reveals the frailty of
the being? Is the being structurally called to wear
clothing to give it the illusion of substantiality?
Mental illness that fails in function reminds us of
this frailty, and suffers more than its own flesh.
I am talking of a functional relationship between
the aesthetic-discursive production of a group of
people, most diagnosed with mental illness, and
the task of deconstructing imaginary social
formations, and I believe perhaps going down as
far as the “underlying matrix” of the nature of myth.
Would these productions, the productions of “the
person speaking” in this case, give an account of
the “underlying geological layers at their points of
failure” within our culture? I mean that in “the
person speaking” termed Mentally ill some of those
underlying “cultural matrices” may be the “word”
at its point of “weakness” or insistence.
Something would exist in those “sayings”,
something in that rhythm, in that “aesthetic
configuration” that is contained in the plastic-sound
installation which, taken to the heart of the
community through the re-transmission
mechanism, perhaps does not just speak of itself,
but of everyone, or of some others. Difference,
then, as an unequalising dimension.
I believe that mental illnesses, in its mechanism of
discursive production, inviting the obvious to be
reconsidered, stumbling on what is naturalised or
established, would signify that “being broken by
our forgotten step” [quedar roto de nuestro paso
olvidado] which the poet Miguel Abuelo spoke
of. I repeat, they stumble, on what has been
established or naturalised, deconstructing,
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