The Farol Journal is a biannual publication of the Graduate Program in Arts at the Federal University of Espírito Santo. As an academic initiative, connected to the field of Arts / Visual Arts, the journal is open to texts that aim to discuss the problem of formation and artistic, critical and historiographic assigned for the visual arts. It also strives to provide research experiences, which are open to the fields of knowledge, between consensus and dissent, in a contemporary context.
The authors of works submitted to Revista Farol authorize their publication in physical and electronic media, solely for academic purposes, and may be reproduced as long as the source is cited. They attest to their originality, authorship and originality.
This article analyzes Hans Haacke's retrospective at SCHIRN Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2024-2025), examining the artist's trajectory as a pioneer of institutional critique. The exhibition demonstrates Haacke's methodological coherence in investigating power structures governing art and society across six decades. The text articulates the main threads of his work – critique of corporate and political power, exposure of institutional mechanisms, historical memory, and democratic accountability. The retrospective reveals both the scope and complexity of a dense, multifaceted oeuvre and the curatorial challenges of synthesizing decades of critical experimentation, exposing tensions between artistic autonomy, market forces, and society.
Copyright (c) 2026 André Arçari https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Farol magazine has established itself as an important instrument for the dissemination of art and culture from a perspective that is believed to resist the crushing influence of dominant discourses and that proposes new readings and new networks of knowledge. The thematic dossier of this edition, Possible Ends: Contemporary Deviations and the Artists of the Common, proposes new readings that, in their convergence, constitute a network of meanings, integrated into a new landscape and the tensions surrounding the "common" in the arts. From reflections on the term itself and its implications in contemporaneity, to expressions that evoke ways of looking; thus, producing and rethinking issues intrinsically linked to the artistic field, opening up to potential dialogues with society.
Copyright (c) 2026 Editoras https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Preserving Institutional Memory Through Photographic Collections
This article aims to highlight the importance of photographic collections as a source of information for the preservation of institutional memory. Specific objectives include: defining memory and institutional memory in the field of Information Science and related areas; examining the history of photography and its aspects as a document of historical value and its relationship with institutional memory in the literature; and presenting the relevance of preserving photographic collections in institutions. Regarding methods, the research is characterized by a qualitative approach and is exploratory in nature, having conducted a literature review. It is concluded that photographic collections are extremely important for the preservation and dissemination of institutional memory, which is also part of the memory of all individuals involved, such as employees, suppliers, and clients. It is also observed that institutions need to pay more attention to the management of photographic collections, especially digital ones, which are often disorganized due to the large number of records. It is estimated that the topic of this article may lead to greater interest in the preservation of institutional photographic collections, resulting in even more careful attention to management and storage issues.
Copyright (c) 2026 Rosa da Penha Ferreira da Costa, Thiago Greggory de Oliveira, Rayra da Silva Föeger, Margarete Farias de Moraes https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article proposes an overview of issues related to the common in the arts, based mainly on the writing *The Society of the Artist: Activism, Death and Memory of Art* by Stéphane Huchet, 2023. Within this context, the article explores issues interconnected with artists-of-the-common and their specificities, such as motivations and strategies, traversing different temporalities and guided by critical thoughts and artistic praxis from different historicist moments in the arts. From a supposed end that can be rethought from the perspective of purposes, to the statutes that define being an artist, especially in contemporary times.
Copyright (c) 2026 Léa Araujo, Angela Grando https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The public space of Brasília's Pilot Plan, created by Lucio Costa, is protected by heritage listing laws that guarantee the preservation of general formal principles in accordance with the modern project. The occupation of this listed space with works of art intensified from the 1980s onwards, when, in addition to works commissioned from modernist artists, the production of street art intensified. In the context of discussions about the end of originality and the unlimited expansion of the repertoire of techniques for creating open-air murals, different modes of occupying the city's walls emerged. Among these, this work distinguishes a group of panels with pictorial qualities, which link them to the field of art history.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elisa de Souza Martinez https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Artistic Activism and the Re-enchantment of the World
This article seeks to offer some reflections, albeit within an initial approach, regarding the activist turn in contemporary art. To this end, it attempts to trace a genealogy that offers a possible interpretation of what has been configured as the production of activist art, especially that which, presenting itself as "community art," seems to displace the artist to a position of laterality. While the assumptions of a portion of modernist art have long proven totally inefficient and inadequate to deal with the complexities and inequalities of the contemporary world, on the other hand, art still seems to seek the tones and measures so that, guaranteeing its permanence and the relevance of the artists, it can speak to and listen to the world in processes of enchantment of art and life.
Copyright (c) 2026 Luiz Sérgio de Oliveira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article addresses the relationship between image and violence, focusing on a specific moment and place associated with trauma and pain. The discussion, which takes as its starting point the image of the implosion of one of the buildings in the Carandiru Complex, refers to the doctoral thesis *A Provisional Poetics and the Aesthetics of Other Emergencies: Collective Tactics to (Dis)inhabit a Women's Prison* and the participatory installation *Neither Does the Ground Lie* (2022-present), created from collaborative processes between the Balcão da Cidadania collective and a group of women deprived of liberty at the Madre Pelletier State Women's Prison (Porto Alegre, RS/Brazil). The theme is approached from the perspective of authors such as Susan Sontag, Suely Rolnik, Sharon Macdonald, Georges Didi-Huberman, Flávio Agostini, and William Logan & Keir Reeves. The writing still retains graphic elements present in the thesis.
Copyright (c) 2026 Márcia Braga https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This work presents an autoethnography of ten years of photographing alongside a transvestite association in the state of Roraima. It aims to describe the trajectory and understand how photography can contribute to visibility, resistance, and aesthetic-political sharing, drawing on reflections by Jacques Rancière and Judith Butler. It concludes by reflecting on the importance of collective practice, aesthetic experimentation, and affection for the improvement of photographic practice and the political struggles for visibility.
Copyright (c) 2026 Elisangela Martins https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Artivism in 21st-Century Russia and the Rhetoric of the Absurd
This article addresses the use of absurdism and irony in the artworks of the historical avant-gardes of Eastern Europe, in their relation to conceptual art developed informally in the Soviet Union and contemporary artivism. The poetics of the absurd appear as important characteristics of contemporary art, in its artivist and actionist aspects, prominent in the Russian art scene in the 21st century. The importance of the artistic work of Dmitri Prigov, a representative of Soviet informal art and Moscow conceptualism, is highlighted; as is Prigov's influence on artistic collectives such as Voina and Pussy Riot, examples of contemporary artivism. Finally, some aspects of the work of artivists such as Katrin Nenacheva and Artyom Loskutov are discussed.
Copyright (c) 2026 Cristina Antonioevna Dunaeva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
By “common,” we usually refer to a type of art distancing artists and the public from the erudite frameworks that have characterized art throughout its history. Revisiting here some brief points from an essay published by the author of this article in 2023 and outlining a reflection on the paradoxes of the concept, I defend the thesis of a “common” whose ideal, sociologically grounded in the idea of ​​proximity to everyday life, also conveys a universalizing vision. The very old concept of sensus communis in Kant allows us to support this thesis, since every “common,” within the aesthetic logic of experience, almost explicitly creates an integrative relationship with the idea of ​​community. Whether micro or macro, the “common” needs to be thought of beyond sociology to affirm its full belonging to the aesthetic game as a potentially unifying mechanism of sensibilities. A supposedly novel category recycles old motivations.
Copyright (c) 2026 Stéphane Huchet https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
“Een merkwaardig misverstand”: Postcolonial reflections on Hoepla
This article is based on a Dutch television event from the 1960s. In a dark humor program, the first nude woman was shown on Dutch television; however, its impact overshadowed the subsequent event, the demonstration of a reality made invisible on Dutch soil: the Moluccans residing in the country. The ignorance and unpreparedness of those involved in the interview, and the surreal nature of the living conditions of Indonesian immigrants after the violent process of Dutch colonization in Indonesia, are discussed. This "event" on the television program Hoepla is developed in the article from the perspective of Ludic Conceptualism, a terminology coined by Dr. Schoenberger and applied to the artistic trend strongly present in the Netherlands between the 1960s and 1970s.
Copyright (c) 2026 Janna Schoenberger https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Copyright (c) 2026 Janna Schoenberger ; Léa Araujo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Mierle Ukeles, maintenance art and the commodity counter-spell
This article presents the works *I Make Maintenance Art One Hour Everyday* and *Touch Sanitation*, by performance artist Mierle Laderman Ukeles. Drawing on contributions from the recent interdisciplinary field of discard studies, I observe that public-private urban cleaning systems have invented for waste the fiction of an impossible "outside," which choreographs the movement of goods, people, machines, and animals through the city. In this sense, and thinking with Ursula Le Guin, I propose Ukeles' maintenance art as a bag of maintenance stories, a counter-spell of the commodity, opening spaces of visibility in the field of arts against the forgetting of throwing away.
Copyright (c) 2026 Ricardo Cabral Pereira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The present text is an exercise in performance writing that traces in its course an account of the failure of two art teachers from the municipal education network of Florianópolis (SC). It is triggered by the writing of Fernand Deligny, memorable for his work in educational centers and for his critique of their imprisonment character. The educator, who accompanied marginalized youth for more than fifty years, thought of education as a way of finding possible ways of living in excluding contexts. Writing with him means making visible the role of writing and reading in critical educational action, as devices of support and care. With Deligny, failure becomes dance.
Copyright (c) 2026 Gabriel Bonfim, Guilherme Bruschi Frizzo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article investigates poetic and political aspects related to the theme of motherhood, situations that arise when inventing oneself as a mother and caregiver through the creation of an artistic work. The text addresses the conception and development of a novel artistic intervention reinventing the minyan; a Jewish ritual marked by male protagonism, referring to the minimum quorum of ten adult Jewish men required for a public prayer. The proposal is to compose a minyan exclusively for women, reinventing and updating traditions, and thereby seeking to find meanings within them linked to contemporary issues. To anchor these approaches, connections are made with Jewish feminism in the work of visual artist Mierle Ukeles and German and Austrian Jewish salonnières, as well as notions proposed by authors Natalie Wichmann and Charlotte Burns.
Copyright (c) 2026 Viviane Gueller https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Genesis and Expansion of Brazilian Artistic Collectivism in the Early 2000s
This article analyzes the genesis and expansion of artistic collectivism in São Paulo in the early 2000s. We seek to understand how collaborative practices, artistic residencies, and activist actions, along with movements fighting for housing rights, shaped new relationships between art and politics. The research is based on documents, artists' accounts, and critical bibliography. We demonstrate how the emerging collectivism established a field of aesthetic and social action that combines aesthetic experimentation and the struggle for rights.
Copyright (c) 2026 Pedro Caetano Eboli Nogueira https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The Casa Río Laboratory and its La Plata Voices Archive
This article analyzes the relationship between art and territory through the work Living Rivers, presented in the exhibition The Earth Will Not Abide (Gallery 400, Chicago, 2017). The study shows how situated artistic practices can make visible socio-environmental conflicts in the Mississippi and La Plata river basins, territories impacted by agribusiness and transnational extractivist dynamics. It argues that Living Rivers, by mobilizing collaborative cartographies and local narratives, operates as a critical device for territorial interpretation. The article also discusses the project’s unfolding in the Casa Río Lab Archive, which consolidates a repertoire of community memory and resistance.
Copyright (c) 2026 Paola Fabres https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This article analyzes the installation Lote Bravo (2005), by the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, created in response to femicides in Ciudad Juárez. The aim is to understand how the artist transforms the materiality of death into a sensitive-political device of memory. The work displaces historically invisible bodies into the space of the common, challenging the naturalization of gender violence. The approach is based on the work of Judith Butler, María Lugones, and Jacques Rancière, and relates concepts such as precariousness, gender coloniality, and the sharing of the sensible. Lote Bravo reconfigures the visibility of precarious lives, converting mourning into a political gesture. Thus, it can be concluded that Margolles' work proposes an aesthetics of memory that challenges the normalization of violence against women in northern Mexico.
Copyright (c) 2026 Sheila Cabo Geraldo, Karenn de Amorim e Souza https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The artwork ¿De qué otra cosa podríamos hablar? Limpieza, by the Mexican artist Teresa Margolles, prompts this art criticism, which attempts to understand the ephemeral and public proposal made in the context of the Venice Biennale (2009). In an open invitation to reflection, this writing organizes the anxieties and ecstasies from the world of contemporary art to the gestures of subjects in the world of social experiences amidst the ballast of violence. To this end, we articulate a multiplicity of voices such as those of Margolles, Medina, Mondzain, Bauman, Danto, with which we believe we make more evident the practices of a singular micropolitics where the facts of art and the morality of the artist act.
Copyright (c) 2026 Bárbara Mol https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Territorial and Programmatic Eccentricity: Three Public Art Programs in Portugal
This article presents three public art programs implemented in Portugal since 2018, located in small towns and rural areas. These are the "Poldra" programs in the city of Viseu, "Desencaminharte" in the Alto Minho region, and "Experimenta Paisagem" in central Portugal. These programs highlight a trend in public art over recent decades and a lineage of international cases, marked by the search for eccentric territories and an approach to the non-urban landscape. Also noteworthy is the connection between these practices and regional and tourism development objectives, as well as a commitment to sustainability, which confirms the multiplicity of actors involved and the social instrumentalization of art in an attempt to meet the interests and needs of the population.
Copyright (c) 2025 Laura Oliveira Castro https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This thematic dossier is linked to the academic debates of the 1st Symposium on Riverside Landscapes, which arose from the need to understand the aesthetic and urban relationships surrounding the development of art and the city in the context of the main cities bordering the rivers, as presented by the main cities of Espírito Santo and our Brazilian, Portuguese, and Spanish partners.
Copyright (c) 2025 José Cirillo https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
It is with great pleasure that we present issue 32 of Farol, a publication that consolidates its position as a vital platform for interdisciplinary reflections on the arts, architecture, urbanism, and political philosophy. This issue, rich in thematic and geographic diversity, offers a thought-provoking overview of contemporary concerns, inviting readers to delve into urgent debates on collective identity, public space, memory, and the complex relationships between society and the environment.
Copyright (c) 2025 Editores https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
We, singular plural (fragments of a conversation)
This philosophical essay examines the problematic nature of the pronoun "We" as a contested political and ontological concept. Drawing on Jean-Luc Nancy's notion of "singular plural," the text critiques fixed collective identities (national, ethnic, or ideological) as reductive and exclusionary. It explores the tension between the need for community articulation for political agency and the risks of homogenization, highlighting how "We" oscillates between emancipatory potential and coercive appropriation. Contemporary thinkers such as Judith Butler, Tristan Garcia, and ecological theorists (e.g., Baptiste Morizot) inform discussions of fluid collectives, intersectionality, and nonhuman alliances. The author advocates for "We" as an open and procedural practice—anchored in shared action, not identity—to navigate fragmented public spheres, ecological interdependence, and ethical responsibility in the face of polarization.
Copyright (c) 2025 Rodrigo Rebelo Silva https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
This is not about women: “Same Old West”
This article critically analyzes the dynamics of hegemonic masculinity in the film "Same Old West" (2024), connecting them with debates on necropolitics (Mbembe), necrobiopower (Bento), and gender decolonization (Preciado). It demonstrates how male violence operates as a self-destructive ritual in the face of an inability to process emotions and sustains micro-sovereignties over life and death. Blaming women for male suffering is identified as a structuring axis, linked to anti-gender discourses that idealize a patriarchal past. We conclude that the film exposes the crisis of masculinity as a necropolitical phenomenon, in light of which we can propose the deconstruction of binaries and the adoption of dissident epistemologies to overcome gender hierarchies.
Copyright (c) 2025 Alana de Oliveira Ferreira, Fabiana Pedroni https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Essay on a Seaside Enclosure: Transformative Processes of Urban Form and Life
This essay links urban history studies to the oldest port sector in the city of Vitória, in the capital's historic center. It presents, from a historical perspective, iconographic documentation on the area's transformative processes, divided into periods from colonial Brazil to the 21st century. Considered morphological elements of the city, the delimited enclosure comprised of the edges of Vitória Bay, Oito de Setembro Square, and Vitória Commercial Wharf highlights changes in urban form over time, inextricably linked to the seaside boundary and local ways of life.
Copyright (c) 2025 Martha Machado Campos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
The construction of a system of open spaces for Colatina, ES
This article presents the results of descriptive and analytical research on the open space system in the municipality of Colatina, Espírito Santo, focusing on the relationship between the distribution, type, and quantity of open spaces in the territory, territorial planning, and the ecological potential for connecting these spaces. The issues raised by the research are linked to the way open spaces are addressed in urban planning legislation and how the creation of a system could improve the quality of the urban environment. Based on the principles of landscape ecology, the study suggests a methodology for classifying open spaces and creating a system that prioritizes connections between open spaces, stimulates ecological flow and ecosystem recovery, and contributes to the improvement of the urban environment.
Copyright (c) 2025 Renata Mattos Simões, Eneida Maria Souza Mendonça https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Back to Tlalocan: deities, activism and ancestral symbols of water in Mesoamerican art today
This text proposes a reflection on the reactivation of ancestral knowledge, especially of Mexica origin, related to water—a central element in Indigenous worldviews—based on some contemporary art and architecture proposals developed in the Mesoamerican region, with a focus on Mexico. These works evoke aquatic deities and ancient sustainable technologies, establishing dialogues with contemporary climate and Indigenous activism. The research seeks connections between works that incorporate symbols, myths, and traditional techniques as a way of denouncing environmental issues. To this end, it adopts analytical tools from postcolonial, feminist, and visual studies. These approaches are grounded in historical and cultural references from the original civilizations, expanding the understanding of creative processes and their social and ecological repercussions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Renata Ribeiro dos Santos https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
Liquid Horizons: Public Art and Cultural Transformation on the Margins
This article proposes a reflection on contemporary public art in river and coastal territories, based on three axes: sensitive cartographies of the margins; underwater installations and relational art; and the monument as a symbolic gesture in the face of climate change. Emblematic works are analyzed, such as Roberto Burle Marx's Copacabana Sidewalk; Mark Manders's Fragment of a Living Room Reduced to 88% (2001); Christo and Jeanne-Claude's floating walkways; and Jason deCaires Taylor's underwater museums. These experiences are complemented by the installation COP 30: The Future in Suspension, by the researcher, conceived as situated public art sensitive to environmental urgency. In all these works, art emerges as an aesthetic-political device that reinscribes meanings in the territories of the margins—marine or river—activating memories, affections, and possibilities for re-enchanting the world. By engaging the body and the collective, these artistic practices expand the symbolic field of public space and contribute to imagining new pacts between society and nature.
Copyright (c) 2025 Giovana Aparecida Zimermann Zimermann https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0
By the Bank: A Reflection on the Riverbanks and Love Letters to the Rio Doce
This text discusses the impact of the 2015 Samarco dam collapse (MG) on the Rio Doce, highlighting the environmental and social devastation resulting from contamination by mining waste. The riverside landscape, once marked by affection and subsistence, has become a diseased ecosystem, rendering traditional activities unviable and contaminating water resources. It also addresses the artistic project "Monuments of Love to the Rio Doce" (2018-2020), led by Piatan Lube, who collected letters from affected communities in Espírito Santo. The initiative uses art as activism to denounce environmental crime and recover collective memories, redefining the relationship between culture, nature, and resistance.