Molecular Revolution in Brazil

Yes, I believe that there is a multiple people, a people of mutants, a people of potentialities that appears and disappears, that is embodied in social, literary, and musical events.... I think that we're in a period of productivity, proliferation, creation, utterly fabulous revolutions from the viewpoint of this emergence of a people. That's molecular revolution: it isn't a slogan or a program, it's something that I feel, that I live....
—from Molecular Revolution in Brazil

Following Brazil's first democratic election after two decades of military dictatorship, French philosopher Felix Guattari traveled through Brazil in 1982 with Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik and discovered an exciting, new political vitality. In the infancy of its new republic, Brazil was moving against traditional hierarchies of control and totalitarian regimes and founding a revolution of ideas and politics. Molecular Revolution in Brazil documents the conversations, discussions, and debates that arose during the trip, including a dialogue between Guattari and Brazil's future President Luis Ignacia Lula da Silva, then a young gubernatorial candidate. Through these exchanges, Guattari cuts through to the shadowy practices of globalization gone awry and boldly charts a revolution in practice.

Assembled and edited by Rolnik, Molecular Revolution in Brazil is organized thematically; aphoristic at times, it presents a lesser-known, more overtly political aspect of Guattari's work. Originally published in Brazil in 1986 as Micropolitica: Cartografias do desejo, the book became a crucial reference for political movements in Brazil in the 1980s and 1990s. It now provides English-speaking readers with an invaluable picture of the radical thought and optimism that lies at the root of Lula's Brazil.

Multitudes: A Platform for the Fragile, the Uncertain and the Provisional

                                          The Otolith Group, "Hydra Decapita", still.

MULTITUDES:

Multitudes was founded by members of The Otolith Group in 1998; it is dedicated to the distribution of alternative networks of information on art, culture, tactical media, politics informed by the multiple perspectives of the Global South.

Multitudes contributes to contemporary modes of knowledge production that demands a critical engagement with the political and cultural conditions of the present thereby affirming the potential of intervention within the disorientations of the now.

We offer essays and articles that critique neoliberalism as a global reassertion of class power that operates through the deregulation and privatization of the world's resources, leading to the impoverishment of the majority of the world's people and the simultaneous escalation of racism and nationalism across the globe.

These political and economic modes of power create impossible conditions for life. Multitudes offers a platform for the fragile, the uncertain and the provisional; it provides a space in which questions of race, class, gender and technology can be complicated, reformulated, reimagined and reenvisioned.

The Otolith Group was founded in 2002. Based in London, their work engages with archival materials, with futurity and with the histories of the transnational. The Group sees its work as a series of explorations with image, sound, text, objects and curation that observe different affective and aesthetic registers, allowing for questions of location and disorientation and creating platforms for discussion on contemporary art practice.

Multitudes used to exist on a private list before it was moved onto Yahoo. It will move again soon and evolve to be a more detailed and participatory platform. (Source: otolithgroup.org)

On Horizons: Art and Political Imagination

Watch the video recordings of the 2nd FORMER WEST Research Congress here