Intervenção JAH
A live performance by Welket Bungué
Synopsis | This intervention is a symbolic walk to exhaustion. The intervention proposes the preliminary warm-up that precedes a fight of titans in a boxing ring. The intervention consists of the movement of the performer sensing the sudden fall when affected by perforations by bullets of semi-automatic weapons.
Black people in Brazil are still more than half of the population of the country. Between 2005 and 2015 the number of black people murdered increased by 18% and this also made us the majority of homicide victims, accounting for 71% of all registered bodies. – in Brazilian Forum of Public Security (2017)
Drama, Video Art – Color, No Dialogues, 16′ Brazil, Guinea-Bissau, 2019
‘Jah Intervention’ is a performance created by Welket Bungué. It is a performance action originated in the case of the Brazilian citizen Cláudia da Silva Ferreira, a resident of the community/favela of Congonhas, in the northern part of Rio de Janeiro, who was fatally shot by PMs on the morning of March 16th, 2014. In an attempt to lend the body of the citizen in disarray, she was taken in the boot of the military police car that unexpectedly ended up opening and causing her body to fall on the asphalt and be dragged for about 250 meters. This performance revives this event in a symbolic way but proposes to bring awareness about the dehumanization and perverse isolation that peripheral communities and their inhabitants (mostly Afro-descendants) are being victimized. On average, an individual with a height of between 1.70m and 1.90m gives about two steps every three meters, which would mean that to walk a space of 250m this same individual would have to give about 357 steps. In ‘Jah Intervention’ the performer proposes himself as a receptacle of lamentations, thoughts, indignations and personal inquiries. The intervention aims at a symbolic walk to exhaustion. The intervention proposes the preliminary warm-up that precedes a fight of titans in a boxing ring. The intervention consists of the movement of the performer sensing the sudden fall when affected by perforations by bullets of semi-automatic weapons.