Artistic productions are devices in the meaning-making process of the world — through them is possible to enliven a symbolic circulation capable of representing and announcing meanings and values, in agreement or coalition, that move imaginaries and build realities.
A festival such as Mix Brasil Festival of Cultural Diversity presents itself as an exemplary platform in this regard — with cinema at first, and currently including other cultural languages like theater, music and literature, stimulating a network of committed actions in listening to and sharing discourses that reaffirm sexual and gender diversity and the human rights.
Permeable and in dialogue with intersectional social movements, it acts from a vital premise: to understand art as a way of materializing conflicting narratives — whether respecting the gradual increase of letters in the LGBTQIA+ acronym or the creation of words seeking to give names to individuals and subjectivities, or through effective, critical and politicized representations that contibutes to the creation of imagetic fields capable of recovering the complexities of these life experiences and corporealities always sidelined. Being so, it’s a collective effort to struggle against the politics of forgetfulness: violence promoting, for instance, the absence of representations and memories. Therefore, this act is organized as a powerful creation of spaces, of networks of affection for and with the LGBTQIA+ communities.
Enduring and traditional in the city of São Paulo, in this edition, the initiative asserts itself as a democratic stage for the cinema — the emerging as well as the established one, the national besides the international one —, with a wide-ranging program contextualized to our age.
The perception that the cultural action can move the real in a subjective and material way leads the work developed by Sesc, which get close to Mix Brasil Festival values. Both institutions have as a horizon and daily practice the promotion of the national art, as well as the stimulus to situations of respectful life experiences, and the building of imaginaries which are propellers of life and dignity to the diversity of people.
Danilo Santos de Miranda — Sesc São Paulo Director
October 20th, 2023