We are Zumbi
2007-12-07 21:20:00 - by Nicolas Malevé

Found in the blog Critical Spatial Practice, an article about the cartography made by the group Frente 3 de Fevereiro. This group has been created after the death of a young black man, Flávio Sant’Ana, by the São Paulo military police.

Frente 3 de Fevereiro

A few quotes from their manifesto We Are Zumbi: A Cartography of Racism to the Urban Youth

Thus we began our cartography trying to decompose the historical thread that has been rendered “natural” through new social practices. But how are these practices structured? What are the limits of the slave legacy in our quotidian experience? How can we break free from this logic by inscribing other forms of sociability?

Cartography is to us more than a map. It is writing understood in a larger sense, a stance before the world. We are cartographers when we recognize and organize that which instigates us to act, giving us hearing, a voice and form to our anxieties and desires, poetically expressing and inscribing onto reality that which moves us.

Everything that voices the movements of desire, everything that serves to coin expressive material, is welcomed. All entry points are good, so long as there are multiple exits. That way the cartographer uses a variety of sources, not only written or theoretical [...]. The cartographer is a true cultural cannibal: always expropriating, appropriating devouring and giving birth, trans-valuing. The cartographer is always seeking elements/nourishment to compose his/her cartographies

Thanks to Muriel Claeys