“É uma forma de contar que a gente existe”: arte e re-existência no Festival das Juventudes do Grande Bom Jardim

Abstract

Fortaleza is one of the Brazilian capitals with the highest rates of Lethal and Intentional Violent Crimes (livc) against adolescents and youth. This problem marks the daily lives of peripheral youth, amidst transformations in criminal dynamics, dismantling of social policies and the intensification of security and punitive-penal devices stigmatizing such youth. In contrast to this scenario, cultural practices have been produced by young people in these territorialities in order to, through art, not only denounce these logics and fight for recognition, but also to rewrite their trajectories and juvenile experiences. One of these cultural practices is the Festival das Juventudes, which takes place in the territory of Grande Bom Jardim (GBJ), in Fortaleza-CE. Considering the context of artistic insurgencies in Fortaleza, this research seeks to map, within the scope of the Festival das Juventudes, how young people narrate experiences of violence and re-existence in the territory of GBJ through art. As specific objectives, we have: 1) Reflect with young people from youth groups in the territory of GBJ on the art produced in the peripheries, taking as an analyzer the Festival das Juventudes, its organizational process and its incidence in the territory; 2) Reflect that (d)enunciative effects of violence against young people are produced from the work with art, within the scope of the Festival das Juventudes; 3) Problematize how participants of the Festival das Juventudes give visibility, through art, to the potentialities of their territories. Theoretical references from the field of Social Psychology and related areas are used to think about the relationship between art, youth, territoriality, violence and re-existence. The proposal is guided by the perspective of research-intervention and has as methodological strategies the collaboration with the IV and V Festival das Juventudes and the realization of semi-structured interviews with young people who participate in the organizing committee of the event. The data analysis will be based on scenes and episodes that analyse the moments of the Festival, recorded with the help of field diaries, and the narratives produced in the context of the interviews. It is hoped, with this research, to collaborate with the visibility of trajectories, experiences and struggles for recognition and practices of reinvention of self on the part of young people in peripheral urban territorialities, producing a research implicated with social transformation and that is constructed by knowledge composed of multiple voices.