Teatro Cine Jandaia

The Teatro Cine Jandaia is a cinema in decay. This space inherited its position on the earth, separated from the water of the existing river that runs below it from a long history of enclosure. Dutch settlers dammed the Rio das Tripas at two locations in order to create a deep moat at the eastern edge of Salvador, used for defense. The Portuguese later built walls around the dammed river’s banks, separating inside from outside, positioning this territory to be that of the other. Governor José Joaquim Seabra moved the Rio das Tripas below ground to improve urban hygiene and sanitation, widening and straightening Rua da Vala and installing a tram. Baixa dos Sapateiros became a tight commercial corridor. In 1931, Jao Oliveira financed the theater with the wealth accumulated through land holdings in warehouses.

The era called for the social performance of the consumption of spectacle, a new manner of enacting an ideology of progress. As a racially segregated space, the cinema operated as a space of social enclosure. In The Darker Side of Modernity, Walter D. Mignolo argues that “…’modernity’ is a European narrative that hides its darker side, ‘coloniality’. Coloniality, in other words, is constitutive of modernity – there is no modernity without coloniality.” It is impossible to have modernity without coloniality. Mignolo also calls us to fully acknowledge how these systems rely on the “…The expendability of human life (e.g., enslaved Africans) and of life in general from the Industrial Revolution into the twenty-first century.” The Cine Teatro Jandaia is congruent with this trajectory. This is not a history of the past. In The Weather, Christina Sharp writes, “…Slavery was not singular; it was, rather, a singularity – a weather event or phenomenon likely to occur around a particular time, date, or set of circumstances. Emancipation did not make free Black life free; it continues to hold us in that singularity. The brutality was not singular; it was the singularity of antiblackness… In what I am calling the weather, antiblackness is pervasive as climate. The weather necessitates changeability and improvisation; It is the atmospheric condition of time and place; it produces new ecologies.” After sixty years hosting film screenings, circus performances, beauty contests, and political meetings, Cine Teatro Jandaia closed its doors. And while left to disrepair, a new open-ness formed. The weather acts upon the teatro in a choreography of breaking the enclosure. The teatro is opening to the sky and starting to form new earth. Seeds are being carried in by the South-Eastern blowing trade winds, sprouting and re/inhabiting.

The Weather, an Agent of Transmutation
The singularity of the weather is not distinct from, or a consequence of, but a contiguous actor in all that we are and perceive. It also extends further than the human umwelt. The weather, in continuity with humans, is and has been an agent in the transmutation of all life. It acts, and is acted upon, by life. Some of us have named this era the ‘Anthropocene’ in acknowledgement of this, although perhaps not knowingly. While the term incorrectly implies a hierarchy where the human has affected the natural world, we might also consider this term as a glimpse of the impossible made possible. Out of a history of valuing control, this term hints first at an acknowledgement of the futility of this imaginary control, while we also find ourselves confronted with the reality that we are inseparable from the forces and life that surrounds us.

In the wake of the violence of colonial expansionism, rather than considering evolution or change as moving outward, how might we rest?

As described by Sanford Kwinter in Into the Mystic, we are being called “To attain a knowledge no longer deformed by illusions of our separation from the local and cosmic surround… It is about assuming a posture and attitude fully annexed to the three forms of sentience: thought, feeling, perception. It asks us to place knowledge, as well as ourselves the knowers, in the world, within the very element where the mysteries that “work” strives to reveal are developed and where they unfold.” So how might we dismantle these illusions of separation, and without thinking, feeling or perceiving, place our knowledge in the world, as the weather?

The Sail
From the implementation of sail as a tool of violence propelling slave ships, to a tool of social performance, the leisure of the complicit in the continuation of a social order that relies on caste to propel its profits – the sail has been, and is hoisted in service of the colonial-modern capitalist endeavor, cutting across time and into life on this planet. Implicit in this expansionism is the modern false narrative of progress. In the wake of the violence of colonial expansionism, rather than considering evolution or change as moving outward, how might we rest? In The Weather, Christina Sharp brings our attention to “The weather of being in the wake,” emphasizing how the “The orthographies of the wake require new modes of writing, new modes of making sensible.” A departure from this false narrative might dwell in the rupture and recapitulation of old narrative devices.

The Scrim
The oleo scrim is a device for narrative rupture, taking its name from the oleograph printing technique. It was used in theater as a method of concealing a scene change, and to create the imagined space of a vignette, downstage, as interlude, breaking the narrative tension of a drama. As intervention in the Teatro Cine Jandaia, the scrim is not a veil of printed or projected image, but rather as a plane that life may directly inhabit.

Interoception, an Awareness of Being
Interoception is to engage with the intuitive connection to this continuity, a sensing of the internal world that perceives in a way not fettered by the logics, rationale and narratives that are easily instrumentalized to order, creating the discontinuity of modern isolation. This isolation stems from being enclosed from an awareness of being, from our innate knowing that extends beyond the reach of modern-colonial capitalism.

But we might pause within this decaying theater, not for leisure but for rest, and to know, not to construct narratives but to escape them.

And in this pause, we might experience the sensing of the weather, perceiving not just our place as a part of it, but as also our affect within it.