Territórios em papel: a reconfiguração de estruturas estéticas como processo de emancipação política; o caso de moedas sociais brasileiras

Abstract

This dissertation proposes a reflection on the creative processes of community currencies issued by Community Development Banks (BCDs). Among the 150 complementary currencies produced between 1998 and 2019 in Brazilian communities and cities, their aesthetic particularities – absolutely unique to each other – are elements not fully explored in the field of Solidarity Economy. The creative process of these banknotes, founded on the fundamentals of this economic system, such as aspects of collaboration, horizontality and collective construction, propitiates, in an aesthetic dynamic, the creation of scenarios of active participation that propel possibilities for social, economic and political emancipation. By purposely analyzing the methodology and dynamics of the creation of social currencies and their respective images as sensitive experiences, it is based, above all, on an articulation between french philosophers Jacques Rancière and Bernard Stiegler; which deal respectively with the concepts of distribution of the sensible and symbolic misery. In an articulation between these two thinkers, it is possible to understand how a process of reengagement with the symbolic, guided by an aesthetic, dissensual and collective production, broadens the possibilities of access to democracy by reordering these configurations of the sensible. Thus, from these two theories and starting from an understanding of the symbolic space of power that is paper money, one understands the power imbued in the act of occupying "official" spaces from which these communities have been historically excluded: because in this act they interrupt a narrative of incapacity, replacing it with another one of their own. Moreover, while these questions show how these dynamics can subjectively influence the community, it is unlikely that these aesthetic experiences would be effective if they did not happen spatially. Based on the works of Henri Lefebvre and Doreen Massey, this study also deals with how space has an active function – operational and instrumental – of knowledge and action, affecting, in its plurality of narrative durations, the perception of the BCD and the social currency in that territory. Therefore, what is discussed is how community banks, through their aesthetic actions in space – which include their management and governance structures – reconfigure the history of their territories by sensitively reorganizing the spatial code, and in it, the general definitions of value; of the place and the subject that inhabits it. The main aspect here is the understanding the centrality of aesthetics, imagery and image in the political dispute, and how a reappropriation of these symbolic places can trigger political emancipation.