COMMUNITY OF PARTNERS IN YOUTH AND CHILDHOOD CULTURES: BUILDING NEW NARRATIVES, OCCUPYING TERRITORIAL SPACES, AND CHANGING A HISTORY OF SUBMISSION OF BODIES AND CONFINEMENTS

Abstract

This article discusses and disseminates issues involving youth and childhood cultures and, in the intertwining of both, an engaged art acts to occupy spaces in the neighborhood and to change a history of bodily subjugation and restrictions experienced in the Gesso district, in Crato, Cariri, Ceará. It aims to bring to the broader scene of the text the trajectory lived by a community of partners since their childhood and youth, gathered by the Camaradas Group, who carried out confrontations in the mentioned territory, where the conflicts of a place marked by prostitution and also a gypsum deposit were experienced. In this way, the performance of youth and childhood cultures managed to intervene in the spaces and to reshape narratives in and about the place. Within this context, new aesthetic-expressive partnerships also enabled, through art, an intervention in the public scene. Thus emerges the concept of a community of partners of youth and childhood cultures, involving a partnership that transcends age groups and acts jointly in cultural actions, also aiming at political-aesthetic intervention. Young partners and children share artistic movements that systematically take place, articulating groups and institutions in the neighborhood and the city, along with public schools and other artistic segments participating in the cultural manifestations of the territory. The role of Alexandre Lucas is highlighted, as the main animator and founder of the Camaradas Group, as well as of the Creative Territory of Gesso and the Territory of the Word, which, among a variety of actions, mobilize children in the streets and squares with Conversation Circles and Literary Soirées, among other activities that unfold and give rise to Poste Poesia—a form of literary art that, combined with cutting and collage, creates imagery placed on streetlight posts, emblematic of the aforementioned collaborative performance.