THE 21ST CENTURY has buried the idea of a unique and shared reality. What could be universal when some talk for others, offering their views as a corollary of their privileges? In the field of art, fragmentation has invaded the frame, helping us to reverse the perspective. Original artists invest in collages and reorganize archives to suture gaps and compose new realities.

The cover and opening article in this edition, Val Souza refreshes feminism by nourishing it with images of black women. In her self-portraits, Souza confronts the look that objectifies, as well as defies the narrow patterns of beauty. Her quest to redefine Venus gave rise to a trans-historic panel celebrating the deity of independent and resilient women. In the 1970s, Gretta Sarfaty also broke patterns by ironizing her own image. Iconoclastic, Justine Kurland has cut open the photographic canon to protest against the ruling patriarchy. Survivors of the Argentinian dictatorship, women – and photographs – of the Trans Memory Archive rewrite history and bear witness to a life that resists oppression and prejudice. In the performances of the Amazon entity Uýra, resistance is also a way of learning with nature.

Throughout its history, photography has experimented with different ways of looking at the other. In a moving homage to filmmaker Andrea Tonacci, researcher Patricia Mourão de Andrade looks back at the originality, hesitations and impasses of a film art committed to the struggles of others. Lourdes Grobet, who died earlier this year, glorified wrestling by celebrating the sportsmen who give form to Mexican popular culture. The photographs of filmmaker Affonso Uchôa and artist Desali exhibit their own reality “without sentimentality, without self-pity or false exercises of empathy”, in the words of Cidinha da Silva. “They are expressions of the outskirts of Brazil through their own voice”, continues the writer from Minas Gerais, also echoing Maxwell Alexandre’s new work, which removes blacks from paintings to display them in the galleries, where they choose what to see and why. Changing times!

Thyago Nogueira, editor