The First Day at Work - Filipe Ferraz

Anthropology is the discipline of counterintuition. It seeks to find the strange in the familiar and the familiar in the incomprehensible. When finished, the process starts again, this time in reverse. In the hope that a synthesis will manifest itself. In this article we propose to look at participatory art, changing the turns. What kind of art is this, the ‘non-participatory’? What does dissent flee from? For this purpose, we will use our work in participatory art projects in the last two years (Wame l Anthropology Public) as fieldwork. In a contemporary era during colonial deconstruction, grappling with identity movements, issues of representativeness, in a present where political extremism goes hand in hand with horizontal experiences of governance, what fate will remain for what is not participated in, only exercised? This article transforms into fieldwork the daily life of Wamãe I Public Anthropology. Starting from a participatory art project that lasted two years, in a school in the Ajuda neighborhood, in Lisbon, we try to talk about the process of discovery that is to do non-academic anthropology.A text by Filipe Ferraz llustrated by Wamãe (Filipe Ferraz).https://theanthro.art/the-first-day-at-work/