"O teatro . . . nos proporciona a possibilidade de . . . fundir memória e imaginação -- que são dois processos psíquicos indissociáveis -- de, no presente, reinventar o passado e inventar o futuro" (Boal, Teatro Legislativo 44).
"[N]ão será [a memória] apenas um espaço onde a imaginação se exerce, onde organiza registros de emoções, pensamentos, sensações havidas, onde inventa o futuro e reinventa o passado? (34).
In the final scene of Utopia da Memória, each of the actors holds a photograph and shares what it reminds them of. One actor holds a photo of the Monumento das Castanheiras Mortas and says, "Esta foto me lembra o ano de 1996. Eu vi minha mãe chorando em frente à televisão que noticiava o massacre de Eldorado do Carajás, onde 19 trabalhadores Sem Terra foram assassinados pela Polícia. Alguns meses depois, na PUC de São Paulo, ela colaborou com uma exposição de fotos de Sebastião Salgado sobre o Movimento dos Trabalhadores Sem Terra, o MST." A photo of the monument to the landless workers who were murdered by the police on 17 April 1996 "lembra" the sight of the mother crying as she watched the news of the massacre on television.
Then, another actor holds a photo and says, "Esta foto me lembra janeiro de 2119, quando a gente comemorou nas ruas os primeiros 100 dias da Revolução Popular." Since there is no photo of this imagined future event, the group uses a photo of the actors Roberto Kroupa (who is holding the photo) and Juliana Liegel at one of the manifestações organized by the Frente Única da Cultura in São Paulo in 2017. It's as if the person we're hearing is an inhabitant of our distant future (he uses the subject "a gente" and the verb comemorar in the past tense), whose memory of this celebration is triggered by the photo. It doesn't really matter whether the photo has any direct relation to the Revolução Popular; it's a photo of people protesting in the streets -- and, it seems, celebrating (see 1:02:42 of the video) -- and thus it reminds him of the street celebration of the first hundred days of the Popular Revolution.
At the start and end of the play we're told by a messenger that "Utopia da Memória" is a place -- "Utopia da Memória / Parece que estamos no lugar certo" -- where we'll have to "juntar" or "fazer correspondências" between "fragmentos" "na imaginação." The preposition "na" suggests a notion of imagination as a space in which we can join seemingly disconnected fragments, including "fragmentos de memória." In the second quotation at the top, Boal refers to memory as "um espaço onde a imaginação se exerce, onde organiza registros de emoções, pensamentos, sensações havidas, onde inventa o futuro e reinventa o passado? (34). I find Boal's description (in the first quotation) of imagination and memory as "dois processos psíquicos indissociáveis" more helpful (4), as it invites us to think of the acts of imagining and remembering as (indissociable) forms of joining or making correspondences between fragments.
How do we join the photo of a past manifestação with what we're hearing about January 2119? We're told at the start of the play we'll have to join fragments, "na" or with the imagination, but also, "tragam junto suas memórias, elas serão necessariás." I may not know when or where the protest in the photo took place, but the photo "me lembra" when my partner and I marched across the Brooklyn Bridge chanting with hundreds, perhaps thousands of protestors all the way to Abolition Park (as the occupation at City Hall had been renamed) in the summer of 2020 following the police killing of George Floyd. The Revolução Popular of Utopia da Memória may never happen, but the photo "me lembra" that struggles for justice are happening and will continue to happen till "tudo seja diferente."
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