Reflections on feminist collaborative initiatives in music in Brazil and their implications to the policies of resistance and creativity

In this article we discuss two initiatives involving women, music and collaborative and creative work in Brazil as possibilities of breaking with and / or weakening hegemonic logics of knowledge production and ways of life / coexistence according to the political dimension of decolonial feminism. They are “Mostra XX” (XX Show) and Isabel Nogueira and Leandra Lambert duo. We propose a reflexive and critical look at our local context and possible creative and political outings of the traps that are imposed on us and that we also help to arm.

Introduction
In this article we discuss two initiatives involving women, music and collaborative and creative work in Brazil as possibilities of breaking with and / or weakening hegemonic logics of knowledge production and ways of life / coexistence according to the political dimension of decolonial feminism. They are "Mostra XX" (XX Show) and Isabel Nogueira and Leandra Lambert duo. Our statements are the ones from Brazilian feminist white and non-white women (depending on the context), from different locations in the country, with an academic background in music -undergraduate and postgraduate. We ourselves are performers, researchers, composers and educators 1 . 1 As stated by various feminist trends, especially those of intersectionality, post-colonial and decolonial trends, it is important to establish our "place of speech", for it is never neutral. Thus, we assume, at the same time, a political stance and risk of vices built in our context, allowing a true dialogue with the interlocutor male or female. This is to say that we can neither homogenize the group we are going to analyze nor assume a place of the "universal one" by comparing the analyzed situation, starting from the presupposition of oppression, which necessarily results in the silencing of the movements of resistance and the particularities of the group in question. It is what Chandra Mohanty (1984) criticizes in Western feminists who analyze women from the "third world" in the Zed Press publications "Women in the Third World. " In the author words: "What is problematical, then, about this kind of use of "women" as a group, as a stable category of analysis, is that it assumes an ahistorical, universal unity among women based on a generalized notion of their subordination. Instead of analytically demonstrating the production of women as socio-economic political groups in particular contexts, this move limits the definition of the subject to gender identity, completely by passing social class and ethnic identities. What characterizes women as a group is their gender (sociologically not necessarily biologically defined) over and above everything else, indicating a monolithic notion of sexual difference. Because women are thus constituted as a coherent group, sexual difference becomes coterminous with female subordination, and power is automatically defined in binary terms: people who have it (read: men), and people who do not (read: women). Men exploit, women are exploited. As suggested above, such simplistic formulations are both reductive and ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions. All they do is to reinforce binary divisions between men and women. (Mohanty 1984, 344).
Our formations, each of us within a specificity, could be understood as that of privileged people in the face of the current Brazilian reality. For example, according to IBGE (2013) and OECD (2015), in terms of schooling we represent approximately 0. 5% of the Brazilian population, since the majority of the population do not finish high school and barely reach higher education. Our areas of action also reflect a privileged situation that of the arts. In Brazil, these areas, especially within the academy, are frequented and occupied by people with great purchasing power and cultural formation more aligned with European and North American traditions. In Brazil, we are also privileged people because we are considered ethnically and racially as white or non-black / non-indigenous people. Even if one of us positions herself as nonwhite, we know that none of us are seen in our local contexts as black or indigenous, and this also places us in a privileged position in relation to other women who suffer more severe social oppression than we normally do.
Thus, when we propose to speak of a perspective of rupture with colonizing and privileged models and schemes, we understand the limit of our discourses, which themselves come from privileged places in our local context. Still, we believe it is necessary to point out that this presentation is a reflexive academic proposal which does not intend to speak on behalf of any particular group.
We propose analytical views of initiatives that may represent ruptures in relation to very specific models and practices. We take mainly as a reference point that of a broken model; namely the musical knowledge approached in Brazilian conservatories and universities, which are based on North American and European repertoires from Germany, Austria, Italy, France, Russia, England, Spain and other countries. Although the models followed by our institutions are not exactly the same as the ones followed by those countries, the current discourse in Brazil is that such a model and its canonized repertoire as well as the way to approach them (usually in a solitary, competitive and demanding way) is our gateway to the world of music. In this way, we perceive that our institutions produce and reproduce discourses and practices of formation of a privileged class, supposedly based on European and North American cultures. These discourses and practices were not created and invented out of nowhere, they have a history that, according to the thinkers allied to the theories emerging from Global South, is closely related to the processes of American colonization.
Having said that, even if it is not our intention to be spokespeople for decolonial feminism, we believe we can establish an honest dialogue that can encourage reflection on the colonizing processes (internal and external) and the dangers of appropriation. Also, it must be said, many of the leaders of this feminist movement in Brazil, such as Ochy Curiel, Yuderkis Espinosa Miñoso and others, criticize academic decolonial feminist strands by arguing that decolonization should not be a theory devoid of practice and that decolonization is a daily struggle well beyond the walls of university.

Cultural studies, colonialities and (de)colonialities
Postcolonial theories and concepts of development, underdevelopment and developing world critics emerged in the 1970s in the field of cultural studies. The idea of development related to countries was proposed in 1949 by Harry Truman, president of the United States. In general terms, Truman proposed the use of these terms associated with notions of wealth and poverty. Wealth and poverty should be linked to established economic power, through productive capacity, exploitation of labor and nature. As such, countries around the world were classified as rich / developed and poor / underdeveloped. In the concept of development lies the idea that countries classified as underdeveloped or developing not only wish to be developed but should move to that end with the help of developed countries, mainly through financial loans and public policies.
However, as Mirian Lang (2016) points out, the perspective of a whole world of developed countries is unsustainable since wealth has been and is only possible through the exploitation of poor countries (underdeveloped / developing) both in terms of human and material resources. Beyond the logical question of the impossibility of generalized wealth, researchers and thinkers of the so-called underdeveloped or developing countries, which we call Global South 2 , began to question the very concepts of development / underdevelopment and wealth established by these rich countries themselves. Such a questioning proved even more necessary when it was realized that the model of economic development of rich countries did not translate into population happiness and well-being 3 . In this sense, for example, the work of caring which is exercised primarily by women is not valued because it is not seen as productive. Thus, not only are poor countries perceived as inferior, and therefore silenced in their own practices and dynamics, as are many women who carry even more strongly the marks of oppression.
At that time, feminist movements in Western Europe and the United States were in the 'Second Feminist Wave' effervescence, which began in the 1960s. During the Second Wave, marked by movements of deconstruction of the concepts of man and woman, sexes and sexuality denaturalization, sexual and identity liberation and others, it was possible to see more women occupying power positions in strategic institutions of knowledge production in universities and some government positions of these localities. The struggles for voting rights, studies and public life characteristic of the First Feminist Wave (late nineteenth and first decades of the twentieth century) bore fruit through women's presence in several public areas and work, which had previously and predominantly been associated with men and males. At the same time, as it had also been perceived and denounced inside the feminist movements of late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, many of these conquests concerned a certain class of women, leaving many others women out. Black, Latin American and indigenous women from undeveloped localities in the world were not part of this group of women to whom the public space was addressed and whose struggle was recognized. Again, it was necessary to denounce attitudes, behaviors, discourses, racist, elitist, classist and exclusionary practices in the feminist movement itself. Thus, marginal feminisms (black, intersectionality, postcolonial, decolonial feminism) have criticized and questioned hegemonic feminisms, for reproducing what they have identified as one of the major problems and misunderstandings of societies -the assumption of the "universal one" and supposedly "universalizable / generalizable one", which is, in this case, man / male / white/ eurocentric. Yet hegemonic feminists reproduced such an error in not perceiving and being unable (or unwilling) to hear and notice women who did not share the same oppressions as them, whose problems were 'other'. Thus, the non-hegemonic feminisms that criticize a feminism whose subject was a specific, white, heterosexual and bourgeois woman who oppresses and silences other 2 As a political stance that rejects the terms development, underdeveloped, developing, and also the Third World, we assume -supported by authors and writers like Chandra Mohanty, Gaytry Spivak, Ochy Curiel, Gloria Anzaldúa, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Aníbal Quijano and others -the term Global South. 3 Mirian Lang (2016), quotes some studies proving that many countries considered as rich and / or developed are champions in the ranking of suicides and depressions like Norway, Denmark, Australia and the United States. It seems to be a direct relationship between this notion of wealth and development with "loneliness, existential anguish, depression, permanent stress that causes multiple physical and mental illnesses, including a lethal one; the instrumental human relations, the lack of coexistence, the time to share or even to enjoy things that one buys." (Lang 2016, 27). women require that their different contexts and struggle specificities exist, be listened to, named and respected. This explains the resurgence of Black feminism and Global South feminism.
At the end of the 1980s, the Peruvian political scientist Aníbal Quijano proposed the concept of Power Coloniality, which in the following decade was developed by the Modernity / Coloniality Group 4 of which the researcher was a member. In the context of the Modernity / Coloniality Group, that concept was dismembered in two other categories: Coloniality of Knowledge and Coloniality of Being. Both concepts are the basis of the development of Maria Lugones' thought, the Argentine feminist philosopher and social critic. She developed in the 1990s the concept of Gender Coloniality, which will be fundamental to the birth of Decolonial Feminism in Latin America.
With the concept of Coloniality of Power, Quijano states that relations, values, beliefs and practices established by colonialism continue to be perpetuated even with the end of the colonial system and the beginning of Modernity. On the one hand, this concept denounces that colonial forms of domination remain through colonial and world-system cultures 5 , as explained by Luciana Ballestrin, and, on the other hand, "it has an explanatory capacity that updates and temporalizes processes which supposedly would have been erased, assimilated or overcome by modernity" (Ballestrin 2013, 100). It means that mechanisms of domination established in colonization by the relationship between Europeans and Americans 6 were and are used and naturalized both by the privileged and dominated people, with a focus on the colonization of the Americas, closely related to the capitalist system: Coloniality is one of the constituent and specific elements of the world pattern of capitalist power. It is based on the imposition of a racial / ethnic classification of the world population as the foundation stone of that power pattern and operates in each of the planes, scopes and material and subjective dimensions of daily social existence and 4 This group was formed in late 1990s by a group of Latin American intellectuals from several universities in the Americas. It was one of the great responsible for establishing the debate of the "decolonial turn" in social sciences, realizing that the tools used traditionally in the discipline reinforce stereotypes created by the image of subaltern social groups and developed social groups (Ballestrin 2013, 89). 5 World System is a term proposed by social scientist Immanuel Wallerstein and used by Aníbal Quijano to elaborate his theory on coloniality and coloniality of power World System establishes that the economic, cultural and social capitalist relations that had its origin in Middle Age were extended to the rest of the world, creating a center, peripheries and semi peripheries of this world economic-social system. Aníbal Quijano has used and develop this concept for Modern / colonial system, in which he says that modern world was created from colonialism and this one created two Americas, one central and rich and the other marginal and poor (Hurtado 2017). 6 In "The coloniality of power: Eurocentrism and Latin America" (2005), Aníbal Quijano states that, as concepts, Europe and America were only possible from colonialism. When the Spaniards, Portuguese and English people "found" these lands, they characterized the peoples who lived there as inferior peoples and established racial differences, proclaiming themselves as developed, civilized and "human" in opposition to the peoples they encountered. The phenotypic difference was the main basis for establishing these categories. Thus, colonization postulated from the outset that there were white, educated, and human men (for they were Christians and had souls) and black and dark (reddish) beings who were savage and virtually without humanity (were not Christians, therefore, had no soul). Tania Navarro Swain (1996) demonstrates how the historical and ethnographic speeches made by European white men built the misogynistic, sexist and racist images of the Indians and especially the women in the Americas. social scale. It originates and globalizes from America itself. (Quijano 2000, 342 apud Barbosa and Maso, sd, p. 5) 7 Following the same line of reasoning, Walter Mignolo, an Argentine semiologist, a member of the Modernity / Coloniality Group has continued Quijano's theory presenting the Coloniality of knowledge concept with Nelson Maldonado Torres who developed the Coloniality of being concept. They indicate coloniality mechanisms in people themselves and in the processes of knowledge production. The coloniality of being refers to the election of some groups as universal and to others as marginal, incomplete, immature (that is when people are considered as people at all) 8 , mainly stating racial and ethnic differences as determining components.
Similarly, there is the coloniality of knowledge, which indicates that the knowledge developed by these groups considered subaltern and inferior, are not worthy of being reproduced or known. Thus, stories, legends and beliefs of entire peoples and communities have been destroyed, forgotten and never heard in favor of a model considered unique. Eurocentrism is born. An example of this is our school curricula, which is built on the knowledge basis developed by Europeans and North Americans, from the United States.
Here in Brazil, we study the History of Civilization, but this history (taken as universal) refers to the history of Western Europe and, after colonialism, also to the United States. We ignore Africa and Asia history and many others histories. We learn a little about our ancestors in the study of pre-Columbian civilizations 9 but we know nothing about indigenous ethnic groups of our territory because they have been silenced since the Americas invention. Their lives, history and knowledge were not considered important for 'global' development. In the same way, the musical content that we learn in our institutional courses, like in conservatories, university and free courses in Brazil are also based on European and North American models.
Global Southern authors linked to the Modernity / Coloniality Group will argue that internal colonization is created and perpetuated by colonization which accentuates ethnic-racial and class differences. In other words, coloniality mechanisms -the choice of the "universal one" as central and referential and the classification of "everything else" as marginal, oppression based on race, ethnicity, geography and class resulting from the process of colonization -are experienced between nations and reproduced internally in countries, cities and localities. (Ballestrin 2013;Barbosa and Maso 2014). Concepts of coloniality, coloniality of power, being and knowledge form the basis of the decolonial concept and practice, commonly referred to as "decolonial turn", which uses them as a "new way of producing knowledge" (Mena 2016, 46), understanding knowledge in an extended way in which are considered both the subjective symbolic dimension and the objective practical dimension. Knowledge is, thus, defined by Maldonado-Torres (2016) as attitude and project.
It is in this context of decolonial theory that Maria Lugones develops the concept of Colonial / Modern System of Gender. She starts from Latin American and postcolonial thought criticizing the concept of development mentioned earlier, the coloniality of power, being and knowledge and also from the perception of a hegemonic feminism, which reproduces mechanisms of colonialities of power, being and knowledge among different categories of women. The author, who in 2006 joined the group Coloniality / Modernity, has found that gender was not used as an analytical category by the theories of coloniality of power, being and knowledge. For Lugones, Quijano concept of coloniality of power based upon heteronormative notions and gender biological determinism does not take into account the reality of the pre-colonial context 10 . As pointed out by Leticia Otero Dias (2014): "Lugones' works characterize the existing gender situation founded by modernity and are a critical epistemological construction of this situation." (Dias 2014, 3) 11 .
As pointed out by theoreticians of the Modernity / Coloniality Group, the supposed end of the colonialism period with the independence movements in several countries especially in the American continent did not actually occurred. Maria Lugones shares this idea, noting that gender presuppositions prevailing in the 10 By biological determinism we understand gender constructions determined a priori to a person biological sex. There are some strands of feminism that rely on biological determinism as a way of establishing a supposed feminine power, for example, extolling the characteristics that would be inherent to women, but which, because of patriarchy, are not valued. Other strands understand that biological sex does not determine the person gender. In gender studies, in feminist formulations and in studies on women there are many different and even contradictory definitions of gender. However, especially after Joan Scott's formulation in 1989, there is now more consensus in admitting gender as a "constitutive element of social relations based on the perceived differences between sexes, and gender is a first way of signifying power relations" (Scott 1989, 21). Gender for Lugones is clearly a social construction that establishes itself in relations of intersectionality, however, she states that these relations depend on the context and therefore adopting conceptions of these relations of a reality "x" in a reality "y" is to distort the reference points. Thus, preconceived notions of sex, sexuality, race, and others could not be applied in a naturalized manner in Latin America, for example. 11 Our free translation. The original follows: Os trabalhos da Lugones caracterizam a situação de gênero existente e fundada pela modernidade, e são uma construção epistemológica crítica a essa situação." (Dias 2014, 3). colonization event, which stressed the relations established in this period, remain practically the same in Modernity. She states that male theorists of the group were not able to problematize the categories of sex and gender in their analyses and by not doing it they reproduced the colonial thought about sex and gender based on stereotypes. Then, she observes that colonial scholars, both male and female, often mix and confuse biological sex with gender through the analysis of the work done by people of opposite sexes, reinforcing the dichotomous and binary idea of sexes. This point of view characterizes the relation that establishes that biological sex determines gender. According to Lugones, the functions performed by the people in pre-Columbian period were not determined by sex. She argues that female biological and male biological sex performed the same social functions depending on the characteristics of each person. Still for Lugones, black and indigenous people were not considered human by the settlers. This situation sets them in an almost sexual dimorphism position, like bestialized and animalistic beings. So, she states, there are no Indian and Black women, and let alone colonized women, because the woman category refers to a, white, heterosexual, European female person.
In Women, Race and Class (2016) the black American philosopher Angela Davis presents a similar argument in relation to enslaved black women and black men in the United States. According to the author, black women and men were not considered human and this justified their slavery. Black women were not considered women but a workforce and a body to be dominated and violated. Working in the same way as men, without any regalia, the question of physical strength or female incapacity so often faced by white and Western women did not apply to Black women. Thus, at the same time they were considered non-human, they also challenged male supremacy, in their equal social positioning in relation to black men. This is one of the reasons, pointed out by Davis, for the hate addressed toward black women in the United States context of 'slave-raiser'. White men felt not only in their right but in their duty to violate them, to make it clear that they were despicable beings even though they were on equal footing with black men. However, it must be said, these same white men had a sexual attachment to black women, who were considered a threat to social status by their white wives. Thus, Davis notes that, from the eighteenth to the twentieth century, in the United States, the situation of black slaves, men and women, has engendered the possibility of resistance and denial of the patriarchal system and male supremacy: Black women suffered the same oppression as did their black companions; they were socially equal to them within the slave community; and resisted slavery with the same eagerness as they did. This was one of the great ironies of the slavery system: the cruel exploitation, without distinction of sex, has laid the foundations upon which black women would affirm their condition of equality in social relations, expressed in acts of resistance. This must have been a terrible finding for slave owners, who apparently attempted to break this condition of equality through particularly brutal repression against black women. Again, it is important to remember that the punishments inflicted on black women exceeded those imposed on black men in intensity, since these women were not only whipped and mutilated but also raped. (Davis 2016, 35-36) Although she presents an argument similar to that of Angela Davis, concerning the non-humanity of the indigenous or black women, Lugones observes that in the Latin American case, Latin men end up "adhering" to male supremacy speech and practice brought by European white men, helping to establish patriarchy and female inferiority in this context. However, colonized men are not on equal footing with European white men. They, like black women, are considered non-humans. They are considered "effeminate", constituting their inferiority and the constant threat of rape (Lugones 2014, 743), suggesting that the category "woman" does not apply to such people considered nonhuman or subhuman. It is a category defined for and by a very specific model, namely: a person with a vagina and uterus, white, middle class, European female or female European descent (as in the case of Brazilian women who proudly display their Italian, German, French and other origins) who are affectively related to a man (also a white middle class, European and heterosexual), to whom she is subordinate. For her, the "civilizing mission" was a justification for the brutal exploitation of bodies: The 'civilizing mission' used the hierarchical gender dichotomy as a judgment, thought the attainment of dichotomous gendering for the colonized into human being was not a colonial goal. The difficulty of imagining this as a goal can be appreciated clearly when one sees that this transformation of the colonized into men and male would have been transformation not in identity, but in nature. But the colonized against itself was included in the civilization mission's repertoire of justifications for abuse. Christian confession, sin and Manichean division between god and evil served to imprint female sexuality as evil, the colonized females were understood in relation to Satan, sometimes as mounted by Satan. (Lugones 2010, 745) Lugones understands that the gender category is crucial when it comes to coloniality. For her, coloniality was established mainly by gender invention and perpetuation in colonized communities. Just like race. She postulates that colonization and Christianization are responsible for transformations beyond the control of reproductive and sexual practices. Yet, the civilizational movements of colonization transformed the relationship people had with their land and their religiosity with its symbols and signs, through the norm that links gender and civilization. For her, the imposition of the colonial system of gender leads to the coloniality of being (proposed by Nelson Maldonado Torres) necessarily inhuman. Thus, she concludes that "a colonized woman is an empty category: no women are colonized; no colonized females are woman" (Lugones 2010, 745).
With this, more than "colonized women", Maria Lugones proposes the recognition of beings that resist to the coloniality of Gender, considering the colonial difference. It is not just thinking of distant realities, such as supposedly pure indigenous communities, without contact with white people. She admits that we in Latin America are also fruit of this hegemonic thought of coloniality of power, gender, knowledge and being. We are constituted within this; however, we can assume liberating resistance postures, subjectively and intersubjectively, involving adaptation and creative opposition. And she theorizes: Resistance is the tension between subjectification (the forming/informing of the subject) and active subjectivity, that minimal sense of agency required for the oppressing resisting relation being an active one, without appeal to the maximal sense of agency of the modem subject. (Lugones 2010, 746) In general terms, for Lugones, active subjectivity means that there are other possibilities of categorization, living and coexistence, production of knowledge and products besides Western Europeans. These are what we commonly call "marks" of oppressed male and female. With the difference that in the case of oppressed male and female, these marks are not necessarily read as marks of oppression, but as subjectivity. It happens that many times this subjectivity of peoples, cultures and individuals are simply impossible to be grasped by dominating groups, which leads to systemic silencing and oppression. However, for Lugones there is no pure race. That is, there is no race which has not suffered colonization consequences and has not integrated colonizing and modern values and practices. These cultures, people and persons are in a third place, in-between, at the border. As Gloria Anzaldúa remarks this is related to the mestizo conscience, which is, according to her, characterized as the one between places, like the border between western white man or western white woman and indigenous man or indigenous woman, Latin man or Latin woman and black man or black woman. She rightly proposes the possibility of being and remaining on the border: From this racial, ideological, cultural and biological "transpolinization" emerges another consciousness -a new mestizo consciousness, a woman consciousness. An awareness of the Frontiers (...) These innumerable possibilities leave la mestiza drifting in unknown seas. By perceiving conflicting information and viewpoints, she immerses herself in her psychological boundaries. She finds out that she cannot keep concepts or ideas within rigid limits. Boundaries and walls that must hold undesirable ideas outside are entrenched habits and patterns of behavior; these habits and patterns are the internal enemies. Rigidity means death. Only by remaining flexible can she extend the psyche horizontally and vertically. La mestiza has to constantly move out of the crystallized formations -of habit; out of convergent thinking, from analytic reasoning that tends to use rationality toward a single goal (a Western way), towards a divergent thinking (Anzaldúa 2005, 704).
Through Gloria Anzaldúa's comments we can see that this inter-place, being at the border, incorporates the contradictions that permeate our lives and allow us to have another look on the oppression marks of the groups considered subalterns, seeing these marks as strong, beautiful, powerful, inspiring, creative, and resilient. This is Maria Lugones proposal: My intent is to focus on the subjective-intersubjective springs of colonized women's agency. I call the analysis of racialized, capitalist, gender oppression "the coloniality of gender". I call the possibility of overcoming the coloniality of gender 'decolonial feminism' (Lugones 2010, 747) Therefore, the question is to identify mechanisms and processes of gender coloniality (which encompasses that of power, being and knowledge and are also part of them) that establish ways of life, coexistence, knowledge production that silence not hegemonic knowledge and practices. Having identified coloniality mechanisms and processes, it is possible to understand where and how forms of resistance occur. In order to know how these theories applies to nowadays reality, we propose to see some forms of resistance in two specific music initiatives in Brazil.

Two examples of feminist and decolonial resistance initiatives in Brazil
Before presenting these two initiatives, we consider it to be important to clarify that the choice of these two examples is not based on merit alone. We understand that in both examples that we bring to analysis represent possibilities of resistance, within which Maria Lugones conceptualizes as decolonial feminism, however we do not consider these examples more important or better than others that also exist. This is important in order not to fall into the current practice of a certain historical tradition responsible for the constitution of canons in the History of Humanity 12 . It is precisely this posture, of choice and election of a unique model that leads to Canons formation which, necessarily, operate with silencing and rendering invisible of the non-hegemonic. That said, we understand that the examples we present here were chosen from our experiences and affectivities and have the power to be thought as possibilities of decolonial feminism, setting up places and practices of rupture and creative proposition.
In Brazil, we are experiencing an intense blossoming of women in experimental music. Through appropriation of technology, collective creation and networking, learning new possibilities in music and conviviality that are not common in our traditional institutions of teaching, production and placement of music. The examples we highlight, therefore, are two of many. We understand that both represent possibilities of resistance, however we recognize the limitations when thinking about these examples in a wider Brazilian context.
The first example is the Mostra XX -XX Show. Broadly speaking, the show is an event that brings together musical and artistic production performed only by women. In the Facebook page of the show held in São Paulo in 2015 the shared text was as follows: XX is a show that aims to provide the meeting between women creators and give vent to the artistic production that emerges from this confluence. There will be musical works transiting between experimental, sound and visual art, photography, improvisation and performance (Ibrasotope 2015).
Three editions of the show were held, two in California (2014, and 2017) and one in São Paulo, in 2015. At the head of these editions was Fernanda Aoki Navarro, a Brazilian composer, a Latin-American woman with Japanese ancestry. These social marks locate her among women of color 13 , a racialized and ethnicized human group both in the north-American and the Brazilian contexts. The first edition held in the United States was incorporated in the Spring Festival in The University of California -San Diego (UCSD). The show was thought as a response to a sexist speech from an important conductor, in which he suggests women are not as capable as men of maintaining a conducting career because of physiological issues supposedly 12 "Canon" has already been theorized by numerous researchers in several areas. We bring in the scope of this article the concept developed within the context of the History of Western Music. According to Marcia J. Citron, in Gender and Musical Canon (1993), one of the first people to problematize canon in music was Joseph Kerman in A Few Canonic Variations (1993). Based on Kerman and even more in feminist studies and theories and critics, Citron drew up her own perceptions of Canon and states that the constitution of a canon is responsible, for example, for the female miss representativeness in music. For Citron, canon, identified by her as something that "deserves" being used as a reference of a given culture: "what is worthy of inclusion" (Citron 1993, 15) and is determined by this same culture. That is, culture, through social practices and rules of teaching, training and production of knowledge establishes criteria used to consecrate a given production which in turn is the product of these same criteria. Thus, women are excluded, literally from the Western classical music canon because the production of this song is based on criteria that do not allow or facilitate female participation. We do not have to go to great lengths to realize that this situation only worsens when we think of nonwhite, non-Western, non-European and other women. 13 Here we understand women of color as proposed and thought by Cherríe Moraga and Gloria E. Anzaldúa in the book This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1981).
biologically inherent in women's bodies. It is interesting to note that the first event, held in 2014, was a response to a male discourse in an attempt to "show the world that women can do whatever they want, including a concert entirely produced by women with women" (Navarro 2015) 14 . The second event in California (2017) arose in a more purposeful than reactive way, being a tribute to Pauline Oliveros. In the program the composers put themselves as a feminist collective and explain the title "XX", which even alluding to the chromosomes that "determine" the female sex, does not refer to the "woman bound to a biological determinism", but to people who are identified in this gender. In the program of Show XX 2017, the collective assumes the mantle of intersectional feminism. It is symptomatic that Fernanda Aoki Navarro, a Brazilian and Latin-American woman, with Asian Japanese ancestry, takes the lead in this intersectional and feminist movement, in convergence with that of the decolonial feminisms and also the Asian feminisms 15 . Though the fact of being Brazilian does not necessarily make her position and presence non-hegemonic, and it is possible to perceive some tension regarding the curricula and canons in the text of the program itself.
Fernanda Aoki has led the Show XX in Brazil in partnership with the artists Natacha Maurer and Renata Roman. The event was attended by the following artists: Bella, Denise Garcia, Fernanda Aoki Navarro, Jiulian Gonçalves, Flora Houlderbaum, Natacha Maurer, Renata Roman, Marcela Lucatelli, Sanannda Acácia and Vanessa de Michelis. In São Paulo context, the event may be considered a milestone for a number of reasons.
To understand the impact that the show had, it is important to say that São Paulo, being the city with the greatest economic and cultural power in the country, is often considered the greatest reference in many cultural fields in Brazil. This condition is responsible for the Brazilian imaginary in which São Paulo is the cradle of innovations in Brazil and at the same time other localities are marginal and do not establish themselves as reference or viable models. In this way is configured Internal Colonialism, proposed by Walter Mignolo. Often what prevails, contrary to what one might imagine, is not necessarily what differs, but what reaffirms power positions.
Also, it should be said that the female presence in the scene, although much more representative than other fields of creation in music, is still quite a minority. The city's main experimental music production and promotion venues are mostly male: man-run, with performances by men and frequented by men. It is in this context that the XX Show establishes itself as a milestone that weakens the relations of internal colonialism which are within the colonialism of gender, as Maria Lugones puts it.
When performing an experimental music event all run by women, without an aesthetic pre-establishment, assuming improvisation at various levels, with women from other locations besides São Paulo, the XX Show can break with some production logics with very strong roots in the City and also in the country. • Launches seeds for the formation of initiatives for the production of women's experimental music in the city of São Paulo, like the project Dissonantes, by Renata Roman and Natacha Maurer (which disseminates experimental music in São Paulo made by women) a direct result of the Show; • Provides greater visibility to the issue of women in experimental music in the local context; • Groups together women from different locations across Brazil within the same event.
Although this show has happened only once in Brazil, women who took part in it made and are part of networks that move important experimental music spaces in the country, and especially in São Paulo. It is worth saying that it is very difficult to say everything about a country of continental proportions such as Brazil. So, it is not our intention to be exhaustive, instead we will be happy to address some points for a possible reflection on the field. Of the women who participated in Show XX, Sanannda Acácia (who is from Curitiba, the capital of Paraná State) is one of the leaders of Seminal Records label 16 , Bella (from Rio de Janeiro) participates in collective Meteoro and develops a solo work, with creations, performances and workshops; Renata Roman and Natacha Maurer (both from São Paulo State, Roman is from the capital and Maurer from the interior) organize the Dissonantes project, which promotes women experimental music concerts as already mentioned. Van de Michelis (from Belo Horizonte, the capital of Minas Gerais State) provides do-it-yourself technology workshops geared specifically for women and specifically for lesbian women. Jiulian Golçalves (from São Paulo) is mostly involved with the queer and feminist punk scene in the city. Flora Houlderbaun (from Florianópolis, the capital of Santa Catarina State) is one of the current editors of Linda 17 , an electronic magazine on electroacoustic and experimental culture. Denise Garcia (from São Paulo) is a music composition teacher at a prestigious University in the country, UNICAMP. Marcela Lucatelli (from São Paulo) has been living in Germany to continue her music composition studies and has been involved with different kinds of experimental music events in Brazil and abroad. All these projects, labels, collectives and initiatives collaborate to the visibilization of women's work at the experimental music field in the country. It is important to note that all these artists were "located" or "situated", more or less, in the artistic scenes of São Paulo when the event happened. We observe that, even though they have different geographic origins, their articulations and activities in the artistic fields of São Paulo were important aspects for their participation and presence in the "XX Show". This indicates the centrality of the city also in the internal colonialities of knowledge, power and knowledge in the country itself, also in the artistic fields.
Perhaps the most important mark of breaking with or weakening the hegemonic logics of musical production in São Paulo city and in Brazil was precisely the collectivity in the event production and the fact that it was performed by Brazilian women. It must be said, however, that most of these Brazilian women are white, or at least, not black women, reproducing other kinds (race) of hegemonic representativeness inside this field. Also, even though most of them are not from São Paulo, by the period the XX Show was taken, all of the artists had an insertion in the scene in São Paulo, which means that we cannot read them as completely away from the power structures that are reproduced in the city because of what the city represents in a wider Brazilian context. In other words, a way, these artists are also part of this dominant scene of São Paulo, even being from other places. The composers not only played their pieces but also built this space where there was no aesthetic or technique curatorship. It means that even if the organizers (Fernanda Aoky Navarro, Natacha Maurer and Renata Roman) had a plan and invited specific women to compose the event (which could be interpreted as a kind of curatorship), they did not tell them what they were or what they were not supposed to do or to play. The eventual restriction was related mostly to technical limitations, for example of instruments, or specific technology. The set was stereo with two Power Amplifiers (PA), for example, instead of a more complex system (four PAs). The capacity to do what they wanted, so rare in the world of traditional music, was further reinforced by the feminist understanding that freedom was also a form of expression of voices that had much to say although little heard.
Thus, we can say that both in the aesthetic aspect -by the very characteristic of experimentalism that corrupts hard and fixed norms, which distorts notions of beauty, noise and musical -as by the very dynamics of the show production -which had the collaborative involvement of women, each one bringing her expertise to compose the whole in solidarity without necessarily establishing hierarchical relationship between them, the exhibition in the context of São Paulo can be read, in a specific context, as a nonhegemonic possibility of production, because it was: 1. Made totally by women (Brazilian) from the experimental field in music; demonstrating that there are women involved with experimental music and that they can do an event by their own. This confronts the way things usually happen in this field because of male dominance, both concerning the artists, as the public; 2. It was constituted by women from different places of Brazil; 3. It had no aesthetic curatorship (at least not direct), which also confronts the usual idea of quality and control, characteristics that are usually valorized in the musical universe. By not establishing a direct curatorship, the organizers take the risk which can result in new approaches and propositions with sounds and music.
The second initiative that we address in the scope of this speech is the duo formed by the artists / composers / performers Isabel Nogueira and Leandra Lambert.
Isabel Nogueira is an artist, songwriter, performer, singer-songwriter, university teacher, mother, feminist and many other things. Throughout her musical trajectory the artist was perceiving herself outside standards and norms of diverse forms. She was told she had no voice, her compositions had no metrics and the melodies did not close, according to a conception of voice and composition strictly based on singing techniques and musical writing of Western European tradition. This tradition, which has been built for the last three centuries, at least, is based, mainly on the paradigm of the scripture in music in which the complex of counterpoint, development and maximum control of the parameters such as "tune", "rhythm", "harmony", "timbre" are valued. Throughout the development of the musical writing in the Western Culture it was possible to make more and more complex music. At the same time the ideal musical sound (of voice, or any other instruments) were rising as well, electing some "genius" performers, that in the 20th century with the invention of the recording could be eternized as a reference of "a good sound". Therefore, the singing (or the playing of any other instrument) in Western traditional music had and has a very specific aim and model. So has the writing which is supposed to guarantee the "truth" in music (Adorno 1982;Goehr 1989, 85), preceding the necessity of a relationship between composers and performers, especially from the 18th century beyond (Goehr 1989, 56).
Throughout her career, Isabel Nogueira was aware of the impositions she was subjected to in the field of formal Western European erudite music, which necessarily made it impossible for her to speak what she wanted, to express herself as she wanted, to be who she was. To reach the expectations of what is considered a good musician in this tradition it is necessary to adapt the body and, sometimes, the beliefs. It means that usually we are not encouraged to know or question about in what context the music was written and for what purpose, in a belief of a supposed autonomy of music considering these things as "extra musical". The way of playing, singing and composing are very specific in this tradition, so, if a person does not fit well in this specificity, she or he is not considered a good musician. Isabel was told, for example, in her early years of learning that she "moved too much to play the piano" and that she "questioned too much to be a pianist" (Nogueira 2017) 18 .
Like Nogueira, Leandra Lambert is also a multi-artist, producing visual arts, literature, music, sound art, cinema and others activities. She has no formal training in music and since the 1990s she has started to make electronic / experimental music. Leandra is multiple. Her interest and acting in various arts can demonstrate, like Isabel, a possibility of non-framing in any field defined a priori and at the same time the possibility of existence in between-places.
Isabel Nogueira and Leandra Lambert duo appeared as a duo in the fifth edition of the Dissonantes project, in July 2016. An important consideration in relation to the duo is the way both artists work. Each one lives in different states, and it is not possible to have frequent face-to-face meetings and rehearsals. Thus, they have established some main forms of work. This took the form of the following: • They exchange ideas through internet and each one produces sounds and projects individually which are then shared and reworked, the final compositional work being with sufficient editing and interference from both artists; • Each one individually produces the sound proposals and pieces of music which are overlapped partially at random. The final work is, therefore, a collage of overlaps whose result cannot be predetermined; • They determine a script with some definitions of sounds and textures and sound "climates" and improvise in person from these predetermined scripts.
Thinking about traditional practices of musical composition (both written and electroacoustic), which presupposes planning and the maximum possible control of the constituent parameters of the piece, the methodologies used by the composers can be understood as transgressors, since there is no Maximum control of the chosen parameters. This occurs by assuming "chance" as aesthetic component. Even though these techniques are not new, thinking, for example, of Cage who used chance to compose, their use is still taboo in the more traditional mediums of music, at least in Brazil. In addition, the possibility of composing in a distance partnership, a resource increasingly used from the evolution of the internet, also demystifies the very design of face-to-face rehearsals and, again, enables maximum control of the variables, since in this process distance is admitted as Creator component that establishes other criteria of time and relationship between those involved. The technique of collage is also not new, however, it is also considered, within the hierarchies of compositional practices, a less prestigious technique, as opposed to the idea of development. Thus, the collage technique is seen as smaller, simpler, less important. By reformulating non-hegemonic possibilities, we might think that using resources considered marginal, such as "collage" and chance, for example, is to assume that the marginal can be seen as force, beauty and power, opposing the idea of a single possibility, which would be, in this case, development and control. This brings us back to the idea that, instead of the marks that characterize the marginal as marks of "subalternity", we can see them as marks of "overcoming, creativity, identity", and so on. When the dark color of the skin or the "south" place of origin of a person, the "non-christian" religion and the "non-white" cultural values are seen as different, or less important or as marks of subalternity comparing to the light color of the skin, the north place of origin, the christian religion and white cultural values, it is established an hierarchy, in which the white, north and christian are recognized as better, as prettier and so on. To choose to see these supposed marks as subalternity, is to assume, in Lugone´s view, the "white", "north" and "christian" as the reference. So, Lugones proposes that instead of admitting these marks as subalternities we choose to see them as strength and "overcoming identities". We suggest that the "collage" and the "chance" in Nogueira and Lambert's music, in a hegemonic view, would been seen as "marks of subalternity", but if we assume a political view, like Lugones proposes thinking about peoples, these marks can be seen, as an analogy, as "overcoming, creativity and identity" in a positive way.
Thus, with the sum of all these compositional methodological techniques used by the artists, we can say that both, in a way, break solid schemas associated with musical composition by proposing other ways of music creation, translated into less rigid and more fluid ways which are less committed to a tradition. By questioning these traditional methods and techniques they are, actually, questioning mechanisms of power in music, that has been legitimating the figure of the composer (male, white, heterosexual and Western European as pointed by authors like Lucy Green, 2001 andPirkko Moisala, 2015), and the supremacy of written music. Power, in this sense could be understood, also, as a characteristic of a patriarchal thought, in which all that is related to man and to masculine is seen as in a higher level of a hierarchy, opposing to all that is related to woman and to feminine. Since composition has been, during the development of Western Music, associated with rationality opposing to emotion, for example, the association with the male dominance was immediate. Man, and masculine has been associated to rationality, culture, rightness and so on and women and feminine to all that is opposite to man and masculine (Bourdieu 2003;Grosz 2000;Ortner 1979). When the artists propose methods and techniques that, in a way, deny the things that are valorized in a tradition of the composition area, they are denying these mechanisms that affirm the hierarchy of things considered masculine.
At the same time, we could say that creative sound practice is linked to feminist epistemologies when it brings women to the center of the scene and makes them protagonists of the processes at all levels, while being built on dialogue and making empowering for all.
In addition to the methodology of work and composition the content that both artists explore is also quite significant within a logic of rupture. They essentially work with voice and technology. Before presenting their uses in the duo's works it is important to address the symbolic relevance of the voice in women's works. According to Cathy Lane (2016) and Janete El Haouli (2002) as a social, cultural and historical construction, the voice, within the field of emotions, also allows us to perceive the power apparatuses that are constructed, reinforced and reproduced through it (the voice). This brings us, again, to the issue, already discussed, of how women are silenced. When feminist movements speak of silence and invisibility, they refer precisely to the idea that the voices and bodies of women do not deserve and cannot have a place of prominence, power, or even autonomy.
In the works of Isabel Nogueira and Leandra Lambert the voice is used in several ways, including: • In melodic vocalizations referring to shamanic and / or ritualistic songs; • It is used with a semantic sense, exploring texts whose meanings are important for apprehension of the piece. In most cases the texts refer to the feminine universe, feminist questions, or question, satire and criticize hegemonic cultures, as is the case of Encarnando Umas Vozes, in which the artists recite a text of a woman character that talks about her universe. In the text the woman talks about how her references in music and in life as general were built on a male basis and how she managed to deconstruct and confront these references. She asks herself what is to be a woman and the response is, at the same time, very affirmative and feminist when she says, for example: "My father and my stepfather, my grandfather, my teachers all and other figures of authority hadn't the pretension of saying what I should or should not hear and if they did it they would hear a 'fuck you'. Some boyfriends had the arrogance to pretend to know what the best was, but they stayed there with their annoyances and I listened to what I wanted." 19 And reaffirms some stereotyped vision of femininity when they use, in the back sound, a female shamanic singing which operates in a proposition of valuing these stereotyped visions.
• It is used as a dissociated object of referentiality, exploring the possibilities of sound / noise of the voice. The voice in this piece mentioned above, is used with this semantic sense with a text that is recited and has the intention to be understood and, also, with the exploration of sounds of phonemes, without a semantic sense, like "sssss", "tztztz", "rrrrr", or sound of breathing, groan, sigh and others.
Thinking about the symbolic issue of the use of the voice by women, when Isabel and Leandra use their voices in their work, they break with a supposed silence that is demanded of women, and, at the same time, reaffirm women's places of power. When referring to shamanic or ritualistic songs, Leandra and Isabel refer to women from cultures in which the singing of women means power and strength. These cultures and these women have been subject of interest of some feminist ethnomusicologists such as Carol E. Robertson (1993) and by the decolonial feminism thinkers. Robertson (1993), for example, studies the Mapuche people in Argentina and the shaman function in that society. As she points out this function, called machi is 20 usually practiced by the women of the group and they are recognized as: powerful spiritually in that they were able to harness the transformational forces of female energy. Their clairvoyance made them extremely powerful politically as well: in their ability to see the many layers of the present, they were often able to move their people to action. Their ability to predict hostile attacks, their power to mold public opinion and their ability to strengthen defeated warriors through chant made the machi a serious threat to the Argentine military. (Robertson 1993, 109-111. Emphasis added).
Gloria Anzaldúa highlights the importance of the spiritual dimension that connects "the different worlds" (material and spiritual) in the identity of the people from colonized places that were violated from their (ours) history and ancestry. She suggests that the feminism in this reality must consider these things that made and make the history of "our" people strong and genuine: There are certain traditions like the shamanic tradition that teach you to experience the interpenetration of those other worlds. (...) So here we go as feminists-wanting to be practical, wanting to make a difference, wanting to make some changes. We're looking at everything that gives us strength: having roots, having a historical past that we can connect with and say, "This is the route that my particular group has walked and I can see how what happened in the past has affected the present and therefore affected me and who I am and how I feel about myself". So we've dug into the past for a history and models and women and stories that can give us some sort of ground to walk on, some sort of foundation, some sort of place to take off from and also to find positive stuff there that will feed us, that will inspire us. (Anzaldúa 2000, 159-160) Therefore, by singing referring to shamanic and ritualistic chants, in a female voice, Isabel Nogueira and Leandra Lambert brings the reference of women that were recognized as powerful and strong in their societies. Women that had an important social role to play, confronting our patriarchal culture in which these values (those referred to spirituality and femininity) are neglected and devaluated.
By using feminist texts from the feminine universe and / or questioning, satirizing and criticizing hegemonic models and practices, the two artists are refusing to be silent, even and especially in the face of oppression. If, on the one hand, the field of experimental music is more open and free to experiment, on the other hand it is still male domain, so bringing explicit texts that present the feminine universe and feminist questions transgress and propose a political action through music. The use of voice noise refers to a more explored place within the field of experimental music, which breaks away from the notion of musical sound of a certain traditional musical culture (Iazzetta, 2014;Campesato 2013).
Still, the two artists use technology to record, edit, distort, and interfere with their music. In general, the use of technology by women in itself is already a transgressor, since technology is generally associated with men and masculinity, as pointed by many authors such as Georgina Born (2015), Tara Rodgers (2010); Andra McCartney (1997), Pirkko Moisala (2000) and Lucy Green (2001).
Finally, we would like to reiterate that the intention of this presentation is not to speak on behalf of any specific group. We propose a reflexive and critical look at our local context and possible creative and political outings of the traps that are imposed on us and that we also help to arm.
Living and creating borders, for us, is that. To realize the oppressions and privileges we suffer and enjoy. It is to risk an analysis with a huge desire for social changes and effective improvements to the lives of the most oppressed people in the world. It is not having answers but proposing ways and reflections.


Crafting Cinema in the Buddhist Contemplative Gaze

: In this essay, I discuss the evolution of my approach to creating Buddhist contemplative cinema. I begin, by way of personal anecdotes, deﬁning my approach to Buddhist life and the evolution of what I will call the “Buddhist contemplative gaze”—a fundamental shift in perspective shaped by the Buddhist meditation experience. I continue with a discussion of Buddhist art and the distinctive multidimensional quality of the cinema-viewing experience that makes it suitable for celebrating, sharing, and exploring the Buddhist contemplative experience. I trace how my work and life as a Buddhist and a ﬁlmmaker come together in this working approach as an artist. The ﬁnal section of the essay includes reﬂections on my ﬁlm, ONE MIND , as an experiment in crafting cinema in the Buddhist contemplative gaze.

Introduction
Once a film is finished, it goes out into the world. You see your film forging relationships with strangers, and it is time to turn toward new ideas. A year or so after I finished my last film, ONE MIND (2015), I was invited to write this essay on the topic of Buddhism and film. At that time, I had been doing little other than thinking about Buddhism and film. I had been playing in that sandbox for a while already, so I was happy to stop and put all this down to paper.
Many of the films we call "Buddhist" films are films about Buddhists. But what I want to talk about here is the art of cinema-making as a Buddhist art like calligraphy, poetry, painting, iconography or architecture. I am looking at cinema itself, the language and forms of cinema, employed as a dynamic art suited to celebrating, sharing, and exploring the Buddhist contemplative life.
I do not want to define anything for anyone else. This is just how I do it. I am a Buddhist and I am a meditator and I am an American artist-a filmmaker. These were once divided, and estranged elements of my life. With this essay, I have pieced together just how and by what process these elements have evolved and united for me into a working approach to Buddhist contemplative cinema. I also want to talk about why I think all of this is worth doing at all. Why it matters.

Shifting Perspectives
It was right around the time I was heading into college that I started getting interested in the contemplative life. I started to read a lot, and Hesse, Salinger, Maugham, and Kerouac were taking me on epic, soulful adventures. Whether they took me to a living room on the Upper East Side, or a yogi's hut in India, their writing had an incandescence-lit from the inside with inquiry and a spiritual longing. This felt new to me and was the beginning of a profound shift within me, one which illuminated a vast inner world that I was eager to explore.
Looking back, what I found in their writing was a shift in perspective toward a wider view of life. One that respects the entire spectrum of human experience-from joy to pain and everything in between. There is a dark aspect to this world, and we usually encourage one another to turn away from that shadow. I was frustrated by the messages around me-from billboards, television, and checkout-counter magazines-that said happiness is out there somewhere, in the opposite direction of the darkness. That you find happiness with your back toward sorrow, pain, longing, and disappointment. There was a whole part of life that felt hidden but full of meaning; taboo but honest. I did not want to abandon that darkness, as if it did not matter, and in me began to boil an eagerness to rebel against that great perpetuating myth about happiness.
That was when, by a miracle of serendipity and some great advice from my academic advisor, I landed in Dr. Harris's course on Buddhism. Everything kind of changed after that. That day I heard the Buddha's life story for the first time, and it was revelatory. I do not think I was really conscious of it at the time, but the Buddha embodied this very sense of rebellion to me. I learned that the Buddha was a prince and that his parents had him cloistered in a palace, hiding him away from the inevitabilities of sickness, old age, and death. But he abandoned palace life and struck out in the night, cutting off his royal locks, the symbol of his princely rank, to enter into the forest to meditate and live the contemplative life. He turned his gaze inward and committed his entire being to inner cultivation.
What he left behind for us is the Dharma-practical and simple, yet evolutive teachings on how to become a kinder and wiser being in this world. I had found my shift in perspective, and with it, a lifetime of creative exploration.

The Contemplative Gaze
Subhuti, if a bodhisattva should thus claim, 'I shall bring about the transformation of a world,' such a claim would be untrue. And how so?
The transformation of a world, Subhuti, the 'transformation of a world' is said by the Tathagata to be no transformation. Thus is it called the 'transformation of a world'. (Red Pine 2001, p. 304) In college, my exploration of Buddhist thought and culture deepened. At the same time, I was getting interesting in art. I had started reading the poems of a Tang Dynasty hermit poet named Cold Mountain. Jack Kerouac affectionately called him a Zen Lunatic (Kerouac 1958) and seemed to identify with his aesthetic sensibility and his rebellious tone, and so did I. Around that time, Bill Porter wrote a book called Road to Heaven (Porter 1993). In it, he said there are hermits like Cold Mountain living in modern China now, just like in the old days. So, after school, off I went on the road to find Cold Mountain myself.
In my first documentary, Amongst White Clouds (2005), you meet the hermit monk whom I still call my teacher today. Shifu taught me how to read scripture, and he taught me to meditate. He is a true mountain monk, with a direct and creative sensibility. He taught me how to sit and explore the forms and capacities of my mind in a way that spoke directly to my own idiosyncrasies and sensibilities as an artist. Every time I hiked down that mountain trail, the world seemed a little different than it did on the way up. And over the many years of meditation practice to follow, in both Chan 1 and Vipassana traditions, a whole new way of seeing and engaging the world started to emerge within me-a way of seeing I call the "contemplative gaze." Contemplative gaze means living with an awareness of mind-just that basic recognition that within us is this great mindscape, and what goes on in there defines what goes on out here, in life and how we experience the world. Once we start paying attention to that, taking up a meditation practice 1 I use "Zen" when referring to this tradition of approaching and cultivating the Buddhadharma in general, "Chan" when I am talking about Zen Buddhism in China.
to strengthen it, we step into the contemplative life. But the contemplative gaze is not an enlightened gaze-it is just a shift in perspective that happens naturally when we do meditation. We may discover ourselves standing anywhere on the spectrum from confused to enlightened, and that does not matter here. What matters is the gaze. With the gaze, you are on the Path. And the Path is what Buddhist contemplatives share regardless of where we find ourselves on it.
First, we turn our gaze inward and discover our capacity to pay attention and observe our own body and mind. We work on increasing the fidelity of that attention, the breadth and depth of observation. At first, every thread of our being rebels. It feels awkward and unnatural. But we learn to stay put, sit still, and stick with it. Slowly, as if a light were turned on, shapes begin to emerge. The forms and structures of the mind and of the self-mechanism gain definition as they emerge from the shadows. Mind becomes something workable, something we can relate to. And we can explore in that space. Like the sun rising over a mountain valley, shadows recede, and there is a lovely stream flowing and some patches of dark forest, a cliffside overlooking a grassy pasture, maybe some questionably menacing creatures are milling about. These are not hallucinations: I am just saying that is what it feels like in there-that richness and detail.
When we stand up and open our eyes, the inner world recedes to the background again, concentration is broken by the world's shower of signals, like from out of a cave into the light of day we go. Over time, though, the contemplative gaze inward becomes so strong and resolute that even as we look outward, we can hold that gaze, unwavering, and carry it out into the world and into our lives. This is quite a miraculous thing, a blossoming of the contemplative gaze. The inner realm and the outer realm unite into a single, unified field of experience. The world suddenly feels rich with meaning. As with the explorations of the inner landscapes, insight is inherent in every perception.
Different Buddhist meditation traditions might define this contemplative gaze in different ways. I practiced Chan meditation in China for many years before that pointed me toward Vipassana. I can only speak to my own personal experience and how complimentary both traditions have been in my own life as a Buddhist practitioner and a Buddhist artist. Chan opened me up to the power of inquiry, vulnerability and the nature of mind-its fundamental spatial qualities. Vipassana turned me toward understanding body, form, structure, and the self-mechanism.
Regardless of the tradition practiced, by what method you cultivate it, for me, this contemplative gaze is a fundamental shift toward an artistic perspective 2 -from a life lived for what we see, to a life lived for how we see. It is a shift from distraction toward presence. From a reactive relationship with the world toward an illuminating gaze upon the world. This is a definitive contemplative Buddhist experience. We are not talking about states of euphoria or being carried off somewhere. Inherent in this gaze itself is a power to heal and evolve-to move toward buddhahood.

New Art for an Old Path
When we look at a work of art, we bring our whole being with us in that moment-our karmic baggage body-everything that colors the way we see the world. Art can be like a mirror that reflects back to us who we are in that moment. We see things, but in those things, we see ourselves too; our past, our aggression or our passion relating to that thing, all reflecting back to us. Everything is aglow with this incandescence. And some art calls on us to engage that reflecting itself and deepen it.
A lot of what we create in this world is crafted to distract us-carry us away in emotional reveries. I do not want to dismiss the value of pure entertainment, but I do want to point out this important distinction. Contemplative art is not a distraction, it is an illumination. It gives form to the ineffable, takes it out of the shadows, makes it workable, makes it relatable. The art impulse has always been about giving shape to mystery. From the Buddhist perspective, the mystery is mind itself. Traditional Buddhist art forms such as calligraphy, landscape painting, poetry, and story have given shape to the contemplative experience for many centuries. Years ago, I had a book on the Zen Arts that I really loved. And in there was a big, beautiful black and white photo of Ryoanji Rock Garden in Kyoto. A couple years ago, my wife and I went to see that garden. The first glance through the frame of dark timber pillars and roof beams took my breath away. From the viewing-veranda, the precision of the craftsmanship of the whole garden, the angles, the composition, the textures-it is like being in the presence of mind itself. There is a skillful utility of form and means that resonates with the mindscape within us, lights it up, and grounds us in presence and attention. I thought, there has got to be a way to make cinema as elegant but impactful as this.
The distinctive multidimensional quality of the cinema-viewing experience makes it suitable for celebrating, sharing, and exploring the Buddhist contemplative experience as I know it and as I see others living it. I look for inspiration from cinema masters like Andrei Tarkovsky, Werner Herzog, Agnès Varda, and David Lynch, who I think are working with cinema with similar intention. These filmmakers are interested in memory and dreams and ecstatic vision. And they work at such a transcendent depth, working with cinema as a language to express a mysterious and profound inquiry into human experience, that I believe they are edging up on something universal. I do not think any of them would say that they are Buddhist contemplative artists, but in their work, I recognize the contemplative principles that I want to explore though film.

ONE MIND-A Study
ONE MIND began as a simple documentary project. I lived at the monastery. I filmed everything I saw. But I was sitting meditation with the monks five times a day too, and they were teaching me how to properly live within a Chan monastic community. ONE MIND is an artistic experiment born out of what I learned. My filmmaking approach evolved as my understanding of the dynamics of contemplative life deepened. In post-production, it was sometimes frustrating to work with the earlier footage, which was not imbued with my later, more clarified approach. This showed me how important it is that all dimensions of the filmmaking process cooperate in a well-defined vision that informs each cinema moment. I see in ONE MIND some failures and some successes. It is a study in contemplative Buddhist cinema. Below are four aspects of the filmmaking that I think outline my inspiration and approach.

Living Narratives
The first time I visited Zhenru Chan Monastery I completely fell in love with the place. I had been studying with Buddhists in China for seven years but had not seen anything like this yet. It is basically a big farm. And the red-brick buildings, the creaky wooden floors, the smell of wood-fire from the kitchen, and beautiful, big gardens felt like home to me. The monks there are meditator monks, and you can tell. Life in the meditation hall lends the Chan monk a very distinctive gait, and life there in the mountains, a certain athleticism. This was a farm community for meditators-and I could hardly believe such a place existed in the world. That is where I filmed ONE MIND. Every year at Zhenru, there is a Chanqi winter meditation retreat. Footage from this arduous, wintry lockdown bookends ONE MIND and inspires the entire approach of the film. During the chanqi, the meditation sessions begin with an incredible ritual. I would find out later that it is a stylized adaptation of the Sudhana story from Chapter 39 of the Avatamsaka Sutra. 3 But when I stepped into this thing, it felt like pure theatre; like a communal performance celebrating and inspiring the contemplative journey.
As the meditators circle the meditation hall's central altar at an ever-quickening pace, four of the senior monks peel away and take a position at one of the corners of the hall. Then, one by one, each 3 In her book, Seeing Like the Buddha, Francisca Cho describes a structural expression of this narrative at Borobudur that is interesting to compare (Cho 2017). raises his xiangban-a ritual implement, in the shape of a long wooden sword-high over his head and calls out loud and in a long and drawn-out deep tone: Qiiiiiiiii! 4 Still walking briskly but hunched at the waist in a deep bow, together we bellow a response:

Qiiiiiiiii!!
This call and response continues until finally, a signal is struck and with heaving chests, we disperse to find our seats on the meditation bench around the periphery of the hall. Meditation begins.
During a break, warming our feet around a brazier full of glowing coals, I asked a senior monk the meaning of this ritual, and he told me the story like this: A pilgrim named Sudhana went on a journey to find Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future. Maitreya lived in a fortress, and when Sudhana arrived at the fortress he discovered it had no gate to enter by and no windows. Dumbfounded, Sudhana considered how he could enter the fortress. Just then Manjusri, Bodhisattva of Wisdom, appeared beside Sudhana and grabbed him by the robe with one hand and with his sword of wisdom held high in the other hand, shouted "Qi!"-and pulled Sudhana through the wall of the fortress and into its inner chamber. There, the young Sudhana stood, face to face with Maitreya, the Buddha of the Future. 5 It is a classic hero's journey, but distinctly Zen in its telling-the intensity of the pace, Sudhana's pause, evoking "qi", the fortress that calls to mind the "gateless gate" and Manjusri with his sword of wisdom breaking through the impenetrable with a "sudden" and piercing wisdom.
Finally, it is up to each meditator to take on the remaining leg of Sudhana's journey, each within the theatre of their own inner mindscape.
I recognized then that I was participating in a kind of lived storytelling. And I looked around the monastery to discover the entire canon of traditional Zen narratives not only being told and passed down between monks and masters but also being performed with the same visceral dimensionality within the everyday life at the monastery. I felt as if I had woken up from a stupor or tuned in to a secret frequency broadcast. I could see P'u Ming's Oxherd Pictures come to life in the monk who tends the monastery oxen. Gong'an like "zen and tea are one flavor" come to life in the traditional tea leaf harvest and the quiet, deliberateness of ceremonial tea drinking before meditation. The "field" of mind and the "thicket" of views all come to life. Even the shape of the monk's bowl speaks a narrative. All of it part of what you could call the "everyday" 6 of Chan monastic life there.
To capture the ease and confidence of life there at Zhenru, long suspended shots seemed right-moving past cliché, past simple metaphor, and into the real-time moments where life is being lived in the world of the film. We tend to look at an image and, once recognizing what it is, move swiftly on. The thought is there, "oh, the monk is gardening" and then, what is next? I like a film that stays put and allows for attentive looking and listening. 7 Not unlike the sustained gaze of observation we cultivate in our meditation practice.
As a meditator and as an artist, I sank a layer deeper into the rich embrace of that life and I knew there was so much to learn, as a filmmaker, from these lived narratives. I was, after all, looking for a way to make a film about this community that does not just show like a portrait, or explain like a slideshow presentation, but a film that is of that experience itself-a film where form and subject are unified. 4 ch'i, 起-arise! 5 I have heard at least a few variations of this story. Many monks insisted it is a strictly oral rendering and cannot be found in any text. Where this stylized version differs from the Avatamsaka narrative, I think, reveals a lot about the character of the Chan approach. 6 For an interesting exploration of the "everyday" in transcendental style in film, see Paul Schrader's, Transcendental Style in Film (Schrader 2018). 7 Ozu and Bresson and Tarkovsky are wonderful to watch in this respect. Much has been written on this topic.

The Organic Soundscape
Picture is how we see space, but sound is how we feel it. Zhenru Chan Monastery is in the mountains and remote. The community is mostly self-sufficient, and that magnifies the contemplative atmosphere of the place-adding a layer of sanctuary to it. Our sound designer, Douglas Quin intuited that, and he crafted an immersive world through music and sound-design to reflect that. His soundscape is of the place and is crafted to serve the film's inward trajectory. Working with location audio recordings and instrumentation carefully chosen to be in natural harmony with the environment at Zhenru, he created what I call "musical elements" to evoke a sense of mystery in certain scenes, or as cues in the narrative, especially at shifts in perspective. In some passages, Doug used processing and manipulation of location audio recordings, transforming them, as he describes it, "to reveal their inner workings and worlds of sound within sound". In this way, the ONE MIND soundscape reflects the deepening gaze of meditation, is in tune with the inward journey, and has the feeling of having emerged from within the place itself. Nothing seems to enter from the outside. You step into the world of the monastery and everything you need is there in that space. Like when we sit down to meditate; everything you need is there-breath, body, mind.
If we can slow down and let it, sound can be such a rich and visceral adventure. In cinema, sound invites us to look deeply into long, suspended shots-past simple metaphor, and into a sense of environment, where life is being lived in the world of the film. Wind rustles a bush here, a foot steps there, a monk picks a ripe little tea leaf. The evocation of attention together with the conveyed sense of space make sound integral in establishing the dimensionality of a cinematic image.

The Inner Landscapes
I was not interested in the development of the plot, in the chain of events-with each film I feel less and less need for them. I have always been interested in a person's inner world . . . (Tarkovsky 1986, p. 204) The traditional narratives alive at Zhenru connect us to more than just the life experience there-they speak to real, embodied inner experience too, as with the story of Sudhana's journey. Over the centuries, these are the narratives that survived cultural "natural-selection" to be recounted by Zen masters and rendered by Zen artists as powerful tools to inspire, guide, and communicate inward contemplative experience. But how to make a film in this tradition?
To begin, we need to establish a structure and a grammar that allows for images to belong simultaneously to both the inner and outer realms of experience. This is not new to cinema, and many great filmmakers work in the realm of dreams, memory or ecstatic vision. We can start from there to establish the cinema frame in that gaze, capable of looking upon the unified field of experience that the contemplative traverses. Tarkovsky, Herzog, Malick, Varda, and Lynch guide me.
Firstly, I agree with Andrey Tarkovsky when he says that working within the inner realms is working with life at its most true and so, the images should look true.
I would say that in cinema 'opacity' and 'ineffability' do not mean an indistinct picture, but the particular impression created by the logic of the dream: unusual and unexpected combinations of, and conflicts between, entirely real elements. (Tarkovsky 1986, p. 72) How we invite the audience to accept an image as dreamscape is in mise en scène, and the "logic" of the edit. And so it is with contemplative cinema. We must edit in the logic of the contemplative gaze. There are certain edits-cued by rhythm of edit or sound, dialogue, or a character's gesture-that are pregnant and powerful, shifting our vision to the inner-landscape view. It is an appropriation of the standard POV shot, but the image belongs to the inner realm-the mindscape-or to the unified field of experience where the contemplative abides. I think Herzog and his editor Joe Bini have mastered this approach in Encounters at the End of the World (2007).
If a film succeeds in making the audience familiar and comfortable with this shifting between realms of vision, then the contemplative gaze finds its full fruition when we can no longer say for certain if what we are seeing in the frame of the cinema screen is the character's gaze upon their world, or upon themselves-their inward gaze. Now we are working with both what the character sees and how the character sees, simultaneously. We are in the contemplative gaze.
We look out at mountain landscapes, or a great sprawl of farmland or a bamboo forest, and these landscapes are nothing other than the character's own inner landscapes. Now the film can play in that space, with all elements of landscape available-like a drop of rain or a drifting cloud, an insect or an ox, swift and fleeting birds.
In ONE MIND, in keeping with the very structural "fortress" element of the Sudhana story, I looked for ways to establish a strong sense of this spatial grammar in the film by using images with a strong feeling of spatial definition-features of architecture and natural landscape. I began by thinking, for example, of the monastery-and by extension, the inner-sanctum of the meditation hall-as Maitreya's fortress. There is no need for precision here. We are working in atmosphere, not metaphor. 8 This physical sense of formality, married with moments of closing or closed eyes, images, and sounds of doorways and the impression of moving into and out from spaces sets the groundwork for these shifts in point of view from the internal to the external and back again.

Who Is Looking?
When I consider how to compose an image, I think of how it will live in the frame of the cinema screen. That box of light on the wall is a portal into a world the filmmaker creates. Beyond the frame extends an entire reality; there is space there, and time too. When we approach cinema in the contemplative gaze, and we are working with the structural, formal voice of the film, the cinema-space comes alive in its original, true power. It brings to the fore something innate and primal to cinema itself, and because this cinema-space shares so much in qualities with mind itself, these cinema images evoke a very mysterious effect in the viewer. A kind of resonance occurs between the cinema-space and the inner landscape of the viewer themselves. It opens us up to that sense of space within us, and we feel grounded in that sense of being awake inside. I think this is Dorsky's "alchemy"-the union of materiality and subject matter he so eloquently describes in Devotional Cinema (Dorsky 2014, p. 25).
Within this formality, established by visual and audial shaping, the frame-and I mean the cinema screen itself-is energized, empowered as a reference point, to establish a point-of-view. The question who is looking? emerges.
In the case of ONE MIND, establishing this grounding in form, and not presenting a character arc to follow, is intended to shift the perspective of the film away from a reactive posture and away from emotional absorption and distraction-not to leave you hanging there in some kind of void but to settle into the gaze itself. The viewer is free to respond to the film's subject-as nature intends we do-but grounded in the contemplative gaze, we experience ourselves in that scene.
And so, cinema mirrors meditation. More often than not, films ignore this formal quality of the cinema-space and use it simply as a void to fill with story. It can even sometimes be imbued with an aggressive point of view, calling us to respond emotionally, dramatically, and get carried away in the plot, wandering in a web of impulses. But here we are crafting cinema in the image of Buddhist contemplative values, so we engage this quality of film to find our footing and ground ourselves in the mindscape within us like a watchtower from whence we can relate to our unfolding life with illumination and an intention toward healing insight.
The larger structure of ONE MIND is meant to enforce this gaze. My partner and co-writer of ONE MIND, Agnes and I were very deliberate about the grammar of the opening text and chapter text. Maitreya is talking to you. You are the "Young Pilgrim": Throughout the film, too, are nods to this grammar. There are images where the inner landscape of the frame is meant to be for you. Especially the ox. This is a deliberate shift in the grammatical structure.
Some people tell me the quiet scenes of domestic monastic life ease them into a calm and easy rhythm. Others feel ill-at-ease listening to the sound of the razor scraping over the monk's freshly-shaved head. I feel in that case that I got something right.
People sometimes say ONE MIND does not have a plot. But I like to think it does. It is just that the plot is not happening inside of the film, it is happening inside you. In ONE MIND, you are the Pilgrim Sudhana. The scenes you are gazing upon are the inner landscapes of a very special, deliberate spiritual community of meditators living in the mountains of Jiangxi Province. But the journey is all yours.
I want ONE MIND to connect the viewer to the challenges of deep contemplative practice-that an authentic contemplative life-like we see at Zhenru-is not all peace and happiness. We are Buddhists, not buddhas! These men are struggling the same as we struggle. And while I think we owe them a great respect as people who have chosen to take this struggle on with the entirety of their being and the whole of their precious life, they want us to plant our feet and stay put and look life in the eye as they do, too. I hope that ONE MIND, as a viewing experience, invites each viewer into this very whole and authentic posture toward life. As I went searching for it many years ago.

Conclusions
At Zhenru, I discovered a commitment to contemplative life on a community level, where all things reflect those basic contemplative values of insight and illumination. As a whole, this kind of monastery is a microcosm for what community can look like when we choose to take on that shift in perspective together and craft our environment in the image of those values, to tell those stories to one another and move toward that vision together. Capturing that in film meant I had to look not only at what these monks live but how they live. And cinema was a perfect vehicle for that because with cinema, I could show you the place and the people as they appear in the contemplative gaze.
The contemplative life is about living life as we live in meditation. Showing up, and staying put. Grounded, not distracted. Inquiring, not averse. Illuminating, not reactive. So, I see contemplative Buddhist art, and cinema included, as a profound kind of protest against our own confusion. And by extension, against the status quo of suffering and abuse in our world born of that collective confusion. It is a radical thing to turn one's gaze within.
All stories are worth being told, joyful or painful, gentle or violent. But there is a toxic way to tell a story and a healthy way-with an open heartedness and an intention toward reconciliation with darkness and joyfulness. And I think this is the greatest gift that art can give us. It empowers us to relate to ourselves in a more authentic way and when we can do that naturally, we begin to heal, and when we heal, we evolve.
Years ago, at a monastery in the north of China, a close teacher of mine 9 said to me: A buddha is a being, like you or I, who has awoken from the dream of ignorance. That makes us all dreaming buddhas. Much is written about how to tackle dreams in cinema. But how to tackle the dream? We can approach cinema with the same techniques as Tarkovsky or Herzog. We can carry the audience along on a trip into the inner landscapes. And that is really great cinema, but it is not Buddhist contemplative cinema. What makes it Buddhist is in the recognition of the big dream and the aspiration to wake up. 9 Ven. Ming Ying, who at that time was the senior prior at Bailin Chan Monastery.
Once we make this vow, we step into a life with new intentions. All manner of evils are committed in the misguided yearnings of an unfulfilled, fractured heart. Wholeness, though, is the foundation for kindness. And that is why all of this matters-art, cinema, meditation. Art is not all about creating things, it is also about learning to see with an artful gaze. Learning to look.
Funding: This manuscript received no external funding.