When the master Abdias Nascimento conceived his Teatro do Sentenciado in Carandiru, he perhaps did not know that he was about to inaugurate a terreiro of abolition. A terreiro that would give rise to so many other Houses across Brazil, inhabited by restless artists committed to breaking the bars and chains that still insist on suffocating the veins of Black, poor, and peripheral communities. And here we are speaking of prisons, psychiatric institutions, forced custody homes, and every other institution of deprivation of liberty. Through the thick walls that still separate us, Abdias was opening a crack. Small, dangerous, irreversible. And it is through that crack that the light enters.

FITA emerges within this field of tension: between what already exists and what we still do not know how to do, but must begin; between what we are already sowing in the world even beneath the hard concrete of these institutions; and what was entrusted to us by our ancestors, which ensured that we could live in a world that, though still far from our urgencies, is the embodied dream that makes our journey gentler and hope possible.

With this, we call upon artists, researchers, activists, and indisciplined people of every kind who are committed to the far-from-simple task of dismantling punitive imaginaries and experimenting with other forms of coexistence.