Aquarius’ declaration

Abstract

This essay seeks to share discussions, contradictions and questions that the film Aquarius produced on us, on the basis of our backgrounds and experiences as workers of the public health system. From an interdisciplinary construction, we reflect on themes and concepts such as gender, social class, ethnicity, race, identity/ otherness, epochal logics and forms of subjectivities, gentrification. The result was the raising of different questions and interpretations of the stories that intersect in a complex plot from the figure of Clara, the main character. We use three levels of analysis, linked with one another and organized in a hierarchy: a macro-level, linked with the commercial logic and the mode of production; another one, referred to social relationships (institutional); and, finally, that of everyday life (particularization of the generic-social, embodied in the account of situations from the film). The challenge was to problematize obvious readings and thence to question our own mandates around the feminine and women. We propose on this path, a little rambling and confused, to retrieve scenes, dialogues, characters, that we link -direct or indirectly- with social, urban, subjective issues which are representative of phenomena existing and extended in areas of our intervention and training, from a perspective oriented to a critical analysis of the differential health- disease- care process. From a tension between commercial logic- logic of the singular, we consider some of the questions that organize our thinking: How is it possible to resist the prevailing commercial logic? What is the sense of doing it in solitude? What happens with the difficulty to build collective horizons? What is it Clara faces?