Critical Regards
Transversal Dialogues
The Word at Risk: A Conversation with Dieudonné Niangouna
WITH Dieudonné Niangouna and Guilherme Terreri
- March 14, Saturday, 2pm–4pm
- Sesc Vila Mariana
- Free admission | Ticket pickup 1 hour before the event
SYNOPSIS
Guilherme Terreri leads a conversation with Dieudonné Niangouna about the word as political dispute and a form of public survival. Drawing on a trajectory marked by war in Congo, the experience of displacement, and a dramaturgy in which body and territory are not metaphors but conditions of enunciation, Niangouna addresses the cost of speaking when language and stage carry colonial legacies and regimes of cultural legitimation.
The encounter highlights writing as a site of confrontation—between memory, risk, and presence—and asks what strategies make it possible to sustain complexity when the word itself is treated as a threat.
BACKGROUND
Dieudonné Niangouna is an author, director, actor, and educator born in the Republic of Congo. In 1997, he founded the company Les Bruits de la Rue in Brazzaville. Since 2007, he has been prominently featured at the Festival d’Avignon, where he served as associate artist in 2013. His prolific body of texts—widely recognized in Europe, Africa, and Latin America—is published by houses such as Les Solitaires Intempestifs and L’Espace d’un instant. In 2021, he received an award from the Académie Française for his overall dramaturgical work. Also a novelist and poet—La mise en papa won the Grand Prix Afrique Avant-Garde 2023—he is co-founder of the Festival Mantsina-sur-Scène in Brazzaville. MITsp previously presented his work The Foundation of Vertigo in its sixth edition (2019).
Guilherme Terreri is a cultural critic, professor, researcher, columnist, and popular educator. Known for bringing to life the drag persona Rita von Hunty, he has worked in universities, schools, and social movements in Brazil and abroad. He has contributed to more than 25 books—two of which were finalist and semifinalist for the Prêmio Jabuti Acadêmico in 2025. In 2025, at the invitation of the Rector’s Office of UnB, Terreri, as Rita, delivered the opening lecture of the academic semester. In 2023, invited by Brazil’s National LGBTQIA+ Secretariat (Ministry of Human Rights and Citizenship), in partnership with ENAP, he delivered the reopening conference of the Human Rights Training Program.