A community can be understood as a compound of expectations, interactions, and behaviours that humans perform amongst themselves. On the other hand, a community creates a network of meanings that we share amongst ourselves, and that allows us to communicate, through images, meanings, and feelings that, although pertaining to each individual, concern everyone.
However, within the community, there is a tension between a collective will and individual freedom. We see examples of it in the stories of Aniki Bóbó and Tragic Story with Happy Ending, in which the main characters live between their world and the adult world (a community of which they are also part of), trying on one hand to adapt, and on the other to find their place. The same can be said of the girl who draws in Time – Past and Present.

What is it that supports or allows the act of being together? According to Michel Maffesoli (In Au Creux des Apparences, 1990), it is sometimes an idea of what it should be; other times, on the contrary, it is what’s sensitive, the communication, and the collective emotion. Recognizing something together with others is recognizing what binds us to the other, and this recognition will strengthen in each individual the bonds of belonging, with whoever it is – whatever their ethnic, national, religious, or political identity. This connection to the whole, in which the we becomes stronger than the I, can be described as a feeling of community.

Just like the boys under the starry sky of Aniki Bóbó, we also question ourselves about life and death, and for each one, the heart of the girl from Tragic History with Happy Ending will be the symbol of our uniqueness. This recognition with the other is a source of understanding without implying a consensus or a single meaning – works like Time – Past and Present or Domain Field invite the viewer to find his own narrative. Each one is invited to express himself, to create meaning. Being part of a community doesn’t mean leaving aside our individuality, the way we interpret and reflect on the world. Art contributes for the community to deal with the conflicts and differences that exist within it, precisely through each artist, expressing their vision of the world, offering the community “other realities, other forms of common sense, that is, other space-time devices, other communities of words and things, forms and meanings.”Jacques Ranciére, The Emancipated Spectator, 2008.