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The Cultural Frontline: Brazil’s small utopias

Magazines & Reviews

Brazil’s small utopias

07/01/2023 GMT

BBC World Service - The Cultural Frontline, Brazil’s small utopias

Brazilian artists create utopias in their work to imagine a better future

Brazilian artists create utopias in their work to imagine a better future.

As Brazil enters a challenging and uncertain era under the new president, British-Brazilian writer Yara Rodrigues Fowler talks to its artists about the small utopias they are creating. 

Writer Natalia Borges Polesso centres the non-romantic relationships of queer characters to forge precious connections in a country that is increasingly polarised. In her short story collection, Amora, she wanted readers to feel understood, while her latest novel The Extinction of Bees, urges readers to see the collapse happening all around them, and reimagine their present in order to create a better future.

In 2018, the sacred Indigenous cave of Kamakuwaká was vandalised. Photographer Piratá Waujá is helping his community to create a virtual reality experience in order to preserve their culture for future generations, and challenge fake news about Indigenous people. 

Keyna Eleison, the co-artistic director of the Modern Art Museum in Rio de Janeiro, takes us around Nakoada, the centenary exhibition of the birth of Brazilian Modernism. She discusses how humour can slowly shift the Eurocentric definition of art, and the importance of diverse collaborations in leaving an ‘intelligent’ legacy.

Elisa Larkin Nascimento, activist and collaborator of the late polymath Abdias Nascimento,  is thrilled to have a two-year exhibition of the Black Art Museum in rural Brazil. She opens it with an ancient Afro-Brazilian procession in order to strengthen links with the surrounding quilombos, or communities of runaway enslaved people. 

As the new president, Lula, makes ambitious commitments to diverse communities and the arts, what do they hope might change for them and their work? 

Producer: Eloise Stevens 
An Overcoat Media production for BBC World Service

Image: Dramatist Leda Maria Martins with Congado Mineiro at Inhotim (Credit: Zezzyinho Andraddy)

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