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 Book-Block, Party Machine

 

 

Take your mind off dancing. Launch sentences like streamers. Fluttering images, stories, verses, drawings and daydreams like banners that transport and translate the experience of Rio de Janeiro's street Carnival onto the pages of a book. A space that promotes the meeting of bodies, in a ball of ideas, stories and images. A block-book, a dirty block, the most libertarian and anarchic genre of carnival block, a direct descendant of the most ancestral of carnivals, the Dionysian festivals.

 

This publication was born from the desire to reflect on the carnival experience from the perspective of the emergence, in the 2019 Carnival in Rio de Janeiro, of a specific block. Panamérica Transatlantica was conceived in Paris,  gestated for a few years within La Centrale 22 by Dado Amaral, Viviana Méndez, Pablo Schalscha and other people connected to the transatlantic networks of this collective. Artists and activists from France, Brazil, Chile, Peru, Argentina, Portugal, Italy and other nations make up this intangible fabric, this living network. All these people made the project of a plurinational carnival block, the materialization of the meeting of people from different origins, germinate little by little, year after year, until it blossomed in Carnival 19.

 

Among the members who joined the adventure of leaving for Brazil to put the block on the streets was Bastien Gallet, coordinator of Éditions MF and collaborator of La Centrale 22. Bastien went, saw and came back impressed with the strength of the street Carnival in Rio de Janeiro . The poemLet the bloc advance, an admirable synthesis of the experience of participating in a street block, is the result of his experiences at Rio Carnival. Bastien Gallet's original idea for producing this book, a collective essay, an experience of reflection, investigation and creation around the experience of Carnival and its poetic, political, historical and social potential.

 

The initial criteria was to invite artists and intellectuals who participated in the block's first parade, in March  2019, to collaborate with the book, whether with poetic, fictional or theoretical texts, or with visual works related to the carnival universe. As the project matured, the design became more ambitious, and began to count on collaborations with important contemporary thinkers of Brazilian culture, such as historian Luiz Antônio Simas and musician/musicologist Luís Filipe de Lima, who produced texts especially for this edition . Internationally renowned contemporary artists such as Ernesto Neto, Jarbas Lopes and Cabelo also joined the project and sent original creations. Franck Leibovici, who participated in the rehearsals and the block's departure in Paris (inFête de la Musique2019), created a work especially for the book.

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The year 2020 came, and with it the global pandemic. Carnival happened, Panamérica Transatlântica left and soon after Rio de Janeiro closed. During this time, the scope of the book expanded even further. We included historical texts by central writers in Brazilian culture such as Mário de Andrade, perhaps the most important intellectual in the study and understanding of the country's popular culture. Texts by him and by Machado de Assis, José de Alencar, Lima Barreto, João do Rio, Manuel Bandeira, Oswald de Andrade and Carlos Drummond de Andrade bring us other historical and literary perspectives on the Rio de Janeiro Carnival phenomenon.

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The dialogue with the visual arts, constitutive of La Centrale 22 and deeply rooted in the tradition of Rio Carnival, has taken place here since the genesis of the block, which has two Chilean artists at its original core. Hélio Oiticica, a central figure in Brazilian art, was chosen as one of the block's patrons and an aesthetic reference for Panamérica Transatlântica. Oiticica undertook the transition from abstract, cerebral art to the search for what he called supra-sensory, proposing creation through the bodily act and the “experimental exercise of freedom”. The artist's relationship with the Mangueira community, its traditional samba school and the world of Carnival was definitive, and definitely changed the direction of his work and his thinking.

 

The aesthetic urgency of Panamérica Transatlântica's propositions is mirrored in their political urgency, as Brazil elected an extreme right-wing government in 2018, which brought the military and the moral crusade back into politics. Thus, organizing a carnival group, rehearsing and parading through the streets of the city is above all a possibility of promoting encounters, meetings, discussions and collective creation. This book is also the result of this association, this network created around the idea of a stateless carnival block, or a floating continent, like Saramago's stone raft.

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Panamérica Transatlântica was born with its heart in Afro-Brazilian culture,  its head in the fight against social inequality, in the integration of the cultures that form Brazil, and in the non-tolerance of fascism and violent ignorance that plague the country, and of which , unfortunately, no one is free yet.

We hope that the “party machine” of this book-book, its crossed looks, the dance of its ideas and images can bring new visions of the Brazilian Carnival, stripped of prejudices and folklorizations, as well as new understandings about its political potency, of its strength of resistance, of its civilizational proposal.

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Dado Amaral

(book presentation text)

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