This year the University of Oxford’s Brazil Week commemorates the Centenary of the Semana de Arte Moderna [Modern Art Week]. In February 1922, a group of intellectuals and artists, and musicians held an arts festival in São Paulo that introduced audiences to bold new methods of creating, performing, and conceptualising Brazilian culture. It was a watershed moment. They re-evaluated the ways in which indigenous peoples and foreign trends—particularly European—influenced Brazilian artists and writers, and developed the metaphor of cannibalism as a positive form of cultural appropriation.
In the original programme there were lectures on art and architecture, concerts, and exhibitions. We decided to mark the occasion by recreating the ‘Semana’ by inviting specialists from around the world to talk about the same subjects one hundred years later and to reflect on the legacy of Modernism today.
See the PDF programme here.
Please note that registration closes 24hours before each event.
Monday 31 January
2–3pm, Online via Microsoft Teams
Opening Event
Cannibal Angels and the Cannibal Magazine: An Introductory Lecture
Opening Brazil Week 2022, K. David Jackson's lecture will explore Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago [Cannibal Manifesto], the Revista de Antropofagia [Cannibal Magazine], and the idea of 'anthropophagy'—enduring legacies of Brazil's Modern Art Week.
K. David Jackson is professor of Luso-Brazilian literatures and cultures at Yale University. He is author of Cannibal Angels: Transatlantic Modernism and the Brazilian Avant-Garde (2021) and co-translator with Elizabeth Jackson of Patrícia Galvão's novel, Industrial Park (1993).
Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/MRFtet7kfL
Tuesday 1 February
12–1pm, Online via Microsoft Teams
Cannibalising Cannibalism: Brazilian Contemporary Indigenous Art and São Paulo Modernism
Focusing on the work of multimedia artists Denilson Baniwa and Jaider Esbell, Lucia Sá will explore the ways in which indigenous contemporary art engages with—and cannibalises— the vanguard Movimento Antropofágico [Anthropophagic Movement] of 1920s Brazil.
Lucia Sá is Professor of Brazilian Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester, author of Rain Forest Literatures: Amazonian Texts and Latin American Culture (2004) and of numerous articles on Brazilian and Spanish American literatures and cultures. She has taught at universities in the United States, Brazil, and Portugal.
Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/KbCqakWnL3
4–5pm, Online via Microsoft Teams
Seminar on Brazilian Modernism, Cinema & Architecture
'From Baroque to Brasilia: Modernism in Brazilian Cities' by Andreza de Souza Santos,
'Framing Ruinscapes: Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins' by Guilherme Carrera
Andreza Souza Santos is the director of the Brazilian Studies Programme at the Latin American Centre, University of Oxford, where she also teaches politics and society in Brazil and Latin America. Her research and teaching interests include participatory politics, inequalities and local governments. Recent publications include “The Politics of Memory: Urban Cultural Heritage in Brazil” (2019) and the co-edited volumes “Urban Transformations and Public Health in the Emergent City” (2020) and “African Cities and Collaborative Futures” (2021).
Guilherme Carréra is a Brazilian journalist and film researcher. He holds a PhD in Film awarded by the University of Westminster, in London, UK. His project was sponsored by the CAPES Foundation (Ministry of Education, Brazil). He is the author of "Brazilian Cinema and the Aesthetics of Ruins" (Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/7HE1b5ccdJ
Wednesday 2 February
2–4pm, In-Person at Miles Room, St Peter’s College
Interdisciplinary Postgraduate Roundtable
Postgraduate researchers working on Brazil from different disciplines across the University of Oxford present their research projects.
Organised by Andrzej Stuart-Thompson and Vinicius Brunette (Sub-Faculty of Portuguese, Oxford).
Thursday 3 February
2–3pm, Online via Microsoft Teams
Author Event: Micheliny Verunschk, in conversation with Jimin Kang
Micheliny Verunschk in conversation with Jimin Kang on O som do rugido da onça [The Sound of the Roar of the Jaguar (2021)—Verunschk's most recent novel, which brings to life the experience of an indigenous girl taken to 19C Germany as part of a collection of scientific findings and interweaves it with the reflections of a twenty-first century protagonist.
Micheliny Verunschk is a prize-winning novelist, poet and historian, whose works include Nossa Teresa: Vida e morte de uma santa suicida [Our Teresa: Life and Death of a Holy Suicide] (2014), a trilogy of novels, set during the dictatorship but drawing links with contemporary Brazil, and O som do rugido da onça [The Sound of the Roar of the Jaguar] (2021).
Jimin Kang is a postgraduate student, reading for a masters in Comparative Literature and Critical Translation at Worcester College (Oxford), who is focusing on Brazilian Indigenous literature for her dissertation.
This event will be held in Portuguese.
Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/w8YVvTqv8Y
3–4pm, Online via Microsoft Teams
Deglutições de 22 a 22: Antropofagia e Teatro Oficina no Corpo da Música
Drawing on 20 years of experience as actress and vocal coach at legendary theatre company Teatro Oficina, Letícia Coura will reflect on how the Semana de Arte de 1922 still informs the theatre of José Celso Martinez Correa’s troupe to this day. From Oficina’s first stage production of Oswald de Andrade’s O Rei da Vela, in 1967, to the more recent Macumba Antropófaga (2011), starred by fictional versions of Oswald and Tarsila, the company has time and again turned to the concept of anthropophagy in search of a truly Brazilian way of making theatre. Letícia will discuss the impact the modernists had on Oficina’s ethos in a talk punctuated by musical interludes taken from the company's modernism-infused plays.
This event will be held in Portuguese.
Register here: https://forms.office.com/r/SQVwhuN8Rp
Friday 4 February
3–4pm, Online via live-stream on the Oxford University Brazilian Society YouTube channel
Grand Finale
A Mulher do Pau-Brasil: A Lecture-Spectacular by Adriana Calcanhotto
In 2018, Adriana Calcanhotto toured Portugal and Brazil with a show called ‘A Mulher do Pau Brasil’ [The Brazil-Wood Woman], a title referencing the ‘Brazil-Wood Poetry Manifesto’ written by Oswald de Andrade in 1924, itself focusing on the bright-red wood which became Brazil’s first export. In this 'lecture-spectacular', she will talk about the influence of the Brazilian Modernists on her work and perform songs with echoes of their poetry.
Singer-songwriter Adriana Calcanhotto is a Brazilian legend, known for her ballads and love songs, blending a pure voice with the sound of her guitar. Since 199O she has brought out 17 albums of original songs, covers and adaptations of Lusophone poetry.
This event will be held in Portuguese.
Live-stream via Oxford University Brazilian Society YouTube channel: https://youtu.be/toh2uPLgqMg