Reflections on magic: from the avant-garde to indigenous Brazilian arts and literature

In 2022, at the Biennial “The Milk of Dreams”, organised by Cecilia Alemani, paintings by Jaider Esbell were exhibited (the same ones from the 2021 São Paulo Biennial), which sought to make some dialogues between different types of artistic languages, showing fields in dispute and conflict. In this seminar, we intend to carry out an archiphilological review of Makunaima’s narrative and revisit Jaider Esbell’s work, exploring the emergence of creative sources both in his work and in the avant-gardes of the first decades of the 20th century with the aim of verifying the negotiations and contrasts of the respective magical interventions.

Keywords: Modernism; Surrealism; indigenous art; magic; worldviews.

Mônica Muniz de Souza Simas is Associate Professor of Portuguese and Brazilian Literature at the University of Venice (Ca’ Foscari). She did her BA, MA and PhD in Literature at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio), where she was a professor from 2001 to 2003. She was a professor at the University of São Paulo between 2003 and 2018, where she did her Post-Doctorate. She was one of the introducers of the systematic study of Portuguese surrealism in Brazil, having written several articles. Her research involves studies of otherness, coexistence and ways of thinking about the world in both Portuguese poetry and the Portuguese-language literatures of Asia, particularly those of Macau. Her main work is Margem do destino: a literatura de Macau em língua portuguesa (2007).