Music as a point of trans_mut_action

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A central figure in Brazilian Modernism in the 1920s, writer Mário de Andrade was also a musicologist and had a musical background, which led the author to pour his musicality into Macunaíma. In an attempt to fit your masterpiece  in a literary classification, the author used the term rhapsody, which for him "remitted directly to instrumental fantasies that use themes and improvised composition processes, taken from traditional or popular songs". It was through the rhythm of the prose, the words, or the meter of the verses, that Iara heard the music that was already implicit in the book. His musical transcreation was guided by these discoveries added to his personal identification and his enchantment with the polysemantics of the text and the syntactic revolution with which he confronts the reader. The profusion of languages from different ethnic groups that met in Brazil was transformed by her into songs, recorded on the Macunaíma Opera Tupi disc.  

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Anthropophagy and modernism today

Iara mirrors the anthropophagic movement by feeding on Mário's work, and, with each new artistic production, presents an updated socio-political reading. The wound exposed in the work through the hero/anti-hero without identity and character provokes discussions that are still very current. Iara, a mestizo like Mário de Andrade himself, identifies with the character's translocation in his non-belonging to a single and definitive ethnicity or to a closed cultural tradition, but in the midst of a process of creative and self-assertive expansion of his place in diversity, in counterpoint to the alienation generated in the whitening process instilled in Brazilian society since the beginning of its history. Iara also brings her feminist vision subverting the protagonist's gender: Macunaíma becomes  Macunawoman, played by Thalma de Freitas in her first montage (2010) and by the transgender artist Aretha Sadick (2019), highlighting the black woman and emphasizing her importance as the foundation of this emerging culture.  

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In 2022, the centenary of the Week of Modern Art is completed. By approaching Modernism today, transmakuná proposes its updating: through the representation of race and gender; with the dialogue and inclusion of productions by indigenous, black and brown artists, thus fostering the emergence of aesthetics that are born from the need for a non-hegemonic expression.

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on the thread of history

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MODERNIST MOVEMENT

1922 Modern Art Week

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"We are reacting against the prejudice of form. We are killing literacy. We are ending France's hold on us. We are ending Portugal's grammatical domination. We are forgetting the homeland-beloved-save-salve in favor of a real land that will enrich the multifaceted image of humanity with its characteristic contingent. [...] We are making art very mixed with life".

In addition to Oswald de Andrade, Anita Malfatti, Menotti del Pichia and Tarsila do Amaral, Mário de Andrade was one of the central figures of the avant - garde movement in São Paulo for twenty years. Trained as a musician and best known as a poet and novelist, Andrade was personally involved in virtually every discipline related to modernism in São Paulo and became Brazil's national polymath. His photographs and essays on a wide range of subjects, from history to literature to music, have been widely published.  

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Macunaíma "de" Mario  

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At the end of the 19th century, the German ethnologist Koch Grunberg carried out a long expedition to indigenous lands in the Latin American Amazon and published Von Roraima zum Orinoco, an essay in which he records accounts by a taurepang accountant about the cultures and cosmologies of the peoples of the region. Mário de Andrade does not deny that this was his main source for the creation of the novel Macunaíma, released in 1928. "I really copied it!" - says the author, thus composing his great anthropophagic literary work, one of the most important modernist references, crossing the 20th century and entering the 21st century. The stories and characters narrated by the indigenous are adapted in Mário's narrative, which tells the story of a transmutable, unpredictable protagonist, endowed with magical powers - such as the property of transforming into any mineral, animal or vegetable form - and who lives operating wonders. His out-of-the-ordinary character and morality, as well as his exuberant and unrestrained sexuality, have in particular been the object of intense critical exploration.  

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