Artes de fazer o mundo e performances negras em Pelotas: “reinventando memórias”.

Abstract

This thesis is an ethnography of the way in which black collectives of the city of Pelotas, from different generations and situated in different spaces of action, diverge as to the ways of interpreting the processes of duration in time and transmit these constructions of collective and social memories. As a search for "black collective memories" in the city, it also becomes a research interpreting different "black" versions of Pelotas's own "memory". The thesis is then divided into two parts. The first one, ethnographs how the diffuse and intertextualized memories of the city plot their founding myths, anchored in the experience of slavery instituted with the charqueadas in the nineteenth century, refigure them into morbid landscapes, filled with "energies" and "spirits" that "vibrate" in the topography of the city. Memories that appear as a composition of a symbolic of the inaugural evil, counterpoint to a dominant white and elitist vision in the city of its "aristocratic", "refined" and "urbanized" apogee given at the same epoch. Old-town black clubgoers tend to neutralize the "pain" and "evil" of the dehumanization of slavery in their memorial filters, in a work of silencing memory, plotting a duration from a festive and institutional time of associative sociality in the carnival, festive and edifying forms of the clubs. On the diffused background of the inhabited topography of "spirits" and "vibrant energies" the Odara collective, of aesthetic, reflexive and political action centered on Afro dance, acts and dramatizes the time refigured by the affiliation of a desired duration as afro- referenced, of dance in the sense of transcending and restoring the evil of the ancestor slave's experience. Questioning the processes of transmission of silenced memories, the members of the Odara adhere to the afrocentrated movements of investigation of black memories and conceive forms of "reinvention of the memory", putting itself in the poetic and pragmatic perspective of producing restorations in the time, from a diasporic memory-idea.