Alcântaras – O Som é Um Sistema: Expanded Poetics of Production/Reception of Audio and Visual Scintillations of Sound as a System

Abstract

Alcântaras, as the name suggests (bridge, in Arabic), proposes the creation of bridges that connect dispersed temporalities and technologies, but with the same matrix: territoriality and shared ethnicity. A certain State of Nature of living matters that demands, more than an opposition to the Rule of Law, a certain Ecology of Knowledge. A palm tree in the wind, music that spreads in the tidal breeze, by connecting image and sound, ancestral and emerging technologies, nature and culture, body and sound, we want to show the sound that emerges from the wind and the images heard by light, both in ethereal vibrational movement. Alcântara, in Maranhão, Brazil, which was once the scene of the commercial development of cotton crops, today pulses with reggae sound systems and Creole drums coming from the quilombola communities that were created during and after the end of the colonial era. Such communities are spaces of resistance and maintenance of very refined practices of a cultural framework that involves religiosity, art and life, and body politics.

This essay reflects on the process that permeates this artistic investigation, by revealing sparkling/sound excerpts from a strong amalgam of black culture, hidden in a recess on the coast of Maranhão, which find in the reunion of the visions of a collective of artists and at the intersection of their practices, a unique and unrepeatable synthesis.