• Part of the PhD-Workshop «Imagination as a Site of Struggle»
Since the first days of Pindorama’s invasion, descriptions of invisible entities, phantoms, devils and deities have populated writings that attempted to translate to the European imaginary the realities of that world. These writings not only render visible the difference between indigenous cosmologies and colonial narratives, but they also mark the transition between the time of mystery, when so-called ‘fantasies’ were the very operation of describing the world, and the time of manipulation, when narratives were consciously being constructed to sustain political regimes. But, if fabulation was once able to transform what was forest in a collection hard truths and concrete forms, can they also be tools to produce other tales of reality and cast retroactive spells?
Working on the interrelation between the writings of missionary José de Anchieta and the libretto of Il Guarany, a 19th century influential Brazilian opera, the presentation explores the critical and aesthetical possibilities of the invisible entities of colonial and postcolonial Brazil, using fictional writing and forms of enchantment embedded in popular culture as potential counter-colonial strategies rooted in the history of performing arts.
Chair: Helen V. Pritchard, Shaka McGlotten, Ines Kleesattel, and Lucie Kolb.
Biography
Túlio Rosa (Sombrio, Brazil, 1989) is a performer, choreographer and researcher, currently based in Brussels. In the last few years, he has been developing, in collaboration with Beatriz Cantinho, the project Arquivo Atlântico, which proposes a critical and sensible approach to the memory of colonialism in different territories of the South Atlantic. Combining writing, visual and performative practices, his work proposes to place the body in relation to time and history, and explores how the juxtaposition and confrontation of archival materials might foster new sets of relationships and question narratives and visualities that characterize an imaginary of colonial matrix. He is invested in anticolonial practices, the politics of memory, and in the possibility of rewriting personal and collective stories as a gesture of reparation.