Agoniza Mas Não Morre
by Ana Roman, 2021
Samba Exaltação Project
Mirante do Vale Building
Like a footnote on the city skyline, a red neon announces Carnival’s arrival. In 2021, the celebration that precedes Easter by forty days does not take place on its main stage: the street. All those with the privilege of choice remain sheltered at home, facing an invisible virus that threatens life. It is no accident that the first neon of Felippe Moraes’s Samba Exaltação project bears the words “Agoniza, Mas Não Morre.”
The phrase gives its name to a song composed by Nelson Sargento in 1978, immortalized by the voice of Beth Carvalho. The song tells the story of samba’s marginalization through its direct association with the Black population, and of its later elitization. It critiques the change in instrumental structure and the guise imposed on the genre by the elite who appropriated it. Despite the setbacks, in the song, samba resists and survives. And it resists collectively.
Carnival, in this year of 2021, will also resist: in the songs we know by heart, in small acts and gestures. Moraes’s neons act as a kind of trigger, letting us access, in the silence of the songs that inhabit us, memories of what it was like to be together, and to project our future. Such memories, both individual and collective, mobilized by music, can still be carnivalized, even without physical encounter. Carnival resists through care for one another and by ensuring the embrace and the possibility of shared presence tomorrow.
The verses of the samba, resonating in a low but persistent tone from the window of Moraes’s apartment, located in the brutalist architecture of the city’s tallest building, sing of the difficult times we live in and intone a way forward. As in Sargento’s beautiful song, what may save us is perhaps belief in the collective in the face of individualism and, at the same time, the resistance of the individual in the face of massification. Moraes points, with a certain hopeful melancholy, toward the tone we might follow.
Ana Roman
2021