Quero Viver no Carnaval
by Thiago Fernandes, 2021
Revista Caju
One of art’s principal operations, since the oldest surviving records, is to grant forms of presence to the absent or the invisible: the spiritual world, scenes from history, images of the unconscious, or whatever is most subjective in human experience. Felippe Moraes’s Samba Exaltação series takes this principle as its starting point to recover the Carnival suspended in 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. From Carnival season through Easter Sunday, anyone passing through the area around the Santa Efigênia viaduct could see neon signs spelling out verses from Brazilian songs, installed in the window of the artist’s apartment in the Mirante do Vale Building, the tallest building in the city.
Samba Exaltação takes shape by borrowing excerpts from musical works that, in some way, connect to the spirit of Carnival and, paradoxically, to today’s dark times as well. It opened on the night of February 12, Carnival Friday, with Agoniza Mas Não Morre (seen in our featured image, photographed by Gabriel Cabral), one of the most celebrated songs composed by Nelson Sargento. The lyrics, immortalized by Beth Carvalho’s voice in 1978 (on the acclaimed album De Pé no Chão), at a time when the country still lived under a dictatorship, celebrate samba’s survival through different forms of repression and the encroachment of foreign cultural influences. Carried into the present day, the verse that opens and gives the song its title seems to speak to our own survival, and that of art and culture, in the midst of one of the greatest health and political crises in our history. The red that pulses from within the letters outward, radiating across the architecture and creating a micro-interference in the landscape, aims to announce that samba and Carnival do not die, despite every obstacle.
An Open Window Beyond the Virtual
The survival of art and the need to still poetically inhabit the world — or our domestic sphere — are affirmed not only in the choice of the song that opens Moraes’s project, but also in how he carries it out. The tension between public and private that arises when his apartment window becomes an exhibition space, during a period of social isolation and the closing of art institutions, is an intelligent and coherent solution that allows the artist to avoid falling into pure virtuality — even as digital environments played an important role in giving his action visibility beyond the public who could witness it physically in the São Paulo landscape. The singularity of Moraes’s work lies, among other things, in this capacity to rely on the reproducibility of images without giving up the phenomenological experience of space.
Uma Pausa de Mil Compassos, an excerpt from the song Para Ver as Meninas, by Paulinho da Viola, marks the second part of the Samba Exaltação project, coinciding with Lent. The period of the liturgical year that precedes Easter (with parallels in various other cosmogonies around the planet) is characterized as a time of preparation, introspection, and reflection. The pause of a thousand beats that Paulinho da Viola refers to takes on new meanings here: it evokes the silence of the streets during a Carnival that could not be celebrated, or the “bleak collective Lent” we were living through, in Felippe Moraes’s own words.
Play with Neon Creates Multiple Semantic Interpretations.
The third part, E Viver Será Só Festejar, brings the work into the universe of axé, the Bahian musical movement connected to Carnival and, historically, to the reclaiming of the streets after the end of the military dictatorship. As I have argued elsewhere, axé is more than a musical movement: it is also a performative movement, one of asserting identities, Bahianness, Africanness, freedoms, and the playful occupation of public space. The final verse of the song Baianidade Nagô, composed by Evandro Rodrigues, receives a different treatment here: its last word, “festejar” [“to celebrate”], flickers, staying dark for a few moments. In this way, another possible reading is produced: “E viver será só” [“And to live will be only”]. The interference lends a dose of melancholy to one of the most infectious songs about Bahian Carnival, expressing the anguish, solitude, and incompleteness of the present moment. But when the neon verse lights up in full, the force of celebration prevails, along with the certainty that Carnival will return.
This flicker of hope is amplified in the work’s final act, Quero Viver no Carnaval, in which Moraes asks the songwriters Luiz Antônio and Eurico Campos for license to alter the lyrics of Quero Morrer no Carnaval, a song known through the recordings of Linda Batista and Elza Soares in the 1960s. The neon verse, unveiled at the moment Brazil reached the mark of 300,000 COVID-19 deaths, is a cry for the present and for the future. It affirms the desire for life and the will to celebrate Carnivals yet to come. The word “viver” [“to live”], in white light, stands out from the rest, which are in red — and not by chance. If death is mentioned in the sign that opened the project — Agoniza Mas Não Morre — it is because grief and melancholy are precisely where the strength to exalt life, samba, Carnival, and the street is drawn from. There could be no more fitting way for Samba Exaltação to end than on an Easter Sunday, leaving behind the message that Carnival will rise from the ashes of this long Ash Wednesday.
Thiago Fernandes
2021
Originally published in Revista Caju on April 21, 2021.