Felicidade Clandestina / Clandestine Happiness
by Giselle Beiguelman, 2021
In Felicidade Clandestina (1971), Clarice Lispector recalls a carnival that carried her back to her childhood. In the short story Restos do Carnaval, she describes the days leading up to the festivities, when a restlessness would take hold of her — the world seeming to unfold like a great scarlet blossom, the streets and squares of Recife finally revealing what they had been made for, human voices at last singing the secret capacity for pleasure she carried within her. As she put it: “Carnival was mine, mine.”
This sense of possessing pleasure above all else is carnival’s inheritance and the secret of its power. In this 2021, still haunted by pandemic life, artist Felippe Moraes consecrates the date in a ritual devoted to the right to feel “dizzy with happiness,” as Clarice put it.
Samba Exaltação is his response to the melancholy stalking us. In a set of four neons, Moraes reclaims verses from songs that celebrate samba schools and their cultural and social power. They were installed in the window of his apartment in the Mirante do Vale building starting on a Carnival Friday, over the course of 52 days, featuring four sambas: Agoniza Mas Não Morre, Para Ver as Meninas, Baianidade Nagô, and Quero Morrer no Carnaval.
Regarding his choices, Moraes remarks in conversation with seLecT: “I chose these songs because they were essential to ensuring my physical and mental survival during the pandemic. Each of them, in its own way, transported me to the stupor of the Carnival we had lost, a kind of promise of times to come when we might reclaim public space for delirium and lyricism. I like the idea that these are songs so well known that, on reading a single line, we start humming them in our minds and are swept up by the emotions we’ve built around them. What interests me is evoking that thrill in the pit of the stomach that Carnival is capable of producing — not only because of the melancholy of this moment, but as an expression of Brazilianness resisting the casa grande [the “big house” — historically, the plantation manor, a symbol of colonial and racial power in Brazil].”
Giselle Beiguelman
2021
Originally published on Select.art.br
Revista Select YEAR 10, No. 49, JAN/FEB/MAR 2021