Creating a Micro-Utopia: Transcending Nation Branding in Arte Popular Brasileira

Abstract

This thesis analyses the marketisation process undergone by Arte Popular Brasileira (APB) in current neoliberal society. It examines APB’s multiple negotiations when transitioning from its community-based origin to becoming a symbol of national heritage and artwork traded in cultural settings reserved for the economic elite and global cultural circuits. APB is defined as an authorial creation by artists with no institutional training. Born and raised in vulnerable socioeconomic conditions, they ground their work in deep cultural memories and collective ways of knowing and doing: saberes e fazeres. Promoted by public and private sectors interested in consolidating nation-branding agendas, APB is marketed as an authentic expression of brasilidade. This repositioning of APB reflects feelings of disenchantment with the ethos of modern Western society that produces various forms of alienation. In this context, APB’s aura awakens consumers’ nostalgia for ways of life more connected to nature and customary community values. By adopting a decolonial perspective, this research situates APB as a local manifestation that responds to a worldwide tendency in the following ways. First, APB negotiates with state agendas that consistently resort to peoples’ arts to brand their nations: specifically, to artistic expressions produced by peoples historically facing oppression. Second, one chapter locates the nation-branding process within global trends through a cross-cultural analysis with other national scenarios in Latin America and Oceania, all operating under conditions of “coloniality.” Third, as a local experience, APB is instrumentalised, but it also fills an ontological void by becoming a “micro-utopia.” Finally, the thesis posits that such a utopian role represents places outside modern Western paradigms and thereby brings them into being by displaying saberes e fazeres that popular artists have been protecting, sharing, and re-elaborating, where cultural memories have resisted the dehumanising processes accentuated by neoliberalism. As micro-utopia, APB contributes to re-establishing such connections for the individual consumer, while its creators, popular artists, find a means to re-exist as guardians and narrators