Art and party: São Paulo's nights during the 1980s and 1990s

• Grant number: 24/22563-1
• Support Opportunities: Research Grants - Visiting Researcher Grant - Brazil
• Start date: March 05, 2025
• End date: August 04, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Linguistics, Literature and Arts - Arts - Cinema
• Principal Investigator: Esther Império Hamburger
• Grantee: Esther Império Hamburger
• Visiting researcher: Denilson Lopes Silva
• Visiting researcher institution: Escola De Comunicação/Eco/Ufrj, Brazil
• Host Institution: Museu de Arte Contemporânea (MAC). Universidade de São Paulo (USP). São Paulo , SP, Brazil

Abstract

Why to think only about mourning and not about joy? Why to tell only histories of traumas and scars that are so present at minoritarian discourses and not histories of the parties? Following not so much an anthropology but an aesthetic genealogy (Foucault) of the parties I would like to look for some moments of the São Paulo ninghtlife at the 1980s and 1990s after the end of military regime throught some audiovisual experiences be it cinema, video, photography or pop music that can be found at the archives of MAC-USP but also at other archives from USP such as one from IEB, personal archives of the artists resident at São Paulo and of institutions like Videobrasil and Brazilian Cinemathec. The research intends itself as a contribution for the history of São Paulo phocusing on a moment not so much studied and trying to have a comparative and intermediatic perspective beyond the limits of each artistic language and thinking about the night not only as a different time but that includes different space that make different stagings, landscapes and even different people and characters. Also it intend to add efforts to the researches mainly about photoghraphy and artvideo developped at MACUSP by Prof. Helouise Costa and more recently by Prof. Heloisa Spada besides the central connection to CNPq research project « Audiovisual, memory, inequalities and the expansion of Brazilian democracy » developped by Prof. Esther Hamburger who is the supervisor of my project concerning post-dictatoship regime at Brazil. The onconstruction corpus is related to what is called Neon realist or postmodern movies especially by Cidade Oculta by Chico Botelho (1986) and Anjos da Noite (1987) by Wilson Barros that can be connected to the photos of Cassio Vasnconcellos, especially at the series "Noturnos São Paulo" ,the musical scene of Lira Paulistana especially Arrigo Barnabe and postpunk rock scene released by labels such as Wop Bop and Baratos Afins. Just to mention some artists that can be changed as the bibliographical and archive research is done.It is important to consider as central not so much literature as for Modernisms of the 1920s and 1930s but the pop culture for which music is a more central art what is suggested but not developped as popular Modernism by Mark Fisher at Ghosts of my Life (2022) to consider not only the musical diversity but the possibilities of life reinventions in England of the 1970s that may be helpful to be developped for the current research. An important hypothesis is that to map São Paulo nights we can bring a different image of the ciy no so much defined by the day work and the multitude associated to it but by different way of being together defined by the parties and even being alone.Not the happiness promoted by neoliberal politics but the joy that implies an intensfication of desire for life with all its problems, pains and a way of being together not so related to family or daylife works and maybe as well different ways of being alone that includes melancholia and the fragility of time passage. Parties as a the night always end.Especially also after the coronovirus pandemia it is important to see another historical moment that was defined by another pandemia, the one caused by AIDS. What kind of experiences, relations and encounters were possible? What did the night mean more than a space and time of alienation and consumption? Not as simples social inversion nor irrational blisss maybe we could find different meanings that happened at night. Is it possible to talk about the night only when one isn´t there anymore as memory? To remember the parties and the nights could help us to think a different present? (AU)