Ontwerp­wetenschappen

Lecture Lula Marcondes

Local and strong: the legacy of the Manguebeat movement in Recife, Brazil

Lula Marcondes
Tuesday 12 February - 19 uur
Aula K1.6 (Dieperik)
Campus Mutsaard, Mutsaardstraat 31, 2000 Antwerp

Recife, an estuary city and the capital of the state of Pernambuco, Northeast Brazil, is one of the most important and diverse cultural cities of the country. During the early 90’s, it was the center of Manguebeat (Swamp’s Beat), a multifaceted cultural movement that drove the attention of the nation over a city that was artistically recreating itself through the collective conscience about its local culture power. As an analogy to the swamp’s diversity, the movement’s Manifesto “Caranguejos com Cérebro” (Crabs with a brain) stated the idea of Recife as “a parabolic antenna embedded in the mud” where cultural hybridism, richness, and openness to the world were always welcome. The Movement put together different music cultures from folk to pop, made up by peasants or university students, and connected socially and geographically distinguished people from favelas to skyscrapers residents.
This talk focuses on the legacy of Manguebeat in terms of diversity, openness and how it changed and was changed by people’s sense of belonging to the public spaces in Recife that allowed encounters, exchanges, and placemaking that, later, shaped the development of a strong creative economy recognized internationally.