🛶✨The Nexialist #0170

priceless artifact | 5000 years of coexistence | profano | from the north | brazil map | nutricide | ignoring graffiti | shitthropocene

Apr 25, 2024

welcome to your weekly brainsparking dispatch, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this bunch of zeroes and ones make it to your beautiful eyes. this week i had the pleasure of visiting stunning rome with juan and our roman friend giacomo (thank you, both!) i was able to fit some thoughts during the trip in the newsletter, which is always the best: mixing what is going irl with these links and references. this weekend, the netherlands celebrates king’s day (aka the closest thing to carnaval this country has) and i’m avoiding deciding on the programme. well, wish me good luck and enjoy the reading! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🇮🇹priceless artifact

last weekend i got to visit rome, and the beauty of city is just incredible: the ruins, the ancient monuments, the art in the churches, streets, squares and museums. lots of things come to mind while walking around and seeing the mixed architectures from different eras. how did they live? how did they build those things with the technology available? are these obeliscs stolen from egypt, were they presents, or were they bought? how many artifacts could they still unearth or find in unthought of places?

well, this video appeared in my e-mail in synchronicity: laura young bought an actual ancient roman bust in the texas for 35 dollars and her life turned upside down. how did it end up there? who did it belong to before? it’s quite a fun story!

via messy nessy chic

brainsparks: art, not pornography (tn#114), stendhal syndrome (tn#88)

🌳5000 years of coexistence

while in rome i was reminded of a very important date in brazil. april 19th is the day of the indigenous peoples (fka indian day, which only recently changed names.) one important content that appeared on my timeline is how there are studies showing how regions of the amazon, previously taught to be untouched by humans, were actually nurtured by indigenous peoples for millenia.

yes, rome’s artifacts are beautiful and impressive, but reading this while being there put into perspective how ancient our forests are, and the knowledge of the indigenous peoples. we are taught to give more value to these artifacts while forgetting nature is much older and carries so much history in itself.

We sometimes think of the Amazon rainforest as unaltered by humans, a peek into the planet's past. In recent years, scientists have learned that many parts of the Amazon aren't untouched at all—they've been cultivated by Indigenous peoples for thousands of years, and mere centuries ago were the sites of cities and farmland. But that's not the case everywhere. In a new study in PNAS, researchers determined that a rainforest in the Putumayo region of Peru has been home to relatively unaltered forest for 5,000 years, meaning that the people who have lived there found a long-term way to coexist with nature—and the evidence is in microscopic bits of silica and charcoal in the soil.

brainsparks: reindigenisation x decolonisation (tn#140), el dorado (tn#78), antigone in the amazon (tn#122), the biophillia paradox (tn#122), ancestral future (tn#112), the lungs of the world have no oxygen (tn#3), indigenous thinking for troubled times (tn#32), natural intelligence (tn#168)

👄profano

jaloo also released a new video in the meantime and i got chills watching it. jaloo is from pará, in the amazonian region, and her latest album is incredible, when she returned from a hiatus as a non-binary person and she/her pronouns. i think as a person and artist she represents so much in terms of transformation, from her identity to her move from the amazon to the one of the most urban cities in the world, são paulo. in the song she opposes the profane and sacred, destruction and creation.

brainsparks: céu azul (tn#3), this city will kill me (tn#144)

🛶from the north

i had never heard of zaynara and i’m love with her new song/video. she is singing with pride about her region, the tupinambá peoples, showing the way of life of the ribeirinhos and their customs.

brainsparks: amazonize the world (tn#74), indigenous histories (tn#161), batidão tropical vol 2 (tn#168)

🇧🇷brazil map

ibge (brazilian institute of geography and statistics) has launched this month a map in which brazil is in the center and i love it. i mostly saw positive reactions online, but some were even comparing it north korean practices (?).

“the world map highlights G20 countries and other that have a Brazilian institutional mission, and presents basic information about Brazil, such as population, area, etc.”

braisnparks: américa invertida, vertical map of the future (tn#140)

🥛nutricide

it turns out “nestlé adds sugar to infant milk sold in poorer countries, contrary to international guidelines aimed at preventing obesity and chronic diseases.” gasp. disappointed but not surprised, right? well, this practice has a name, which i had never heard before: nutricide. the 1995 book by Llaila O. Afrika seems to be the main source about it “nutricide: the nutritional destruction of the black race.”

the word showed up in a post about how in brazil the consumption of ultraprocessed food is growing, even more so within black communities and favelas. it’s more convenient and cheaper to eat packaged goods than natural and organic meals. and the industry loves that.

brainsparks: chemical colonization (tn#144), yanomami humanitarian crisis (tn#108)

🏢ignoring graffiti

load is a content creator that teaches about grafitti and street art. he does react videos to grafitti artists, and this one reached my timeline. while reacting to a video of street artist vênus, he said something that felt like a punch when someone approaches her:

“you don’t like graffiti? just ignore it, just like you do with homeless people, genocide, homicide in são paulo and many other things. just ignore it.”

brainsparks: grey city, reclaiming the concrete jungle (tn#7), the dystopia of são paulo (tn#83), beat diaspora (tn#125)

💩shitthropocene

saw this at

Thomas Klaffke

’s last newsletter and i love it. patagonia is teasing a mockumentary and the premise looks genius and in-brand.

The Shitthropocene is a mock anthropological view of humanity's consumption habits, turning a satirical (yet brutally honest) eye on how everything is turning to shit and why the impulse towards more might destroy us all.
You might have noticed that a lot of things seem to suck right now. This film isn’t about all the things that suck—that would be a really long film. But it is about consumption, which is both a cause and a symptom of the suckiness. For a bunch of reasons, pretty much everyone is making and buying too much stuff, which we are evolutionarily programmed to want. What was once an advantage (more! = better!) is now contributing to the destruction of the planet.

brainspark: enshittification cycle (tn#106), plastic visualization (tn#23)

see you next week, monarchs 🫀✨

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