⛴️✨The Nexialist #0175

all eyes on rafah | the boat | the posthumous memoirs of bras cubas | the iliad | the disappearance of men | out of sight | menina

May 30, 2024

welcome to your weekly sliver of internet made into a newsletter, the nexialist

hey you! i hope this mess~~.age~~ finds you in good order. this week, i’m feeling slightly better: the wounds on my hands are ok, but there’s still quite a lot of healing to be done on the inside. it’s quite nice to see the daily progress of movements, which makes me quite hopeful.

this week i was able to bring a patchwork quilt, piecing together past, present, art, brazilian literature, epic poetry, masculinities, brazilian funk (done by an argentinian) and dutch music. i know, seems like a lot, so buckle up and scroll calmly. enjoy! 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

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🇵🇸all eyes on rafah

impact

A post shared by @impact

this week, it’s the first time i see a content related to gaza go viral with the ‘all eyes on rafah’ post. you’ve probably seen it, but something was not sitting well with me. isobel made a video that put into words what i felt. even though it’s positive that the message is spreading and more people are feeling compelled to share… why is an ai-generated image going viral, which has nothing to do with with the horrid events, and not other information? are ai-generated images erasing reality?

brainsparks: green colonialism, gaza explained (tn#145)

⛴️the boat

my friend gustavo sent me the interview with berlin-based portuguese multi-platform artist, grada kilomba, on roda viva (thank you!). her clarity and calm are so inspiring and eye-opening. my youtube algorithm then presented me with this beautiful record of her work, the boat (now displayed in inhotim, in brazil). she takes the boat, symbol of expansion and power, to remind us the forgotten stories of colonization and the millions of trafficked enslaved people. grada incorporates performance, ritual and history in her process.

“O Barco/The Boat” by artist Grada Kilomba is an installation, made with 140 blocks and forming the shape of the bottom of a ship, a detailed drawing of the space that was created to accommodate the bodies of millions of Africans enslaved by European empires.
Opened within the context of BoCA biennial, the installation extends over 32 meters, along the Tagus River, at Praça do Carvão / MAAT Museum. The work invites the audience to enter a garden of memories, where poems rest over blocks of burnt wood, recalling forgotten stories and identities. What stories are told? Where are they told? How are they told? And by who are they told?
It was also presented a performance directed by Grada Kilomba, with music production by Kalaf Epalanga and starred by different afro-descendant artists with a transdisciplinary dialogue between singing, percussion and dancing.

the video has english subtitles and it’s worth playing it. through her work, grada exposes how for centuries there has been active erasure policies in european systems, and challenges how the colonial monuments and language are full of childish and patriarchal elements and words like discovery (you cannot “discover” a continent with millions of people). in her interview she says that artists are translators, making visible what was before invisible.

of course, it’s impossible not to connect her work to what is happening now in gaza. she focuses on bringing the idea that we need to revisit these moments so they don’t happen again. yet, we are seeing the violence and horror repeating itself.

brainsparks: deactivated power plant (tn#148), how europe stole africa (tn#102), reindigenisation x decolonisation (tn#140)

⚰️posthumous memoirs of bras cubas

talking about memory, i had to bring a phenomenon that happened this week in the brazilian internet. american writer/reader/tiktoker courtney henning novak is doing a read around the world challenge, reading a book per country. from brazil, she picked ‘the posthumous memoirs of brás cubas’ by machado de assis, one of our masterpieces. she shared a video on why it might be her favorite book. this went viral in brazil and the book was soldout, going to the top of the latin-american best-sellers. (i was happy to hear a name i know: the translator is flora thomson-deveaux, part of my favorite podcast, radio novelo apresenta.)

this book and others by machado de assis are usually part of the high school curriculum. i have to admit that i haven’t read this one as i was in the us for most of my high school, but now i feel i need to get my copy. it made me wonder how, again, in brazil we perpetuate this need for outside approval, especially from north america and europe (mongrel complex, as we call it).

brainspark: brazil map (tn#170), the brazilianization of the world (tn#35)

📖the iliad

talking about translations, this post appeared in my feed about a new translation of homer’s iliad (from 2023), the first one done by a woman, emily wilson. this interview for the bbc shows her perspective on themes like war, climate emergency, fame, honor, reputation and masculinity.

I've talked about The Odyssey as a poem about colonisation or about The Iliad as a poem partly about climate disaster, or about celebrity culture. All these things that we're preoccupied by, like, 'what's the relationship between humans and technology?' The Iliad is all about that. And of course, The Iliad has different things to say from what we might say about any of those things, and about 'why is everyone so angry all the time?' because that's the case in our culture, but it's also the case in The Iliad.
[…]
And yet there's also so much awareness that being a man is tied up with a kind of pride and sense of self that can isolate you, and being the best means being out ahead of all the others. And this question, which is at the heart of the poem, about can there be a community of men? If masculinity is all about being better than every other man, then how can men be together without killing each other? The poem's exploring that possibility of whether men could ever be in a community that didn't involve slicing each other's eyeballs out.

brainsparks: origin of war (tn#95), antigone in the amazone (tn#122)

♂the disappearance of men

after sending the heteropessimism post from last week, juan sent me this dw analysis on “why the political worldviews of young men and women are diverging,” and it’s quite frustrating to see.

then this video from big think with christine emba showed up and summed up the points from that video. she shows how modern men are struggling in the labor market, education and domestic life, as they grapple with understanding their place.

her view on the ‘menfluencers’—a term that i cringe when i hear— is also quite interesting. she says these creators represent a fatherly figure for many of these men who did not have that figure, and they can inspire action. but also, it gives space to misogyny and violent discourse, which dominate some of these guys’ content. she ends the video on a hopeful note, but also showing there is a lot of work ahead.

The thing is, this isn't a zero-sum game. The sexes rise and fall together. As a person who loves and cares about men in my family, my friends, people I want to be romantic partners, I actually do want them to survive and flourish. And if we want our broader society to survive and flourish too, both sexes have to be doing well.

brainspark: on heteropessimism (tn#174), the alpha male myth, colonial masculinity (tn#127), drag kings (tn#82), femenine (tn#154), straight men kissing (tn#95)

🙈out of sight

eefje has released a new stunning song and video and i’m loving the corporate-core. the lyrics are also beautiful (if you know me, you know she’s the true reason i started taking dutch lessons)

Out of sight - Out of shivering heart
If we hide we remain unseen
The stray light shines on the stray path
Are we running further out of view?
And through the years - Our maze overgrows
It reaches further and higher
It sprawls until no one can get in or out

brainsparks: eefje de visser (tn#76), vlammen (tn#166), dutch poetry (tn#2)

🤸‍♀️menina

nathy peluso’s new album, GRASA, is so hot. she released a video for each song and it’s so good. and i’m specifically obsessed with this track, featuring brazilian artist lua de santana, and bringing us brazilian funk. so proud to see artists from other countries bringing the style and brazilian artists with them.

brainsparks: salvage (tn#130), atheist (tn#41)

see you next week, meninas 🫀✨

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