🎭✨The Nexialist #0265

mongrel complex | brazilian renaissance | hyped (?) brazilian carnaval | carnaval chronicles | cultural heritage as invisible infrastructure | soft power | compost modernity | fire horse

welcome to your weekly nano-dose of cyber-inspiration, the nexialist

hey, you! i hope this message finds you well. i’m writing this message while recovering from being immersed in carnaval for the past five days. my feet (and liver) are tired, but my soul has been nurtured.

i got so many chills over the past days and even cried a few times: people singing and dancing in unison, glittery smiles, funny and stunning outfits, beautiful people, younger and older couples kissing, all the diversity, from tiny grandmas in costumes, to dogs and kids, to families throwing water from their windows to refresh the crowds. since the pandemic i had been avoiding crowds and this year i think the exposure therapy of going to blocos healed me. i needed that… now, i’ll leave you to this week’s nexialist. enjoy 🫀✨

—Rodrigo Turra

⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks on this day over the past years:

technocracy incorporated, headed for technofascism, amplified roots: tecnobrega, monobloc (tn#213), indigenous histories, pachakuti, várveš, did the future already happen?, laborer, craftsman, artist (tn#161), jumping carnaval, salvador, pitanga aka surinam cherry, house of carnaval, thriving in paradox (tn#109), an economy of suffering, rituals of, suffering, profession ≠ personality (tn#59), polygendered brazilian music, tropicália, music internationalization, from pop puppet to indie icon (tn#8)

🦴mongrel complex

growing up in brazil we always learned about our “complexo de vira-lata” or mongrel complex / mutt complex / stray dog complex, the inferiority complex brazilians acquired through colonial, racist and classist processes the country was built on. in recent years, however, i’ve been noticing we seem to be overcoming that as a nation. last month, for instance, the caramel mutt aka vira-lata caramelo was officialized as são paulo’s cultural expressions: it already had become a symbol of our brazilianness, embraced by the population, but now even the law says so.

brainsparks: the posthumous memoirs of bras cubas (tn#175), top dog (tn#117)

🇧🇷brazilian renaissance

letícia fornari put into words what is happening: everybody wants to be brazilian. she calls this movement the brazilian renaissance. of course, she is being superlative and funny, but she has a point. she mentions food, soccer, music, dance, and it’s all true. the #cometobrazil meme sums up all that with an invitation.

when people say ‘god is brazilian’ — he is. i truly believe [that]. i pray in portuguese because i know he would understand.

she even forgets to mention the brazilian meme industry, our most alive institution. even brazilian science is on a roll: a promising treatment for spinal cord injury by researcher tatiana sampaio, using earwax to diagnose diseases early and non-invasively, a dengue vaccine.

brainsparks: the brazilianization of the world (tn#35), amazonize the world (tn#153)

✨ hyped (?) brazilian carnaval

why is brazilian carnaval so hyped? before we move on, the title is off — even if the reasons are pretty good. hype = promote or publicize (a product or idea) intensively, often exaggerating its importance or benefits. carnaval IS huge, no exaggeration needed — for the money talkers, the estimated revenue for this year is “R$18 billion — 2.9 billion euros — in revenue during its best Carnival ever”. now, some alternative titles: why is brazilian carnaval… such a big deal, so necessary, so sought after, the future?

the hits, the different carnavals around the country, the fashion, collectivity as a technology (tn#260), the brazilian kissing culture (tn#262), the way fun and politics can merge together, the way people hype each other up, the catharsis of it all. it’s impossible to write everything carnaval represents and all its depth in one instagram post (or even in this newsletter).

Carnaval isn’t a weekend festival. It’s months of preparation. Entire communities building something together. This isn’t random chaos. It’s organized intensity, and the scale is unreal. The parades at the Sambadrome Marqués Sapucaí are massive productions. Thousands of performers. Live samba orchestras. Gigantic art cars. It’s really next level.

this quote also translated the importance of carnaval:

“Brazil didn’t invent Carnival, that’s true, but the Brazilian people experienced it in such a way (in the plurality of its manifestations) that the opposite occurred: it was Carnival that invented a possible and original country, on the margins of the horror project that constituted us.” — Luiz Antonio Simas, historian and writer

brainsparks: carnaval (tn#268), portela fashion film (tn#246), reclaming the concrete jungle (tn#7), jumping carnaval (tn#109), non-carnaval (tn#7), carnaval of the invisible (tn#110), artificial carnavals (tn#110), beat diaspora (tn#125), camp gaucho (tn#171), immigration in brazil (tn#151), being black in brazil (tn#35), voice of brazil (tn#246)

🎭 carnaval chronicles

these photos by juliana rocha for santa maria are so stunning. three years ago i shared about artificial carnavals (tn#110), ai generated carnaval scenarios and personas. with all the saturation of synthetic imagery, seeing the beauty of real carnaval on the streets feels quite right and magical. also, i’ve been thinking how amazing it is that there are so many local brands making carnaval outfits and accessories.

brainsparks: anatomy of hype (tn#217), age of re-enchantment (tn#123), pleasure activism (tn#123)

🇧🇷 cultural heritage as invisible infrastructure

Observatório Brasil Profundo shared this post (in portuguese — use your browser translator) — cultural heritage: the invisible infrastructure of brazil — and it’s a class on cultural studies, communities, from the bottom up. it complements a text i shared a while back by Nick Susi, culture is the client (tn#203).

“Folklore is when culture becomes scenery.
Heritage is when we understand that it supports the ground.”

…

The problem is that heritage is not an isolated performance. A traditional festival is not just the moment of the procession; it involves local economy, internal hierarchies, transmission of knowledge, spirituality, memory, and territorial identity. When you reduce this to “folklore,” you separate the aesthetics from the structure.

When a practice becomes “folklore,” it seems to be available. Available for use, for activation, for aestheticization. It loses its connection with the community that sustains it. This opens space for:

– cultural appropriation
– commercial exploitation without compensation
– mischaracterization
– empty symbolic use

i know i’ve been romanticizing carnaval here, but the truth is that this cultural expression is being disputed. for instance, the largest brewer in latin america and one of the largest in the world, ambev, wants to monopolize the blocos, only allowing their portfolios (or who else pays them) to be sold in the street blocos: the movement is being called ambevization of carnaval. this year, são paulo mayor basically sold carnaval to ambev, leaving poorer urban/crowd planning (planning two megablocos on the same street at the same moment, less public toilets…). it was also powerful to see the bloco organizers taking a moment to talk about how carnaval is being hijacked.

(on a lighter note, i did see brands doing positive activations during the blocos: magalu had people distributing sunscreen and spraying water on a sunny day, a local bar had manual fans with harm reduction tips)

Treating heritage as merely aesthetic is a mistake, and treating it as a seasonal topic is a strategic error.

We are living in a time when social media is once again talking about a search for “community,” and institutions are talking about “belonging.” But belonging is not produced by design; it is rooted in historically constructed symbolic systems (culture).

brainsparks: culture is the client (tn#203), social and cultural infrastructure (tn#225), amplified roots: tecnobrega (tn#213), beat diaspora (tn#125), social infrastructure (tn#15), social health (tn#179), rebranding trends research? (tn#193), culture is not an industry (tn#203), post-individualism (tn#196)

🫠 soft power

we are hearing more and more about soft power, and brazil and latin america are thriving atm with their soft power strategies/tactics — even if they might not be consciously so.

In politics (and particularly in international politics), soft power is the ability to co-opt rather than coerce (in contrast with hard power). It involves shaping the preferences of others through appeal and attraction. Soft power is non-coercive, using culture, political values, and foreign policies to enact change. […] Joseph Nye popularised the term in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power.

Mara Dettmann shows how “Soft power is rapidly becoming a key word of 2026, both in practice (as in, social posts) and theory (as in, meta-analyses of the topics).” from chinamaxxing, and heated rivalry to the soft power vacuum being left by the united states. “Basically: what started off as an international relations term is now part of pop culture commentary.” afterall, culture has always been political.

brainsparks: music internationalization (tn#8), bad bunny’s historical show (tn#264), this is not america (tn#63), collectivity as a technology (tn#260), scenius aka communal genius (tn#31), the right to party (tn#7), bad bunny: tiny desk (tn#220), world music (tn#252), beat diaspora (tn#125), gregarious (tn#16), social and cultural infrastructure (tn#225), rice hypothesis (tn#259), artistry + world building (tn#192)

🧤 compost modernity

you know i love solarpunk, and this text from neon appeared in my inbox: “Compost modernity! The vision of solarpunk: joining nature with technology in vibrantly inclusive ways to create a world that truly blooms.” the text is full of definitions, examples, and is quite hopeful.

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.
– from Profiles of the Future (1973) by Arthur C Clarke

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from nature.
– from ‘The Deepening Paradox’ (2011) by Karl Schroeder

brainsparks: solarpunk and the end of capitalism (tn#40), cypherpunk, solarpunk and lunarpunk (tn#127), can solarpunk save the world? (tn#97), protopia futures (tn#27), ask nature (tn#86), toolkit for utopian thinking (tn#210), eco-development (tn#210), lo-tek: a new mythology of technology (tn#43), the biophillia paradox (tn#122), a compost theory of culture (tn#225)

🔥 fire horse

while we were celebrating carnaval, the chinese new year started, and it’s the year of the fire horse: “a symbol of forward movement, independence, and endurance.” whenever i read this, this song comes to mind, from one of my favorite bands in my 20s banda uó.

brainsparks: polygendered brazilian music (tn#24), amplified roots: tecnobrega (tn#213)

see you next week, carnavalescas 🎭✨

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