😵💫✨The Nexialist #0267
the labor of carnaval | what you want | stampede | loco loco | hypnagogic state | che fastidio
welcome to your weekly cyber-dreamcatcher, the nexialist
hey, you! i hope this message finds you well! these days i’m enjoying some time in buenos aires with my partner juan (happy 43rd birthday!). this week, my parents are here to visit for the first time, so it’s quite a historic family moment for us. the weather has been stunning, the asado, the pastries, the sightseeing (the prices not so much). i’ll leave you to it because i have more important things to do (be offline and in the moment with my family), enjoy! 🫀✨
⏮️ time-machine: best brainsparks on this day over the past years:
techno-fascism, new aesthetics of slop, taylorism, cybersigilism (tn#215), a frictionless world is boring as f*ck, sonoluminescence, chaos theory (tn#163), the yuppie handbook, deinfluencers, new words for new worlds, a blurry jpeg of the web, enabling state, an ode to silliness (tn#111), the art of listening | how to speak so that people want to listen, the entertainment value curve, Disambiguation, Everything is Everything, visualizing and communicating complexity (tn#61), bye Dissatisfaction, counterculture x counter-futures, dark Forest theory, what is influence (tn#10)
🎭 the labor of carnaval
yes, i might have been (kinda) monothematic since i’ve been in brazil talking about carnaval, and i will not apologize for it. this week, i visited pinatoca, the second largest museum in latin america, and pina contemporânea had a beautiful exhibition called ‘the labor of carnaval, which made my eyes water from the start. “carnaval is the enemy of loneliness:” this sums up another brainspark i’ve shared here recently: collectivity as a technology (tn#260),
below i’m sharing the full introduction text of the exhibition, because it was so comforting to read, a reminder of how carnaval creates its whole economy and showcases so many different crafts, skills and talents, and how those few days are the culmination of so much collective effort and orchestration. there is even an official playlist shared at the exhibit.
“You have to pull from your head what you don’t have in your pocket.” This phrase, attributed to Fernando Pamplona [1926-2013], carnival designer, set designer, and samba school commentator in Rio de Janeiro, reflects the creative ability of the artisans behind Brazilian carnival. Drawing on their specific knowledge and great capacity for improvisation, these professionals apply their expertise to make the four days of celebrating possible.
The spectacular beauty of the event stems from the combined crafts of sewing, carpentry, shoemaking, sculpture, metalwork, decoration, music, and dance, in addition to the sales, logistics, cleaning, and urban security services needed to supply and control the crowds that fill the streets across the country. Thus, the association between carnival and madness, a product of the transformation of “folie” [”madness” in French] into folia [”revelry” in Portuguese], is systematically disproved by the industry that produces the celebration. It is the source of a chain that generates jobs and income that goes beyond calendar limits and transforms carnival into a culmination of orchestrated planning throughout the year.
Brazil’s biggest popular festival is also the event that lays bare the contradictions of the last country in the Americas to abolish slavery. It is during this time that sugarcane workers in Pernambuco become kings and queens of maracatu, black women from communities in Salvador are consecrated as Ebony Goddesses, and girls and boys from the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo raise the banners of their samba schools with dances created from the incorporation of samba and capoeira into court ballet.
Far from attempting to exhaust such a broad and multifaceted subject, this collective exhibition opts for an essayistic approach, acknowledging absences and selecting manifestations from all over the country, revealing their similarities and differences. The narrative is organized into four thematic sections: Costume, Work, Power, and City. Throughout the exhibition, visitors can reflect on how the spontaneity of Carnival is combined with its meticulous organization, and how labor relations temporarily redefine social classes in the country. One can also see how the festival transforms the urban space, while it is also transformed by the rearrangements of public roads and the intense flow of crowds.
The Labor of Carnival occupies the Pina Contemporânea Large Gallery with more than 200 works, produced by around 70 artists or groups from the early 20th century to the present day. The collection seeks to highlight historically invisible trades and redistribute power among those who make the party happen. Furthermore, it can be said that, together, these works and documents tirelessly echo the same message: carnival is the enemy of loneliness.
brainsparks: brazilian renaissance (tn#265), hyped (?) brazilian carnaval (tn#265), carnaval chronicles (tn#265), carnaval (tn#268), portela fashion film (tn#246), reclaiming 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), the right to party (tn#7), voice of brazil (tn#246), brazilian kissing culture (tn#262), craftivist manifesto (tn#178)
🫦 what you want
i love me a good collab, and i was happy to see angèle and justice. i also had to share because it fits perfectly in the current quest of staying horny (spoiler alert) with all the kissing. also cool to learn it features the dance collective (la)horde, the same one that joined rosalía and björk at the brit awards a few days ago (chills!)
brainsparks: stay horny (tn#260), social health (tn#179), the age of pleasure (tn#123), good sex explained (tn#115), erotic intelligence (tn#1), desire, i want to turn into you (tn#108), relationship anarchy (tn#6), love languages (tn#57), brazilian kissing culture (tn#262)
🐎 stampede
i had shared about gensis owusu a long time ago, a ghanian-australian singer, and this new release got me. love me that synth-punk sound, it feels so cool.
brainsparks: get inspired (tn#98), turnstile (tn#230)
😵💫 loco loco
i didn’t know reinier zonneveld and by the name you can get they’re dutch. so i had to post this, because it’s a collab of a dutch and a nicaraguan-american dj i had shared here before, gordo. the video is directed by jurassic smoothie, and it’s ai-generated, which in this case made me not want to look away while being uncomfortable.
brainsparks: mexe-mexe (tn#207), new aesthetics of slop (tn#215), synthetic media (tn#18), anti-design (tn#169), glitch nostalgia (tn#34), the cult of ugly aesthetics (tn#134), model collapse (tn#211)
💤 hypnagogic state
recently this video from bbc hit my feed and gave me so many brainsparks. i found a post at the conversation to bring it here, with a new term to my vocabulary: hypnagogic state — “This is the twilight zone between sleep and wakefulness, when we drowsily linger in a semi-conscious state, experiencing vivid mental images and sounds.”
i visit that state every now and then and there have been so many lost ideas as i trusted i would remember them the next day. i love the idea of conscious napping to generate ideas, will definitely include that in my next workflows.
brainsparks: the shape of dreams (tn#207), the most common dreams (tn#146), why do we dream? (tn#72), animal dreamworlds (tn#138), scientists going into your dreams (tn#13)
🕶️ che fastidio
it’s music festival season and while i’ll not be watching eurovision, this song from sanremo made it to my eyes and ears (thank you @supermilus). the title means “how annoying” and repeats all over the song. isn’t it nice to be annoyed at irrelevant things when there is so much to be pissed about? i lowkey enjoyed it.
Milanese fashion (How annoying)
The Roman snob (How annoying)
The American dream (How annoying)
And the Italian politician (How annoying)
Tribal music (How annoying)
Dogs at customs (How annoying)
And the Pilates class depresses me
brainsparks: chemistry (tn#57), eurovision in crisis (tn#173), eurovision getting political (tn#71), what do i do with my hands? (tn#102)
see you next week, locos 😵💫✨
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lendo essa edição eu lembrei que ontem antes de dormir eu tive uma ideia que não escrevi e agora não lembro qual era kkkkk e também que na Radio Novelo elas falam sobre uma artista que foi na casa das pessoas pra conversar com elas enquanto pegavam no sono (na segunda parte do episódio Correspondências)