SARAVÁ - um video sem nenhum caráter

de Evelyn Zea Schuler e Viola Scheuerer

44 min., video, © curpaqpaq productions 1999

português com legendas em inglês, francês, alemão

S A R A V Á [afrobrazilian greeting]

In May 1999 the multimedia project Heart of the Others - Saravá, Mário de Andrade! took place during a five-week-period in 69 small towns in the state of São Paulo, Brazil. Abandoned train stations were the public sites where the three artist caravans presented their film-, music-, dance-, theater-, and poetry performances to an audience that usually is not exposed to artistic performances of this range.

The project was coordinated by sesc (serviço social do comércio), an important brazilian organisation, aiming at democratizing knowledge in Brazil.

The inspiration lies in the work of the writer and musicologist Mário de Andrade (1893-1945), whose novel MACUNAÍMA the Hero without Character, is a literary cornerstone of brazilian modernism from the 1920s. According to Mário de Andrade the story MACUNAÍMA is told by a parrot, who is a witness of the hero’s actions. It is impossible to translate the story, the retelling merely represents a transportation of one art form into another.

MACUNAÍMA is a Cannibal travelling through time and space in Brazil, digesting all external influences and herewith create a Brazilian culture.

S A R A V Á a video without character elaborates on the cannibalistic character of MACUNAÍMA: It is an audiovisual Anthropophagy of figures, gestures, and sounds that shape Brazil through different medias.