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Welcome!

Artememoria is a magazine that has the goal of representing writing, music, and art that resists and remembers authoritarianism, with a focus on Brazil’s last dictatorship established through a military coup in 1964.

The title of this site, Artememoria, is the meeting of the Portuguese words arte and memória, meaning “art memory” and “art and memory”. Reminiscent of artistic initiatives in the Tropicália movement that similarly combined Portuguese words, Artememoria captures the intersections between two seemingly separate categories. Cultural production is not something that merely represents the past; it is inextricably linked to the way a society – and the world – remembers. The terms arte and memória are mutually intelligible between Portuguese, Spanish, and English. This site will hopefully find similar relevance across the Americas. Brazilians either experienced this dictatorship firsthand or inherited its legacy, and Spanish-speaking Latin America carries the heavy history of many authoritarian regimes, some of which were organized along the same repressive principles as Brazil’s. English-speakers from the United States, meanwhile, can become aware of the violence that their own country endorsed and enabled. The aim is that all readers will gain valuable frameworks for resistance in art that can be leveraged to in struggles against state violence globally.

By August 2019, this site will host four issues of Artememoria, each focused on a theme related to art, memory, and state violence. There is no straightforward way to capture the radical, experimental, and foundational art produced in the two decades of Brazil’s dictatorship, nor is there a simple method for representing the reality of extrajudicial imprisonment, torture, censorship, or exile. For these reasons, the content of this site approaches memory of Brazil’s last dictatorship through a variety of methods, ranging from literary criticism to profiles of Brazilian artists who lived under dictatorship to multimedia explorations of current efforts to remember or represent state oppression. Artememoria also publishes regularly on the Artememoria Blog, tying the themes surrounding this dictatorship to art events, book releases, and current events in Brazil and beyond.

Artememoria is an arts and culture magazine, and its content lies in the realms of literary criticism and translation, journalistic interview, personal essay, and photography. Artememoria will not lay out a history of the dictatorship, as that very important work should be left to historians. For in-depth, rigorous, and free-access historical information on the period of 1964- 1985 in Brazil, please take a look at the Related Reading section of this site.

Though political statements may arise in specific articles, Artememoria as an organization is not associated with any political party in the US or Brazil. Please, debate and discuss content in the comment boxes on our blog! Or, contact Artememoria about other ways to get involved.

All content is published in English, with the original Portuguese available when possible. By publishing in English, Artememoria seeks to expand the information available in English about Brazil’s dictatorial regime, very little of which is about the arts, and in that way challenges the bounds of nation-state that too often circumscribe collective memory.

Collaboration

Collaboration is a key component of many free-access initiatives related to the memory of the Brazilian dictatorship. In the spirit of those movements, Artememoria seeks to incorporate a collective approach to content in three ways:

  1. Collaborative interviews. Artememoria aims to include the input of interview subjects on the very form and approach their interview will take, and encourages conversations to be a creative dialogue between journalist and subject.
  2. Solicited content. Artememoria contacts artists, organizations, and scholars working in a range of media to contribute to the site directly, as there is a wide community of thinkers already working on the memory and history of Brazil’s last military dictatorship.
  3. Open submissions. In the future, Artememoria hopes to accept written, visual, and audio submissions for its issues and for the blog. We are currently developing the site to allow for this possibility. If you have any questions about unsolicited collaborations in the meantime, please contact us.
About the Editor

Lara Norgaard is a recent graduate of Princeton University in Comparative Literature. She wrote her undergraduate senior thesis on post-dictatorship memory in 1990s Brazilian and Argentine
detective fiction. After receiving a Labouisse Fellowship for a postgraduate project in international civic engagement, she launched Artememoria.

Lara is also an Editor-at-Large in Brazil for Asymptote Journal, and you can follow her articles and interviews related to Brazilian literature in translation here, via the Asymptote Blog. Her past work includes a translation of a section of Chicas muertas, Selva Almada’s narrative nonfiction book on femicide in Argentina, reporting on forced displacements during the 2016 Rio Olympics with Agência Pública, and reported articles published in The Princeton Echo and The Nassau Weekly.

Lara wrote, edited, and translated the content on this site unless otherwise specified. She currently lives in Brazil.

Funding

The Henry Richardson Labouisse ’26 Prize Fellowship, a Princeton University post-graduate grant that supports initiatives in international justice and development, fully funds Artememoria. Casa Pública, the Rio de Janeiro branch of Brazilian independent investigative journalism organization Agência Pública, provided mentorship for this project.

For more information on the Labouisse Fellowship, see: www.princeton.edu/oip/fellowships/major-awards/labouisse.

For information on Agência Pública in English, see: apublica.org/in-english/#about