Block Seminar - Dates:

22.10.2025

05.11.2025 *11am

26.11.2025

03.12.2025

10.12.2025

28.01.2026

04.02.2026

Mangroves and estuaries are ecologically fascinating spaces. But mangroves and estuaries are also sociopolitically and historically charged spaces. As such, mangroves and estuaries can be studies in the context of Spatial Strategies in relation to the plants, animals and other beings of which they are constituted, but also in relation to their olfactory or sonic dispositions.

In this class, we will study mangroves and estuaries as philosophical and political concepts whose complexities have found echoes in scientific texts, in philosophical treaties, in manifestos, in novels or in musical compositions.

Ecologically speaking, the moment when two waterways meet each other, like a river meeting the sea, is a moment of negotiation of physical and chemical asymmetries that creates an extra-ordinary ecosystem flourishing with crabs, crocodiles, fish, migratory birds, mangroves, oysters, phytoplankton snails, seagrass, sea turtles, zooplankton and even humans and more. The particularity of an estuary is the interdependence. As each being plays a role, a niche (for example the niche of oysters is filtration, with each oyster filtering up to 50 gallons of water per day), in the sustenance of each species and the ecosystem at large and blossoming biodiversity, especially thanks to the varying salinity levels that arise when sweet water meets salty water. Estuaries are thus important for a vast spectrum of beings as habitat, resource, space for reproduction or transition in our ecosystems, whose existences are crucial for our environments. Estuaries serve as coastal buffers in times of erosions, floodings or storms, just as they help in filtering freshwater. But due to massive urbanisation, dredging, overfishing, pollution, oil and gas drilling etc, the ecosystem balance of estuaries all over the world are losing balance.

One possible entry point are the mangroves and estuaries of Recife in Pernambuco, Brazil. One possible entry point of many is the music related to the Manguebeat movement. One possible entry point of many is the „Manguebit Manifesto,“ entitled „Crabs With Brains“, which was written by the protagonists of Mundo Livre S/A and Nacao Zumbi, amongst others.

Context:

The estuaries of Recife, Pernambuco, is a space of multiple encounters. Not only the meeting of sweet and salt water, but also the first port in the Americas where enslaved people abducted from Africa encountered the so-called new world. Since its founding in 1537 upon Portuguese colonization, Recife, has been a remarkable site in which that which has emerged from that Gouffre, that abyss, that chasm, despite despicable violences has been able to manifest its intractable beauty. A site in which the rumours from and of the depths of that abyss still resonate in all engulfing ripples and manifest themselves as that notion of Tout-Monde.

It is that ‘intractable beauty of the world’ that birthed, in Brazil, some of the most important artistic and cultural movements of the 20th century: from the ‘anthropofagia movement’ of the 1920s that gave form to, informed and infused a Brazilian avant-garde with the “Manifesto Antropófago” an aesthetics and politics that Oswald de Andrade called “Cannibalist transnationalism,” a philosophy that claimed for the cannibalisation, the ingestion, digestion of other cultures as a way of asserting Brazil against European colonial and post-colonial cultural domination, as was so magnificently exposed in the 24th Bienal de Sao Paulo curated by Paulo Herkenhoff with Adriano Pedrosa; or the Black Experimental Theater (TEN) movement founded by Abdias Do Nascimento in 1944 to tackle the dearth of black presence and dignity in the national performing arts that initiated a movement of Afro-Brazilian playwriting and engaged politically by bringing the anti-racism struggles to the 1946 Constituent Assembly “and influenced the proposition of the Afonso Arinos Act, the first legislation geared to curb racism;” or the Cinema Novo’s “Eztetyka da Fome” (Aesthetics of Hunger) movement filmically formulated by Glauber Rocha in 1965 understanding cinema as an important tool and weapon for the revolutionary struggle; or the Tropicalismo movement of Caetano Veloso, Gilberto Gil, Gal Costa, Tom Zé, and Torquato Neto of the 1960s that advocated with their „Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis manifesto” for a “field for reflection on social history” through music, film and other artistic expressions that synchronised African and Brazilian cultures and found a political voice at the height of the Brazilian military dictatorship; or the Manguebit movement of the 1990s in Recife, that stood for a musical revolt against the socio-political, economic and cultural stagnation, for a resistance of the neoliberal agenda that had usurped most of Latin America, that advocated for a cultural memory that embraced all the aforementioned attributes “given in all, valid for all, multiple in its totality,” and that opted for a way-out of the socio-economic cul-de-sac through a pidginisation of sonic scapes and genres like makossa, Congolese rumba, reggae, coco, forró, maracatu, frevo, as much as rock, hip hop, electronic music, and funk. It is the Manguebit movement and its manifesto “Caranguejos com Cérebro” (Crabs with Brains) written in 1992 by singer Fred 04 and DJ Renato L and brought to life by two legendary bands and two albums in 1994 with titles that betray their intentions: Mundo Livre S/A's “Samba Esquema Noise” and Chico Science & Nação Zumbi's “Da lama ao caos”.

That these bands refer to a free world, and to Zumbi’s nation in their names is no coincidence. That they are from Recife, Pernambuco is no coincidence either. After all, it was in Recife, Pernambuco that the I Congresso Afro-Brasileiro was organised in 1934 that included activists like Solano Trindade, who was by the way also part of the Frente Negra Pernambucana, as well as the Teatro Experimental do Negro. And even more importantly, it was in Pernambuco and Alagoas that the great Francisco Zumbi (1655 – November 20, 1695) of Kongo heritage who went down in history as Zumbi dos Palmares claimed his kingdom, fought against the Portuguese colonialists, resisted against the enslavement of Africans, freed his people and resettled them in the kingdom of Maroons, the Quilombos, that Abdias Do Nascimento was later to qualify as some of the first democratic spaces and structures in what is today Brazil. The Quilobolas were the foundation on which movements like Manguebit could be built more than 300 years later.

The threads with which the fabric, the cultural brain, the collective brain of Recife, of the “Crabs with Brains” were woven span from the encounter of the different worlds that were forced to cross paths almost 500 years ago, as well as the different social entities in society from the family to the plantation to the samba school, to different social networks.

Next to the people, the geographical and geological bearings of Recife, Pernambuco also play an important role in the manifestation of that cultural and collective brain that birthed the Manguebit movement. Recife is situated at the confluence of the Beberibe and Capibaribe rivers as they proceed in their majesty to empty themselves in that massive body of water, the South Atlantic Ocean, from whose belly, from whose vault the voices still sing. Topography, climate too contribute in the making of knowledge. With its tropical forest, high rainfall, its tropical monsoon climate, its estuaries, high relative humidity Recife has been called the daughter of the mangrove, with its Parque dos Manguezais that too lends its name to Manguebit. But this natural, ecological richness of Recife which could be a dream for some became a nightmare for the people of Recife. In Alice de Souza’s article “Life reborn in the mud” she writes about an island of Racife Ilha de Deus (God’s Island) that had been generally neglected to its decrepitude in the 70s and 80s - there was no water, no electricity, no attention from the government. In the middle of these dire sociopolitical and economic conditions, the island was called Ilha sem Deus (Island with no God). As if the neglect of Ilha de Deus wasn’t enough, in 1983, two nearby factories provoked an environmental disaster by dumping waste from soap production into the water, thereby intoxicating fish and sea plants, which were the main means of subsistence in the area. This lead to starvation and mass exodus of the islanders in search of greener pastures, and at the same time, criminality skyrocketed on the island that had become a hiding place for gangs. This was nothing restricted to Ilha de Deus, as the ruthless construction in Recife, the intoxication of the environment by industries, the dumping of waste in the rivers, and the perishing of lives in the mangroves of Recife that had become oversaturated with plastic and other wastes led to an auto-suffocation. So if the rivers and estuaries of Recife were the veins and arteries of the place, then the city was struggling from a terrible thrombosis.

It is on this backdrop that the Manguebit movement emerges as a cultural revolution in the 1990s, basically to say “No more,” accompanied by several environmental projects to replant mangrove seedlings, folding sleeves and going knee-deep into the mud to clear the estuaries from plastic. This new movement came with a new sound: Manguebit.

Which is to say that the manguebit is a conceptual paradigm that brings together the notion of maternity, fertility, diversity, productivity together with the notion of a technology, digital media, computation that can facilitate syncretism, that can bridge the gap not only across the Atlantic, but between those that survived on land and those still locked up in that gouffre. Technology in this context serves a double purpose of connecting but also subverting. Manguebit should also be understood as the possibility of creating technologies, sciences, arts that do not only reflect the quotidian,
but also are fundamental for the subversions of the terrors of normativity.

This is also an invitation to reflect on the social and cultural brain of the collective that embodies the ambidexterity, intelligence and prudence of the crabs as a way of being in the world, as a way of being better humans. This is an invitation for people from varying walks of life to deliberate on spaces like estuaries, spaces of the mangroves that is evidence of solidarity, a coexistence of a variety of beings, plants and animals and mycelia that mostly assist and subsist each other, if left alone by the human. So, if such creatures with what we humans might call ‘primitive brains’ could exercise such proficient memories and such compassion, why can humans not. Or can they?