Feb 03, 2019

Augustto Cipriani presents his lecture “Brazilian Contemporary Writing: Art, Graffiti, and Politics” on Feb. 8, 2019

Lecture by Augustto Cipriani from the Federal University of Minas Gerais, Brazil.

Over the past decade, a new aesthetic phenomenon has taken place in Brazilian arts and literature, which has become an decisive feature of contemporary poetry and visual arts and which consists in a constant merging of image and word, in particular through handwritten texts. Focusing on two representatives of this phenomenon, the poet Guilherme Zarvos and the visual artist Gustavo Speridião, this lecture considers the aesthetic and political implications of their visual exploration of writing. Using graffiti as a framework to comprehend how the aesthetic and the political merge in the works of Speridião and Zarvos, this presentation will also discuss the current state of graffiti in Brazil, placing it in the current assault on culture by the political powers.

Augustto Cipriani was awarded a grant from the Brazilian Ministry of Education to conduct research for a period of six months for his doctoral dissertation with Prof. Véronique Plesch as supervisor. Augustto holds a Master’s in Literary Studies from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (UFMG), with a thesis in which he studied the relations between orality and visuality, focusing on the Brazilian contemporary poet Waly Salomão. Augustto is currently working on his PhD dissertation in Literary Studies at the UFMG, studying the expansion and resulting changes in signification of the concept of writing in Brazilian contemporary visual art and poetry, with a main focus on the presence of handwritten texts in the works of Gustavo Speridião and Guilherme Zarvos.

Please join us on Friday, February 8, 4-5:30 p.m. in Bixler 102 for Augustto Cipriani’s lecture. There will be a wine and cheese reception. Please RSVP to Deb Thurston ([email protected] or 859-5630) if you plan to attend.