Spielraum: Spaces for Play and Margins to Maneuver between Brazil and Europe in the 20th and 21st Centuries

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira

The Spielraum research project envisages the development of a method for reading encounters, movements, journeys, and migrations between Europe and Brazil in the 20th century, with a particular emphasis on the material impact in the context of art, literature, and anthropology. “Spielraum” comes from the notes Walter Benjamin made for expanding his essay on the technical reproduction of the work of art. In the “additions in relation to previous versions,” he noted the polarity of appearance and play (“Polarität von Schein und Spiel”) in which a “second technique” plays a historical role, namely, that “what goes hand in hand with the atrophy of appearances and with the withering-away of the aura of works of art is a tremendous gain in the space for play.” We translate “Spiel-Raum” as “room for maneuver,” a fundamental space for artists and intellectuals to create new correspondences and connections that go beyond even a completed work of art surrounded by an “aura.” Furthermore, these correspondences and connections relate to a procedural value from which the intermediate and intermedial forms of encounters originate. By taking this conceptual-methodological path, “margins to maneuver” is a way of reading texts and analyzing images based on cultural crossings, that is to say, physical movements, exchanges through images, texts, and their translations. Artists, intellectuals, and theorists produce margins and it is their own knowledge that maneuvers them towards the most distinct fields, including art history, aesthetics, literature, anthropology, etc.