Clear enigmas and hidden meanings: the perpetuum mobile of the ‘machine of the world’ motif in recent interartistic activity in Brazil

Abstract

Out of its European Renaissance origins in the writings of Dante and Camões, the metaphor of the machina mundi first came to the fore in Brazilian literature in the canonical poem by Carlos Drummond de Andrade: the quintessential work of Brazilian modernism in its broadest sense, “A Máquina do Mundo”. The aim of this article is to explore the multiple, shifting possibilities inherent in the complex literary-cultural motif of the ‘machine of the world’ in current Brazilian art and literature. The text begins by looking at the comic epic poem Por mares nunca dantes by Geraldo Carneiro, before focusing on the different creative practices and appropriations of a series of paradigmatic variations on the theme from the opening decades of the 21^st century: hybridity and interdisciplinarity in the poems A máquina do mundo repensada by Haroldo de Campos and “A quarta parede” by Marco Lucchesi; and interartistic intersectionality and creative duality in Laura Vinci’s verbal-visual sculptural installation “A máquina do mundo”, and Nuno Ramos’s photo-illustrated poetry collection Junco. The aim of this exploration is to interpret each of the works within the discursive historical-cultural context of the motif, and to analyse critically its presence in these rewritten and reconceptualised forms.