Moments/Movements of street musicians and poets in the city of Rio de Janeiro

This essay is based on ongoing research with musicians and poets who perform in public spaces in the city of Rio de Janeiro. In particular, the research corpus consists of rock musicians who perform on the streets, female Carnival marching band musicians, and slam poets. Understanding their interventions as sensitive expressions of the city, we have been mapping some of their practices by following the actors and reflecting, based on our experiences in the field, on aspects that reveal their urban displacements.

We drew inspiration from the urban context as a place “[…] where the narratives of inhabitants refer to landscapes that shelter their references in paths and itineraries in which they attribute identities always within the perspective of becoming, i.e. coming-to-be” (Eckert, 2008, p. 10). Thus, as it is from his landscape in the Antilles that Glissant draws the idea of a Chaos-world in which “everything is in everything, without this necessarily meaning that it has to blend together” (Glissant, 2006, p. 26), we reflect, based on the actors in this investigation, of a certain Chaos-River and the Diverse (in capital letters, to follow the philosopher’s spelling) of their percursive movements.

 

 

Figure 1. Musician Wagner José plays at the Lavradio Market in downtown Rio, with the contribution of a passer-by
January 5, 2025 – Author’s archive

 

Figure 2. On the same day, in the port area, the feminist marching band Mulheres Rodadas [High-mileage women] holds a pre-Carnival parade.05/01/2025 – Acervo da autora

 

Thus, focusing our eyes and ears on these artists was the way we were able to wander through their wandering imaginations – that is, forging our “series of intermediaries,” in the words of Deleuze:

 

[…] They can be people—for a philosopher, artists or scientists; for a scientist, philosophers or artists. […] Fictional or real, animate or inanimate, we must create our own intermediaries. It is a series. If we do not form a series, even if it is completely imaginary, we are lost. I need my intermediaries to express myself, and they would never express themselves without me: one always works in groups, even when this is not apparent. (Deleuze, 1992, p. 156).

 

We point out that, in the cases followed in this investigation, the materiality of the interventions also lies in the gestures of the artists’ journeys, as the stories and experiences of the city are recorded in them, while they construct images in the public space that also push others to leave their place – in a composition of time-spaces. In this sense, thinking of the body in the city as an image, a sensitive presence that carries intentions, roots, and history, and the imaginary as a dimension “[…] that transcends the individual” and “establishes a bond” (Maffesoli, 2001, p. 76), such performances are proposed as producers of moments/movements that mediate conversations in soundtracks, communicating provisional harmonies in the city and different ways and desires of inhabiting it.

 

Figure 3. Youth from the city’s outskirts gather in the center for a poetry slam
January 27, 2023 – Author’s archive

 

Figure 4. In another part of the city, slammer Preta Poética [Poetic Black Woman] recites in the neighborhood of Campo Grande, within Rio’s suburban outskirts
July 14, 2025 – Author’s archive

 

Figure 5. Poetry battle in Vila Kosmos, North Zone of the city – August 2023
Author’s archive

 

Following the ideas of geographer Doreen Massey, our being together involves the engagement of diverse trajectories, “stories-so-far,” whose “imaginations of space” enter into the negotiations of places (Massey, 2008, p. 220), in a knowledge of the city produced by their involvements. To quote Ingold: “the ways in which people build, whether in their imagination or on the ground, arise within the flow of their engaged activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagements with their surroundings” (Ingold as cited in Massey, 2008, p. 215). Following actors who seek to modulate, through performance, the places they travel and occupy, we understand that they bring their lines to spaces in order to encounter other, unexpected lines that may be favorable. When they encounter threads that merge or clash with their own, there may even be an intensification of their action – which does not mean that they go against the elements of the place, but that they intertwine with them.

 

Figure 6. The rock and blues band Mr. Severin plays on the famous Ipanema beach sidewalk in the South Zone
March 18, 2023 – Author’s archive

 

Fernandes and Herschmann (2025, p. 117) point out, in this regard, that thinking about the city’s environments as a form of urban action allows us to “[…] reevaluate urban spaces based on their sounds: situations in which the acoustic phenomenon is converted into a medium for the existence and conformation of these spaces.” Such performances thus speak of the paths of their actors and of the imaginaries that are always being formed and communicated by the movement of their bodies in the city. The interest of this investigation involves precisely, when traveling with these actors to places where they wish to intervene artistically, describe where they start from and what they do in the public space – understood as a space of difference, creative ferment, and encounter. From there, the actors express and share their ways/worlds of life, mediated by sounds – music, poetry – being with others who access, even if only briefly, these worldviews with which they come to dialogue.

 

Figure 7. The feminist marching band Calcinhas Bélicas [War Panties] performs on International Women’s Day in Praça da República [Republic Square], in front of Central Station (where many working women pass by every day) – March 2023
Author’s archive

 

In this investigation, each of the actors tells us different stories of a city in conflict and celebration between hills, beaches, and mangroves, where a “fatality of attachment” (Sodré, 2014, p. 206) that forces us, again and again, to “invent” the place (Massey, 2008, p. 204) – the city, thus constituting the Diverse itself, a common place of different things. If for Glissant, focusing his discussion on identities and intercultural contacts, multilingualism does not imply coexistence or knowledge of several languages, but rather “the presence of the languages of the world in the practice of one’s own language” (Glissant, 2005, p. 51), in a poetic paraphrase, we suggest thinking of the city as being constituted by the presence of a multiplicity of inhabitants in the practice of each habitation – as in “world-totalities” where “everyone needs everyone” (Glissant, 2005, p. 156). Performances in public spaces, therefore, come together only in the sense that all the elements found there are composing their circles.

 

Danielle M. H. L. da Gama

Published in September 24. 2025

 

[1] PhD research student in the Graduate Program in Communication at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ), in the research area of Media Culture, Imaginaries, and the City, where she is supervised by Prof. Dr. Cíntia Sanmartin Fernandes. She completed a doctoral sandwich internship (Capes-Print) at Université Paul-Valery, Montpellier, under the coordination of Prof. Fabio La Rocca. Danielle holds a master’s degree in Social Sciences from the Federal University of Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB), in the field of Cultural Identity and Diversity. She also has a bachelor’s degree in Social Communication from the Federal University of São João del-Rei (UFSJ). She is a member of the Communication, Art, and City Research Group (CAC-UERJ).

 

Referências:

Deleuze, G. (1992). Os intercessores. In G. Deleuze, Conversações (P. P. Pelbart, Trad.). Editora 34.

Eckert, C. (2008). As variações “paisageiras” na cidade e os jogos da memória. ILUMINURAS, 9(20), pp. 1-12. https://doi.org/10.22456/1984-1191.9294. Acesso em: 02 jan. 2023.

Fernandes, C. S.; Herschmann, M. M. (2025). Ambiências carnartivistas na cidade. In: C. S. Fernandes, F. La Rocca, M. Herschmann  (Orgs.). Metrópole Sensível: Ambiências, atmosferas e tonalidades (pp. 115-138). Sulina.

Glissant, É. (2005). Introdução a uma poética da diversidade (E. A. Rocha, Trad.). UFJF.

Glissant, É. (2006). Tratado del todo-mundo (M. T. G. Urrutia, Trad.). El Cobre ediciones.

Maffesoli, M. (2008). Michel Maffesoli: o imaginário é uma realidade. Revista FAMECOS, 8(15), 74–82. https://doi.org/10.15448/1980-3729.2001.15.3123

Massey, D. (2008). Pelo espaço: uma nova política da espacialidade. (H. P. Maciel; R. Haesbaert, Trads.). Bertand Brasil.

Sodré, M. (2014). A ciência do comum: Notas para o método comunicacional. Vozes.