Roberta Burchardt

Polyphonic visions: colonial modernity in the Luso-Brazilian Sobrado house

Spring Semester 2023

The Luso-Brazilian Sobrado house – built ca 1840, situated in the Nossa Senhora da Conceicao parish, Santa Catarina island – is evidence of Luso-Azorean colonial occupation in southern Brazil. Contextualizing both house and site - listed national heritage - as living archive, as living knowledge systems, the proposal reckons materiality and atmosphere as performative entities to engage with. The intention is to generate polyphonic writings, sourcing sounds, stories and matter; storying the space, resisting reduction and linearity, walking towards polyphonic, pluriversal narratives. Working to presentify an access into materialities and subjectivities through engaging with an intimate heritage site, the spirit of this place and erasures that enforce a praxis tell us of histories not told, heritages not acknowledged, and a systematic perpetuation of disparities. Learning through matter and sound, affective relationships with ancestries and cosmologies, come forth. Acknowledging these logics, the proposal aims to voice how different temporal regimes impose different interdependencies, reflecting social and environmental transformations and injustices, but also resistances. Moving within and beyond the extractive zone (Gómez-Barris), how can we both confront and learn from colonial concurrence? How can we better understand what the passage from pre-colonial, colonial to global temporalities - unlading resources of extraction - have to teach us? Colonial modernity becomes a condition from which to listen to and write on its polyphonic imaginaries, crafting a form of historiography between material and immaterial vestiges. Attempting to open what holds coloniality in place, its deep implications, the proposal sits between integrity and futurity, in the abundance of relations and world-making.

_{Image captions: 1-4. Sobrado house, Luso-Azorean heritage. Lagoa da Conceicao, Florianopolis, island of Santa Catarina, Brazil. 1981. Photo Leopoldo Plentz}