A Multiplicity of Holes

This talk focuses on the material, artistic, narrative, and shamanic images of nets, ’redes‘, in Portuguese. Besides referring to fishing nets (’redes de pescar‘) and to the digital social networks, ‘redes‘, has received an interesting extension: it also refers to hammocks (called ’redes de dormir‘) since Pero Vaz de Caminha, in his 1500’s Letter of Discovery, translated the surprising technnology of the Tupinambá’s Indigenous hammocks (in Tupi, ’ini‘; in Aruak, ’hamaca‘) he saw in the coast of Brazil through an analogy with the fishing nets. From this tangle of nets, Marilia Librandi weaves this talk. Hammocks are an Amerindian artifact par excellence, found from the Antilles to South America. Fishing nets are an artifact of riverside communities that are being more and more attacked through the building of dams and mining activities empoisoning waters and people’s lives. From these two materials, fishing nets and hammocks, the idea is to explore a chain of free associations: from hammocks to shamanic dreams, from fishing nets to aquatic beings and ’acoustic baits‘ (Albert). Examples from literature, ethnographies, and the visual arts will help to think the net as a territory of activist, ecological and artistic interactions in relation to Amerindian and riverside cosmogonies.

Marilía Librandi is a writer and literary theorist; her work intersects Indigenous knowledge and Western literary theory. Holding a PhD in Literary Theory and Comparative Literature from the Universidade de São Paulo, she is currently affiliated with the Brazil Lab at Princeton University and collaborates with the Graduate Research Center “Diversitas. Humanities, Rights and Other Legitimacies” at the University of São Paulo. After teaching at the Southwest State University of Bahia, she taught Brazilian Literature at Stanford University from 2008 to 2018. Her publications include Writing by Ear. Clarice Lispector and the Aural Novel (University of Toronto Press, 2018), Maranhão-Manhattan. Ensaios de literatura brasileira (2009) and Transpoetic Exchange. Haroldo de Campos, Octavio Paz and Other Multiversal Dialogues (2020).