In 2018, following the murder of Marielle Franco, a Black councilwoman from Complexo da Maré favelas in Rio de Janeiro, a public staircase in São Paulo city dawned with one of its walls covered by a large portrait of her. Since then, further iconic and verbal inscriptions have been collectively added to it, referencing this yet unsolved crime. Our proposal is to interpret semiotic practices of appropriating this public space as emplacing (Scollon & Scollon 2003) the periphery in the urban center through mourning and hope.
We draw from our project "Peripheral life trajectories: Violence between the ordinary and the extraordinary in (auto)biographical narratives and poetics" (grant 2021/02618-8, São Paulo Research Foundation/FAPESP). Methodologically, we turn to a collection of pictures taken by activists and by ourselves documenting the stairs as a landscape in the making. We also draw from social and institutional media materials.
Analytically, we first look to the poetics of memory-space. The memory-space fusion is framed using the concept of landscape (Zukin, 1991), understood as a product of society in a non-reified way. As a grassroots monument for Marielle, the stairway is a vernacular practice of memory that partakes in producing urban landscapes. Appropriation, uses, and symbolic disputes over the staircase are treated as biographical practices providing narrative frameworks not only for Marielle's trajectory, but also for multiple stories. We look to the poetics of these practices, alongside performers' reflexivity and dynamics of (de/re)contextualization (Bauman & Briggs, 1990).
Memory "in place" will be thought of in terms of recognizing its semiotic and social complexity, rather than a sense of plurality per se. We study the stairs as semiotic landscape (Jaworski & Thurlow, 2010), paying attention to their compositional arrangement and entextualization. We consider the "pragmatic montage" through assembling, juxtaposing and layering different modalities of visual languages (photographs, painting, verbal utterances) and street art (poster, graffiti, stencil). The paratax regime of montage (Pignatari & Mundy, 1981) makes possible ever-changing arrangements: the vernacular monument is alive through social uses and frequent erasures and additions.
We conclude that the montage potentiates political performances of hope and worship but also of "assault" (e.g., aggressive tagging over her portrait). Our analysis leads to an understanding of the production of spectral presences (Derrida, 1993): Marielle's face on the stairs is an appearance, indexing that "the world is out of joint." Through her "absent presence" in the city center, Marielle is a reminder that, like a specter, the periphery returns and emplaces its denial of invisibility.
Bauman, R., & Briggs, C. (1990) Poetics and Performances as Critical Perspectives on Language and Social Life. Annual Review of Anthropology 19: 59-88.
Derrida, J. (1993) Specters of Marx. London: Routledge.
Jaworski, A., & Thurlow, C. (2010) Semiotic Landscapes: Language, Image, Space. London: Continuum.
Pignatari, D., & Mundy, K. (1981) Montage, Collage, Bricolage Or: Mixture is the Spirit. Dispositio 6:41-44.
Scollon, R., & Scollon, S. (2003) Discourse in place: Language in the material world. London: Routledge.
Zukin, S. (1991) Landscapes of power. Berkeley: University of California Press.
