“Welcome to the Cavalhada Arena”: uma experiência de festa entre festeiros, cidadãos e ativistas comunicativos no Pantanal Mato-Grossense

Abstract

The present study addresses the parties as a more complex phenomenon in a contemporary scenario that encompasses the local development of mani brazilian cities based on biggest investiments in tourism and better management of the territorial image (SANCHES, 2010). Especially when the movement (flow) of partygoers is related to more diversified conditions of sociability (sociality), citizenship and activism (political, aesthetic, communicative). Unlike conventional approaches in Human and Social Sciences, the hypothesis is that the parties are taking over a “tactical” in contemporary public sfere, characterizing itself as a landscape in/of the city crossed by ambiguities, contradictions, disputes (local and community x global, sacred x profane, tradition x economic and tourist, visible and spectacularized x anonymous and subcitizenship). The objective of this study is, to some extent, to identify other “forms” and “aesthetics” of politics protagonisms in these spaces generally seen as recreational places. To better check this, one of the most recent editions of the Cavalhada festival in the small town of Poconé, Mato Grosso (2022) is selected. It is a festivity of Iberian origin that rescues the ancient battles between Christians and Moors in the Middle Ages, that in the case studied is celebrated locally as part of the popular festivities of the religious Brotherhood of the catholic saint Saint Benedict (a black saint and known as the protector of humble peoples) and every year it has become an event of greater media projection of the Pantanal Mato Grosso to the outside world. Conceptually and methodologically speaking, the emphasis is for a study at the interface between the studies of Communication, Art (Culture) and City, which will demand as a method a wandering cartography (JACQUES, 2012) and inspired by the drift experiences of the CAC-PPGCOM-UERJ Research Group (Under the coordination of Professor Cíntia Sanmartin Fernandes). In other words: a proposal for a more poetic walk in the “Festive City”, in an academic and ludo-activist effort to propose a profound “Festivalography” of the ways in which the people of Pantanal link with everyday life and with the most diverse stories of modern life. In the light of cartographic reports and theoretical-methodological problematizations, this study aims at the end to reiterate the tradition of everyday studies in the reflection of (socio)communicational phenomena in the not always harmonious relationship between partygoers and city, crowd and space, bodie(s) and landscape(s).