Banca de DEFESA: WILLIAM SOARES FREITAS

“I live my life, I laugh, when I can stand it I dance, I'm in the middle, and that's it”: a cultural cartography of the Engomadeira neighborhood.

Territory, Engomadeira, Black Cultural Manifestations, Cultural Cartography, Performance.

The current study aims to create a cultural cartography detached from the technical/traditional elements of geography. To achieve this, it proposes to develop narratives about the Engomadeira neighborhood, located in the central core region of Salvador, Bahia. Based on the oral perspectives of the neighborhood's inhabitants, I draw connections between the stories told about Engomadeira's territory and a conceptual framework centered on territory and housing. Subsequently, I focus on the neighborhood's black cultural manifestations—capoeira, the Terreiro Viva Deus Filho parties, and the LGBTQIA+ Parade—highlighting expressions of these events in the research dialogues. In the last section, I suggest expanding the cultural cartography through breakdance performances by the b-boys of the/in the neighborhood. The sections are constructed around questioning how Engomadeira's black cultural cartographies narrate and are narrated within/on the territory, employing semi-structured interviews, cultural cartography, and performance as methodological tools. Theoretical foundations include references to Milton Santos, Gabriela Leandro Pereira, Jörn Seemann, Leda Maria Martins, Muniz Sodré, bell hooks, Fred Moten, etc. From the collected narratives, I understand that black experiences in the highlighted cultural expressions reveal radical ways of experiencing the city. All are characterized by a spiraling ethic/aesthetic of black ways of living/making the city, from housing forms with a quilombola heritage background in the geography of the territory to religious and/or recreational manifestations.