An attempt to find an alternative mode of production, and produced over numerous stages, A Certain Brazilianness (A C_B__, 2004–08) is the title of a multidisciplinary process based on relations and resonances. It looks towards Brazilian modernist movements to find a means to blur subjectivities and fixed identities, thinking in particular about how to deconstruct nationalist identities. A key reference is Antropofagia, a cultural strategy first coined in 1928by the Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade as a counter-concept to the European elitism of his country’s former colonisers. Based upon the cannibalism of the Tupi Indians, who ate their enemies in order to appropriate their talents and powers, Antropofagia was incorporative and collapsed existing power relations, hierarchies and separations – between coloniserand colonised, self and other, and so forth.

A Certain Brazilianness refuses the idea of fixed identities in the acknowledgement that ‘identities are transformational, sliding and shifting in an ongoing complex stream of becoming...’ as Lebbeus Woods notes in his 1995 essay ‘Everyday War’. A C_B__ absorbed these tendencies as the basis of methodologies for film production. The work was realised through a series of stages, with each involving a group of invited contributors and establishing non-hierarchical ways of working: these stages include Polyphonic Stage (2004–05)︎, Sound Track Stage (2006–08)︎, Maurits Script (2006)︎ and finally Maurits Film (2008)︎.



Screenshots of the website



Stills first workshop