Sonic Cartographies
Drums Over Drops: Bahia’s Funk Doesn’t Wait for the Club
Built for sand, sweat, and crowds — not headphones — Bahia’s funk culture prioritizes drums, bodies, and versioned chaos over export-ready perfection.
1A+ Dispatch
Context Is A Luxury.
Ancestral Echoes
Brazil’s Ancestral Kitchens Are Fighting for Survival — and Teaching the World How to Eat Again
Indigenous food systems once sustained Brazil’s landscapes. Now they’re under siege — even as the world searches desperately for answers to climate collapse.
System Hacks
CIEP: The School That Became a Sound System
Brazilian Funk Still Carries the Ghost of Governor Leonel Brizola
Random Urgencies
When the Smallest Country Shows the Biggest Spine ...
Timor-Leste’s donation after Portugal’s floods exposes the moral gap between economic “growth,” rising racism, and a state that performs empathy instead of delivering protection.
Street Syntax
Feijão-Carioca: The Bean That Ate Brazil
How a fast-cooking, engineered grain replaced regional food cultures — and what that loss means in a warming country built on biodiversity.
Shifting Grounds
From “Stigmatised Territory” to Travel Trend
The shift from fear to fascination may look like progress, but history shows what happens when neighbourhoods become desirable before they are protected.
Street Syntax
The First Kick Was Never Theirs
From missionary playground to political territory, Indigenous football turns a colonial pastime into resistance.
Diaspora Aesthetics
Brazil Is Back at the Oscars — and Its Cinema Has Always Been Political
Brazil’s latest Oscar contender isn’t a comeback story, but the echo of a cinematic tradition built on dissent, satire, and unresolved histories.
Diaspora Aesthetics
The Archive That Keeps Burning — and Why Brazil’s Cinema Refuses to Die
From Cinema Novo to catastrophe: the uneasy life of a national film memory.
Sonic Cartographies
“Rio de Janeiro” by Chaseiro: Indonesia’s City-Pop Arcade Dream
Long before playlists, passports, or “world music” marketing, Indonesia imagined Rio de Janeiro as a dancefloor—and pressed it to vinyl.
Diaspora Aesthetics
Brazil Was Never a Racial Paradise. Afro-Brazilian Art Is Done Pretending Otherwise.
As Brazil’s racial myth collapses, Black artists are rebuilding the country’s memory from the ground up.
Sonic Cartographies
São Luís Feels the Bass Before Sunrise: Brazil’s “Little Jamaica” Rewired Reggae Into a Collective Pulse
Inside the nights where radiolas roar, couples dance agarradinho, and reggae remains a badge of identity rather than a quest for fame.