Considered by Veja magazine as “one of the most celebrated left-wing thinkers in the country today”, philosopher and writer Vladimir Safatle arrives in São Luís to teach the Modernisms and Aesthetic Construction of Brazil course, from July 12 to 15, from 15:00 to 17:00, at the Vale Maranhão Cultural Center.

At the current moment in which the country finds itself, the course proposes to revisit the Brazilian aesthetic project, which sought to articulate a very specific form of modernization and modernism, with its contradictions, strengths and weaknesses, and to understand how we are still in the interior of a clash between different types of modernism which constitute the horizon of Brazilian social actions.

There will be four classes with the themes “Aesthetic modernism and populism: the aesthetic construction of the country through a ‘revolution from above” led by architecture”, “Literature against the silencing of the national-developmentalist project: the Guimarães Rosa case”, “Body and geometry: Brazilian neoconcretism in the face of of the return of the repressed. Hélio Oiticica and Lygia Clark” and “The return of dark modernism and the lack of an aesthetic of irreconciliation. Brazil in the face of its collapse”.

Vladimir Safatle is full professor at the University of São Paulo (Department of Philosophy and Institute of Psychology); guest professor at the Universities of Paris I – Sorbonne, Paris VII, Paris VIII, Paris X, Berkeley, Essex, Toulouse, Louvain; author of several books on critical theory, psychoanalysis, aesthetics and political philosophy translated into English, French, Italian and Spanish. Former columnist for newspapers such as Folha de São Paulo and El Pais.

Classes are free and open to the public, subject to space capacity. The Vale Maranhão Cultural Center is located at Av. Henrique Leal (or Rua Direita), nº 149, São Luís Historic Center.