A Práxis Criativa Negra de Naná Vasconcelos

Abstract

Naná Vasconcelos is one of the avatars of Brazilian invention music, having elevated percussion, and specifically the Berimbau instrument, to international solo protagonism. Ignored by the environment and narratives regarding both what has been consolidated as Brazilian instrumental music and the discursive environment of experimentalism in these territories, this article presents the trajectory and production of this artist through his traits of innovation, experimentation and invention, problematizing the limitations of biased perceptions that, incapable of reading innovations in Afro-diasporic epistemologies, they silence and reduce these exploratory black productions to the sphere of the folkloric and the exotic. I will read Naná's production through the analytical device of Black Creative Praxis, with which black experimental productions are investigated in their conditions of realization, to detect how artists with disruptive productions in creative terms consolidated their careers in such a conservative environment as the music market. By identifying the modes of organization employed in the international capillarity of a work as innovative and global as that of Naná Vasconcelos, this work aims to deepen knowledge about aesthetics and ethics in musical experimentalism, since inside the black imaginations political and social struggles have historically informed artistic practices.