Violão de Rua [Street guitar]: a bibliographical note

Resumo

Violão de Rua was edited by publishing house Civilização Brasileira jointly with the Cultural Popular Center (CPC) and the National Student Union (UNE), as a three-piece series between 1962 and 1963. Revista Estudos Políticos here reissues them in a fac-simile edition. This piece belongs to what has been dubbed popular revolutionary art, to use the terms of the CPC manifest of August 1962. Rejecting art as “an incommunicable island far-removed and from material processes”, the CPC intellectuals (cepecistas) evinced a militant art experiment, averse to the compromises of aesthetic formalism with the objective to provoke within the Brazilian an understanding of the world imbued with a sense of urgency. The assumption was that once all ties of inconsistency were undone the conditions would be ripe for the overcoming of the “limits of the present oppressive material situation” (Manifesto CPC, 1962). Violão de Rua was the literary face of this revolutionary endeavor that brought together different artistic fields as music, theater, cinema and visual arts. The document provides an interesting entryway into the atmosphere of radical politics before the military coup. No sooner had the new regime been installed, in the first days of April 1964 the UNE main office was burnt to ashes and the CPCs extinct.