Awarded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Unicamp professor Jonatas Manzolli embarks this Sunday (18) for the Bellagio Center, in Italy. Selected from artists, thinkers, researchers and activists from around the world, Manzolli will participate in a month-long residency program, during which he will begin developing his new opera paper birds and put it up for debate with the other participants. “It is a space for conversation between people whose projects look at current issues and seek to produce changes in political and social thinking based on art, politics and human studies”, said the professor.
Among those selected are Dikgang Moseneke, a South African judge who worked alongside Nelson Mandela in the fight against colonialism and apartheid; Jody Heymann, dean of the School of Public Health and founding director of the Center for Policy Analysis at the University of California; and Jan Schaffer, Pulitezer Prize-winning journalist for Philadelphia Inquirer. The Rockefeller Foundation's calling funds artistic and academic projects that “promote the well-being of humanity.” The Bellagio Center's purpose is to be a place to unlock ideas, advance knowledge and activate solutions. (Read more)
Paper Birds
The embryo of the opera, whose libretto was to be written by Jonatas Manzolli during his stay at the Bellagio Center, emerged in 2015, with the disturbing image of the refugee child found on a beach in Turkey. “That boy seemed to be melting, as if he were made of paper. I was very shocked. The refugee situation is a human tragedy and I needed to write about it,” he recalled.
Mathematician and composer, Manzolli works at the interface between computational mathematics and music. In this project, he intends to reflect on migratory flows and the sense of belonging and identity of immigrants and refugees. “paper birds will talk about the migratory process using birds as a poetic vision of migrations and the image of the Tsuru (origami bird) as a symbol of a search for universal peace”, he explained.
According to the author, the opera will be based on the book Macunaíma, by Mário de Andrade. Without getting bogged down in its narrative aspects, it will tell the story from the stream of consciousness of the contemporary reader. “Macunaíma is a migrant. He left the Forest and went to São Paulo. But what would a reader of Macunaíma be like today with the refugee crisis as a reality?”, he asks. Manzolli intends to investigate the contemporary sensations and reflections that the book provokes when writing the opera. “Macunaíma, who was pitch black, bathes in a pool of water and turns white. Then his red brother. Each one is a different color. What does this change in skin color mean for today’s reader? The music will try to bring this process of identification and change into sound,” he said.
In addition to the thematic, narrative and musical investigation, Manzolli will work with movement sensors, research he has carried out at the Interdisciplinary Center for Sound Communication (Nics), since 1996. “I will try to capture the physiological signals of the singers and make them modify the images produced computationally. The images would be like a mapping, a description of the stream of consciousness of singers singing about this issue,” she explained.
