PROJ

by Anna Harsanyi

Caetano Veloso’s song “Sampa” is an ode to São Paulo, a city whose streets contain multiple personalities and embrace characters whose unique traits combine to tell a story of admiration and uneasiness in the song’s narrative. As a descriptor of the city, “Sampa” projects a familiar relationship to concepts of home and place. The song tells of enchantment when crossing Ipiranga and São João Avenues paired with the disappointment of urban poverty in the face of economic growth. Such juxtapositions expand beyond the locale of São Paulo and call the listener to reflect on the city as a metaphor for life’s uncomfortable changes, and the natural desire to preserve the familiar. Traditional definitions of home imply comfort and ease associated with a specific place. Despite the constant transformations taking place around us all the time, home becomes a fixed variable in an otherwise ever-changing world. When considered more broadly, and just as Veloso invites us to reflect through his song, home can be a more complex and chaotic concept. Home can be as much related to one place as it can be to its ever-changing and constantly progressing qualities. What if home is comfort in the juxtapositions and the whirlwind of change that exists all around us? Can home be dissociated from a locale, and become instead a feeling of comfort in transition?

Carolina Paz’s work “Meu canto” uses song as a medium to reflect on these questions. Paz invites audiences to sing their own conceptions of home – whether through literally singing a song reminiscent of home, or reciting mundane activities like grocery shopping lists or daily routines. Either way, the act of singing calls to mind anyone’s ability to vocalize a moment of personal connection to varying ideas of comfort and familiarity. Just as Veloso brings us into his world by unveiling the conflicting symbols and metaphors he observes in his home, participants in Paz’s project invite others to listen to the details of personal relationships to their own.