Underground Artistic-Creative Scenes Between Utopias and Artivisms

Abstract

This article focuses on two countries usually represented as (semi-)peripheric: Portugal and Brazil. At stake is a metaphorical perspective of the Global South as equivalent to most (although not all) low-income and often politically or culturally marginalised territories. The use of this concept marks a shift from a central focus on development or cultural difference towards an emphasis on geopolitical power relations. Using the examples of Brazil’s PWR Records and padê editorial, and Portugal’s Príncipe Discos, the article highlights a series of manifestations of a radical habitus that has materialised in underground musical-creative creations, which increasingly have emerged as a stage for contemporary resistance. These examples demonstrate the spurious nature of the division between the concepts of the art of resistance and the art of existence: they are artivist resistances that enact working utopias. In many such projects, we find artivists with a (sub)cultural do-it-yourself background, who are not afraid to combine art and politics, and who reject the old idea of ‘art for art’s sake’. An art of resistance emerges that, in the cases analysed, is linked to the adherence to new social movements, such as feminism, LGBTQIA+ rights, the right to the city and anti-racism. Using a qualitative methodology, with a strong multi-sited ethnographic slant based on interviews and documentary analysis, we demonstrate how the artistic imagination of contemporary youth is materialised in combined resistance and existence for a place in the world.