Roots to Fruits #3: Congada

Over the course of five decades, self-taught musician and ethnomusicologist Spirito Santo (1947) has produced hundreds of hours of audio recordings containing music, reports and interviews, many meters of black & white negatives and colored slides using amateur photographic equipment, such as polaroids, point-and-shoot cameras and K7 recorders, capturing unique moments of the cultural history of the Central African diaspora in Minas Gerais, Brazil.

This season of Roots to Fruits explores the building of a self-funded archive and one of its most recurrent themes, namely: Congadas. Far from the academic realm, which had little to no interest in understanding the “African culture in Brazil”, the archive tells many stories. It speaks of a resilient musician looking for resonance and the history of his people, as well as of the underexposed Black inheritance of Brazil’s identity.

In Memórias Congadeiras, Spirito Santo and his son Caio Rosa challenge hundreds of years of Portuguese imperial rule that have dominated the memory-making processes taking place in Brazil’s society, carrying out a collective process of resistance against colonial erasure of the cultural expressions practiced by their ancestors.

The precious intergenerational and intercontinental conversations that preceded this issue have shown us just how much knowledge and Brazilian history is still hidden in personal archives. Roots to Fruits Nº3 Congada is an homage to Spirito Santo’s life’s work, most of which has never been published before. Through revisited and lost memories, and nuances in translation, this unacknowledged history is now made globally accessible.