On this day in February 2023, Bastien Gallet is in Rio de Janeiro, and just a few days before its official opening, Carnival has already invaded the Brazilian city. Originating in Portugal, this festival heralding the start of Lent brings together more than 50,000 people every year to watch the samba schools parade in the Sambodroma and accompany the street blocos as they dance and sing their way through the city. Although its current form dates back to the 1930s, Carnival has inherited much older traditions - African, European and Amerindian - from which it has managed to achieve a dazzling synthesis. 

On this Sunday morning, on Rue du Jardin Botanique, the sounds of Rio have fallen silent. A few residents are out walking their dogs. Cars are moving elsewhere, diverted to the edge of the street by the city police. You only have to walk a little, however, to see the first signs. A group of costumed cariocas, a distant murmur of bass, snare drums and saturated voices. The atmosphere has just changed. Two hundred meters past the Botanical Gardens, we can make out the truck from whose roof the singers, masters of ceremony and first bateria are addressing the already dense crowd. The closer we get, the more we feel the pervasive presence of the streetbloco. Soon, all other sounds have disappeared, covered by the mass of its percussion: drums(surdos and repiniques), snare drums, tambourines, chocalhos (small cymbals), agogôs (two-tone bells) and cuicas (rod drums). Its name is Suvaco de Cristo, the armpits of Christ. The expression should be taken literally: anyone looking up from the Botanical Gardens street will see the statue of Christ the Redeemer, Rio's emblem, at the very top of the Corcovado. The bloco scrolls under his armpits, which can be understood in two ways: as a carnival inversion joke, with Christ sweating with us as we march beneath him, but also as a rite of protection: if you can see his armpits, it's because he's extended his arms and we're marching beneath his wings, which a famous march, intoned at every Carnival, asks to be opened for whoever wishes to pass(Ó abre alas / Que eu quero passar)*, to enter the dance and the party, or from life to death.

This Sunday, February 12, five days before the official opening of Carnival, the streets of Rio belong to Suvaco de Cristo, Cordão do Boitatá, Carrossel de Emoções(Carousel of Emotions), Tambores de Olokun, Acorda e Vem Brincar(Wake up and play), Vai Tomar no Grajaú, Fogo e Paixão(Fire and Passion), Tá Pirando, Pirado, Pirou!(a bloco conceived by and partly made up of patients from the Philippe Pinel psychiatric hospital), etc.., to name but a few. In Rio, there are over two hundred and fifty street blocos for some seventy samba schools. These parade down the double-tiered street of the Sambodrome Marquês de Sapucaí, a monument imagined in the 1980s by the Governor of Rio and designed by Oscar Niemeyer to make Carnival both the spectacle and showcase of the city and Brazil. Every year, the schools compete with art and virtuosity to win the prestigious Samba de Erendo competition, which can be translated as "theme" or "story" samba. The composition of this musical narrative and the show that accompanies it is the work of an entire year, culminating at the end of February in the sambodrome alley.

The street blocos march through the city, with no audience other than those who join the procession, but also with no constraints other than marching to music. However, the spectacle of the samba schools cannot be set against the freedom of the blocos. While the construction of the sambodrome was certainly a way for the political authorities to normalize the practice of carnival, this has never prevented the schools, which are located in Rio's working-class neighborhoods and are mainly made up of Afro-Brazilians, from politicizing their enredo. So, in 2019, Mangueira won the competition with a samba that celebrates the history of those silenced by the Brazilian state or its militias, from Luìsa Mahin to Dandara dos Santos and Marielle Franco (assassinated in 2017 and 2018), a song that has become one of Carnival's anthems**.

I arrived in Rio on February 5 to take part in a street bloco, Panamérica Transatlântica, born in 2019 as a reaction to the election of Jair Bolsonaro as President of Brazil and the initiative of Chilean artist Viviana Mendez and Brazilian filmmaker and poet Dado Amaral. A pan-American and transatlantic bloco, made up of Brazilians, French, Chileans, Argentinians, Spaniards, etc., a strange and disparate community united by a project and a desire. It's been three years since our last march, and a few months since Bolsonaro came to power. On February 20, we'll be setting off from the Praça de Harmonia, in central Rio, where we'll be returning, if all goes well, a few hours later. 

I said that we were brought together by "a project and a desire", but it's true that in 2019 my desire was quite vague, as I knew nothing about Carnival. We had to build this desire collectively, and turn it into a shared, tri-lingual project. Above all, we realized that Carnival was a strange and very powerful advertisement for desire, in the sense that it consists in making public what the social order tends to conceal or forbid: bodies and their skin, their dances, their touch, their kisses and so on. This requires an entire staging, with music, narratives, costumes, make-up and finery, diverse and mobile scenography - what we might call an arrangement in the obvie sense that a bloco functions only by arranging all these elements together and setting them in motion. For a bloco, whether official or unofficial, sambodrome or street, desires as it moves forward, and as it moves forward appropriates that which it cannot possess: the city.

I

o have followed the Cordão do Boi Tolo from the center of Rio to Lemme beach, through all the southern districts, from Lapa to Flamengo, right up to the road tunnel linking Botafogo to the line of beaches, which the bloco cheerfully blocks for hours before stretching endlessly upwards from Lemme to Copacabana, to understand the singular power of these thousands of bodies that do nothing but walk while dancing and dance while singing.

Bastien Gallet 

* Marchinha composed and written in 1899 by Brazilian composer and musician Chiquinha Gonzaga. The wings in the first verse refer to the sections of dancers and musicians leading the parade, which here open up to let the narrator through.
** Histórias Para Ninar Gente Grande"(Stories to lull grown-ups to sleep). The third verse explicitly states what story this samba intends to tell, which is obviously not the official one.
"Brasil, meu nego
Deixa eu te contar
A história que a história não conta
O avesso do mesmo lugar
Na luta é que a gente se encontra"
" Brazil, my heart
Let me tell you
The story that history doesn't tell
The other side of the same country
It's in the struggle that we meet "