Friday, November 6 — 12:00 noon — WAG 316

Felipe Cruz, University of Texas

“The Balloonists: Brazil’s Underground Folk Artists”

Thousands of unmanned hot air balloons cross the skies of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo every year. Tightly knit and secretive groups exist whose sole purpose is to create a public aerial art form consisting of balões, the Portuguese name for these intricate aircraft made of paper and propelled by fire. Small balões had been made for annual  folkloric religious festivals since the colonial era, and by the 1970s making them had evolved into an activity in its own right, ushering in a golden age for balões and their makers, the baloeiros. These groups developed a wealth of new techniques in order to construct and launch their gigantic balões, creating a complex body of technological knowledge. I propose the term “guerrilla technologies” to describe this decentralized and bottom up approach to technical creation by subaltern actors. These new large and complex balões  flew higher and longer than their predecessors and began to overtake the urban airspace, traversing the vast oceans of poor peripheries and landing in the islands of elite population in Rio and São Paulo. This talk analyzes the world of baloeiros and their process in creating a guerrilla technology, as well as the elite perceptions of them as dangerous criminals that eventually led to their criminalization and repression.

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Originally from São Paulo, Brazil, Felipe Fernandes Cruz is now a doctoral candidate in History at UT, where he is completing a dissertation on the history of aeronautics and colonization in Brazil’s frontier regions. He also wrote and co-directed the documentary film “The Balloonists: Brazil’s Underground Folk Artists,” the subject of his talk today, and helped found The Appendix, an online journal of narrative and experimental history. His work has been supported by fellowships from the Social Science Research Council, the American Meteorological Society,  the Smithsonian’s National Air and Space Museum, and the Linda Hall Library, and he has been awarded both the prestigious Kranzberg Fellowship from the Society for the History of  Technology and the Edward H. Moseley Award from the Southeastern Council of Latin  American Studies.