Matérias nebulosas: coisas que acontecem em uma festa de exu

In this paper, we are interested less in “objects” than in certain kinds of things: things such as smoke, gestures, images, crossroads, persons and entities. Turning to a particular event – a festa de exu, a celebration for exu –, we explore the circulation of things which in the festa coalesce in a nebulous crossroads between thing and sign, act and meaning. Far from exploring the festa for its symbolic meanings, we seek to engage with the tense play between signification and materiality that takes place there. We take such nebulous matters to involve not the clearly identifiable movement or transitions between pre-constituted things, or the ordered/ordering processes by which such things are constituted, so much as indeterminate states of potential and unforeseen acts, material and performative processes of circulation within which things come to life in the festa.