Remembrance in the Luso-Brazilian artistic-literary space: interview with Rosa Esteves, museologist and visual artist, great-niece of Eunice Peregrina de Caldas

Abstract

Eunice Peregrina de Caldas, a pioneering figure of feminism in Brazil, having helped to found the Liceu Feminino Santista (Caputo, 2008, p. 21), was also a poet and author of numerous works, including the anthology Amphitrite (1924). Her name, on the other hand, only appears in one Brazi­lian literary dictionary: the first volume of the Enciclopédia de Literatura Brasileira (Coutinho et al, 2001). Researcher Melissa Mendes Caputo has managed to bring together various biographical elements of this writer, but she emphasises the difficulty of this feat and denounces the “absence of a historical and cultural mentality of preservation” (Caputo, 2008, p. 21). This is a process that repeats in various transnational frameworks: in the period following the end of the Belle Époque, part of the literary sce­ne gradually weakened, especially homoerotic and women’s writing, due to repression and censorship movements between 1920-1930. As a result, primary documents relating to some of these writers have almost com­pletely disappeared. At various levels, access to the collections of these authors is, if not limited, completely non-existent. In a perspective of re­construction, in order to fill in some biobibliographical gaps, the interest of this work is to address this issue in the Luso-Brazilian literary space, starting with the case of Eunice Caldas, also addressing the modes of remembrance in the artistic space, through the interview with the artist Rosa Esteves.