The city in the memorial gestures of Zero Hora’s Cultura supplement: the chronotope of the chronicle and the columnists

Abstract

This article is the result of the research Journalism, memory and city: study of the supplement Cultura of Zero Hora (2011-2014), which problematize the memorable gestures of a cultural supplement in the journalistic representation of the city. Here, we analyzed the chroniclers Luís Augusto Fischer, Ricardo Chaves e Ismael Caneppele who had fixed columns in the suplemment, considering that they are a special point of view about the city, mediators governed by the experiences of living and belonging. Based on the narrative analysis, we focus on the representations of the city proposed by the chroniclers, the ways in which they move around it, the map they affectively inhabit, which places receive visibility and value resulting in a singular topography. We find in the cultural supplement an environment propitious for the fusion of signs that characterize the chronotope, that is, time indexes that appear in space and, vice versa, the space that makes sense because it´s measured by time.

Keywords
Chronicle; City; Supplement Cultura (ZH); Cultural Journalism; Chronotope

Resumo

Este artigo resulta da pesquisa Jornalismo, memória e cidade: estudo do suplemento Cultura de Zero Hora (2011-2014), que buscou problematizar os gestos memorativos de um suplemento cultural na representação jornalística da cidade. No recorte, analisamos os cronistas Luís Augusto Fischer, Ricardo Chaves e Ismael Caneppele que tiveram colunas fixas no caderno, considerando que são pontos de vista singulares sobre a cidade, mediadores regidos pelas experiências do vivido e do pertencimento que fundam um lugar. Apoiados na análise narrativa, concentramo-nos nas representações da cidade propostas pelos cronistas, pelos modos com que se movimentam nela, o mapa que habitam afetivamente, quais lugares recebem visibilidade e valor, resultando em uma topografia singular. Encontramos no suplemento cultural um ambiente propício para a fusão de sinais que caracterizam o cronotopo, ou seja, índices de tempo que transparecem no espaço e, vice-versa, o espaço que se reveste de sentido por ser medido pelo tempo.

Palavras-chave
Crônica; Cidade; Suplemento Cultura (ZH); Jornalismo cultural; Cronotopo

Resumen

Este artículo resulta de la investigación “Periodismo, memoria y ciudad: estudio del suplemento Cultura de Zero Hora, que buscó problematizar los gestos memoriales de un suplemento cultural en la representación periodística de la ciudad. En el recorte, analizamos a los cronistas Luís Augusto Fischer, Ricardo Chaves e Ismael Caneppele que tuvieron columnas fijas en el cuaderno, considerando que son puntos de vista únicos sobre la ciudad, mediadores regidos por las experiencias de vivir y pertenecer que fundan un lugar. Apoyados en el análisis narrativo, nos enfocamos en las representaciones de la ciudad propuestas por los cronistas, por las formas en que se mueven en ella, el mapa que habitan afectivamente, qué lugares reciben visibilidad y valor, dando como resultado una topografía única. Encontramos en el suplemento cultural un ambiente propicio para la fusión de signos que caracterizan el cronotopo, es decir, índices de tiempo que se transponen en el espacio y viceversa, el espacio que se siente al ser medido por el tiempo.

Palabras clave
Crónica; Ciudad; Suplemento Cultura (ZH); Periodismo Cultural; Cronotopo

Introduction

The Cultura (“Culture”) supplement from Zero Hora newspaper (ZH, Rio Grande do Sul) was one of the longest lasting cultural supplements in Brazil and, merely in its printed format, circulated for 22 continuous years (1992-2014). It focused mainly on the publishing industry, promoting publicity for books and literature, and on placing emphasis on proximity and place, foundational characteristics of the newspaper’s editorial and marketing project¹. Studying the final phase of the supplement’s circulation, between 2011 and 2014, we noticed that cultural journalism, one of a society’s modes of record-keeping and remembrance, beyond spreading knowledge, also establishes itself as an activity that promotes recognition. It summons the reader to a relationship of recognition of the space-time dimension: a heritage, a biography, a city. This paper originates from the research Journalism, memory and city: a study of ZH’s Cultura supplement (2011-2014)², which aimed to problematize the gestures of remembrance of a cultural supplement in the journalistic representation of the city.

Within this sphere, we will attempt to place in the spotlight three chroniclers who had regular columns in the weekly supplement during the analyzed period: Luís Augusto Fischer, Ricardo Chaves and Ismael Caneppele. The intersection of their points of view, which were circulated by the same material space of communication, the supplement, produced different perspectives on the city. We consider the chroniclers as interpreters of the urban space, its special readers. They speak from a privileged vantage point as intellectuals in/from the literate culture. They are mediators led by the experiences of the life, the affections and the belonging that establish a place.

Among the vast critical body that deals with the themes of city and memory, we base our research on authors from different traditions, besides references in Geography, in order to enlighten the cultural journalism segment, particularly the weekly supplement and the chronicle genre. With this goal, and considering the inseparability of the space and time dimensions as described by Bakhtin (1993)³, we are able to use the figure of the chronotope, which was so well-presented by the Russian philosopher in his theory of the novel. The author explains that the temporal indicators appear in the spatial sphere, which, in turn, becomes meaningful when it is measured by time. This intersection of axes would then form the artistic chronotope, where a fusion of spatial and temporal indicators would occur in a carefully thought-out, concrete whole, i.e., a place where traces of the passage of time in space are condensed. Here, the image of the chronotope is compared to the reading gestures of the cultural supplement about the city, as we will now see.

The city’s text and journalism: the chronotope of the cultural supplement

Among the many scholars we studied, there are many approximations between the city and writing, and city and books. From doodles to books, the philosopher Lefebvre (1999, p. 114) stressed that “the city is written on its walls, on its streets”, an infinite writing process, a book with many blank or torn pages. We follow, therefore, the metaphor of the urban sphere as an entanglement of texts that add to each other, that interpenetrate themselves, that compete for visibility and protagonism in memory, so that the size of a city does not necessarily refer to its physical dimension or the size of its population, but to the amount of stories it produces. (REGUILLO, 2001 apud MOUNTS, 2014). The image of the palimpsest, of a piece of writing layered over another one, translates this reading perspective, which considers the city as a matrix of layered texts (PESAVENTO, 2004).

It is worth pointing out that historically the urban space was where a material and cyclical sense of cultural transmission was forged. After all, the storage availability (plaques, books, buildings, monuments) made it possible for the city to fulfil one of its main functions — that of imparting a complex cultural heritage from one generation to the next (MUMFORD, 1998).

In the urban context, journalism made itself into a powerful narrator. While the flow of information followed the movements of commerce and capital, the journalistic institution, after gaining impulse with Modernity, became a kind of compass for facing the experience of great cities, especially from the nineteenth century onwards. In a reciprocal fashion, journalistic production and its textual practices adapted to urban daily life, while being in turn influenced by it, adjusting its abstract sense of time as well as the places which were to be brought into the spotlight or, conversely, hidden away (PARK, 1987; SCHUDSON, 2010, FRANCISCATO, 2005; BENJAMIN, 1991).

As the scene of the phantasmagoria of goods, the urban sphere made it possible to consolidate a new sense of time beyond natural rhythms, by placing clocks on church towers, for instance. The qualitative time of the seasons was confiscated by the capitalist working day, by the consumption and circulation of goods, by the compulsive movement of novelties: “The manner of producing commodities and the appeal to consumption do not leave space for rest or contemplation because, like the financial markets, men must never sleep” (MATOS, 2006, p. 1123, our translation)⁴.

From newspapers to subsequent forms of media, all have been implicated in the continued and rapid movement of capital, accepting a temporality that privileges the horizon of the present time. However, just as it accelerates time, the media also structures and formats memory culture (HUYSSEN, 2000). Considering that the journalistic field also places itself as an important articulator of memory (ZELIZER, 2014), we find in cultural journalism a segment which is resistant, to a certain degree, to the logic of the rapid present which flattens the historical horizon (GOLIN; CAVALCANTI; COUSIN, 2018).

Let us take, for example, the temporality of the cultural supplement, the weekly sections inserted into the printed newspapers that reached their peak in the twentieth century. Conceived in the context of the printed editorial logic, it constitutes a mosaic of heterogeneous fragments (journalistic materials, analytic texts and, sometimes, fictional excerpts) anchored by their editing date. These fragments are articulated in the form of a mosaic, permeated by the overlapping of different subjects and temporalities. Each publication expresses an editorial policy in the interpretation of culture and exerts its power to demarcate spaces for knowledge and for the circulation of knowledge (BAREI, 1999).

We can also view it as a kind of heterotopia⁵, once again the time-space dimension, in relation to the newspaper body. In other words, it opposes other ephemeral and factual narratives produced in journalistic writing when it proposes a long reading and bonding time. Here, we can see traces of the etymological concept of the Portuguese word “revista”/“re-vista” (“magazine”, “journal”), i.e. the act of re-viewing, of seeing again, of examining, of inspecting something closely, presupposing the exercise of criticism and essay and, therefore, of reflection on the past and on what is to come, a reflection which is inserted into the calendar of the present.

In this framework, the studies that have been done about ZH ‘s Cultura supplement pointed towards an interpretation of the city through a commemorative emphasis on birthdays and anniversaries, through the communication of the life and death of notable subjects, among other gestures of memory mobilization. It is not a mere coincidence that a supplement editorially structured on a foundation of expertise makes the prestige of knowledge its main point of view. Through our studies, we concluded that the supplement designed a topography composed of rituals and places of distinction (especially academic and/or prestigious spaces in the culture system). Furthermore, it highlighted certain biographies and inserted the remarkability of their actions in the cultural history of a place (COSTA, 2018).

Here, we intersect with the categories established by Cavalcanti (2020) while analyzing the mnemonic gestures of cultural journalism. The categories listed by the author (anniversary, criticism and diachrony) point towards an ethos of cultural journalism in its practices of attributing value and mediating the cultural system. In her analysis of vehicles such as Cult (“cultured”) and Nexo (“nexus”) magazines, the author defends that cultural journalism acts towards emphasizing a memory production that works against a merely informative tendency and in favor of critical approach and contextualization. Not depending on a chronological temporal link in order to be relevant, this section produces a temporality which, through a latent prefigured universe, gives way to the emergence of the past as a profitable place in which it is possible to recognize and understand the present. Therefore, the temporality of cultural journalism reflects not only a representation of the past, but a presentation of it, a construction that reverberates from the present. If the present is perceived as a point of friction where past and future are interconnected, a window is opened to diachrony, that is, to a reconfiguration which happens through time, allowing multiple readings of the same material. In this sense, the topography promoted by the supplement, understood as temporal writing about space, is also demarcated by that which Cavalcanti (2020) describes as a medium of reflection⁶.

Reading the chronicle’s topography

Aiming, then, to problematize the topography constructed through the supplement, we conducted the first panoramic reading and cataloguing of the corpus (newspaper collection)⁷, selecting reduced samples through the perspective of narrative analysis (CULLER, 1999; MOTTA, 2013). One of these samples was, precisely, the aimed object for works of some of the most frequent columnists. In the collection of columns, we sought to identify repetitions and regularities, focusing mainly on projections of spatialities regarded as relationships. We sorted through repeated, synchronized spatialities that pointed towards biographical, physical and symbolic places. This interpretative reading was oriented by evidence found in the object itself as well as in the theoretical background that underlies our work. In this sense, the conceptual dimension of the place⁸ is quite important to us as a symbolic construct, woven by social relations, by the meanings imprinted by use and experience, that which is linked to the known and the recognized and which concerns the ways of inhabiting the city.

We now turn to the three columnists who had regular spaces in ZH’s Cultura supplement during the period studied: Luís Augusto Fischer, Ismael Caneppele and Ricardo Chaves. Considering the style of their columns, we define them as cultural chroniclers. It is worth repeating that chroniclers are privileged interpreters. They present us with an informative and affectionate type of knowledge about the city and project a topography over it. We inscribe this word with the meaning proposed by Vecchi (2015), who states that topography is a field over which someone seeks to inscribe the materiality of memories, representations, forces which traverse and mold space. Thus, it is a dense tangle of relationships between collective memory, remembrances and places, something that remains explicit, for instance, in the toponymy of the streets (as long as they are not organized through the abstraction of numbers). There, it is possible to identify a symbolic mantle saturated with names and with the evocation of episodes of official history, of notable figures or of the place’s previous references and other kinds of tributes.

From toponymy, we move on to another form of the time of remembrance: the chronicle, a socially legitimized textual genre which carries chronos in its etymological root. If we consider that the genre is a regulating instance which establishes boundaries and indicates a horizon of expectations to the reader (MONTES, 2014), what we find in the chronicle is an unstable ground, with changeable boundaries and which is sometimes literature, sometimes journalism and sometimes whatever the author defines as a chronicle. Tethered to a considerably traditional school of thought, the Brazilian chronicle obtained aesthetic independence and was able to include stylistic variations in its creative modes. Specifically, it became a kind of collaborator to the city, a record of the moment, of daily life, of ordinary conversations and of orality (CANDIDO, 1992).

Since its foundation in 1964, the newspaper ZH presented itself as a newspaper of chroniclers — columnists. The Cultura supplement also gave chroniclers more editorial value, selecting mainly male names during the period we studied⁹. Although taking different approaches, as will be demonstrated, they have all been present in the authorial space that is the column, be it half a page or a full page in length, accompanied by unobtrusive illustrations (as in the cases of Fischer and Caneppele) and photographs (a central theme in Ricardo Chaves’s work).

We have seen that the supplement is a compilation of fragments, a mosaic of themes and temporalities, and the chroniclers-narrators are representatives of perspectives. They function as windows through which observation and narration are filtered. The concept of space as focalization, therefore, enables the existence of an observed space as well as a space which makes observation possible (BRANDÃO, 2013). As stated previously, our study is based on narrative analysis (CULLER, 1999; BRANDÃO, 2007). Therefore, we direct our focus onto the representations of the city through the ways in which the chroniclers move in its space, through the maps they inhabit emotionally and through the decision of which places are given visibility and value.

The chroniclers’ windows

Our analysis begins with Luís Augusto Fischer, a professor of Brazilian Literature from the Federal University of the Rio Grande Do Sul, a writer and an essayist, whose monthly column Pesqueiro (“fishing” or something related to the act of fishing) was published between 2011 and 2014, yielding 39 columns analyzed in our collection. Fischer looked at the city mainly through the lens of an intellectual, a professor and a critic, a narrator and analyst of the movement and circumstances that permeate the culture of the place. Honoring anniversaries was also used as a starting point for reflections proposed in his column, Pesqueiro. Therefore, although the column was anchored on facts and/or contemporary events, the historical contextual perspective and the columnist’s personal memories guided the conversation with the reader.

The representation of certain spatialities predominated in his collection of chronicles: the systems of transmission, the school and the university. The chronicler, whose starting point was the world of teaching, writing and reading, was a pointed defender of Literature in a culture which has progressively been giving it less importance in formal curriculums. In this context, he has enlightened contemporary writers and visited a regional canon, who is not always known or recognized by the majority of readers, justifying their previous importance to the formation of the city’s literary system.

Porto Alegre was precisely the city that was the main protagonist of Fischer’s chronicles, as a character as well as a space, with which he entwined his personal memories and his intellectual knowledge enveloped by a tone of orality and affection. The reader can feel the density of the narrator’s life (at least five decades) in the city since his childhood in the Fourth District and the São João neighborhood, which made him a collaborator and reader-writer to the place. He gathered these fragments of past experience in order to give meaning to what is being experienced at the time of writing. This was the case, for instance, with the marches of June, 2013, which reverberated in at least three monthly columns (June, July and August of 2013)¹⁰ as a motif for analyzing the political and economic impasses that year, about the need to occupy the physical streets and to cultivate “affection” for the city, instead of indifference. Trying to capture from afar the multiple meanings of the manifestations, he appealed to reminiscence and, sharing the stage of the manifestations, he projected his own emblematic João Pessoa Avenue block, with the Student House on one side, the Faculty of Economics on the other and, in the middle, a march in which he had participated to defend the causes of Amnesty and a Free Constitutional Assembly, in 1977.

Porto Alegre’s provincial condition, in a constantly conflicting position with the hegemonic centrality of the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis, is a cherished theme for the author. By approaching cultural processes which demarcate how much space belongs to the realm of a social relation (BOURDIEU, 2007) marked by hierarchies, exclusions and symbolic violence (the kind which is performed because it is naturalized), the author unraveled his fishing net. He pulled fragments from themes as different as they were connected, from the invention of traditions (the figure of the “gaúcho” and their bravado, for instance) to the arbitration of the Modern Art Week (1922), to the difficulty of recognizing the value of one’s surroundings when the parameter is to overvalue what is foreign.

From this reflective view rooted in the territory, whose main production chronotope, in a broad sense, is based on the writing and reading office — the window through which the chronicler focalized his themes —, we move onto the next author. In contrast to Fischer, Ismael Caneppele participated briefly as a columnist, but introduced a new horizon for the chronicles produced in that context. A scriptwriter, actor and director, Caneppele created two series for the supplement: Diário de Berlim (“The Berlin diary”), published between October and November of 2011, when he moved from Rio Grande do Sul to Germany, and A estética do calor (“The aesthetic of heat”), whose title is an allusion to the so-called “estética do frio” (“aesthetic of the cold”)¹¹ that marked Caneppele’s return to southern Brazil at the beginning of 2013¹². Twelve serialized texts stress this proximity through the foreigner’s view and through physical displacement.

Considering the whole collection, it is possible to notice that his writing was based on the observation of the streets, of its materialities, characters, and on the tradition of the writer as a wanderer, in which the act of wandering produces the writing. There are at least four recurrent points in the texts which appear, together, to concentrate the chronicler’s view on the (un)known physical space: the use of memory as a resource, the present as a confluence of times (past-future), the amalgamation of subject and space, and the power of climactic conditions. The chronicle entitled A cidade é uma mulher (“The city is a woman”) is representative, for example, of the author’s sensitivity in translating unknown cities and drawing them nearer through the use of characters. In this case, Berlin was transmuted into a woman and, in this metaphor, which is recurrently used in literature to represent cities, the chronicler saw in Berlin’s “charm” the image of a city which changes while conscious of its past, allowing itself to grow older without hiding the passage of time from its body, valuing physical and symbolic materialities in the accumulation of time, the palimpsest city: “Berlin is a perpetual instant for those who dare to inhabit its current freezing concrete. A present time that contains the perpetual in almost all of its street corners” (CANEPPELE, 2011a, p. 2, our translation)¹³.

As he walked and wandered through streets and on subway cars, Ismael Caneppele used to shift the point of view in conversations with the inhabitants. Through this means, he made analogies and conducted comparisons between his country of origin and the one which had received him, mixing situations, images and timelines. In the chronicle published on November 12, 2011, in a dialogue with a professor of architecture who planned to visit Brazil, he commented on the invisible frontiers of post-wall Berlin, on the multiple realities coexisting without comingling, while simultaneously remembering the incident when several cyclists were run over by a driver who subsequently fled the scene. The incident had happened in February that same year and a video of it had gone viral to the horrified shock of the Berliners, who are “born cyclists” (CANEPPELE, 2011b, p. 2, our translation)¹⁴.

A year after the publication of the first series in the supplement, Caneppele used “feels-like” temperature as the guiding thread to apprehend the sensibilities of the surroundings, still saturated by the freshness and unfamiliarity of someone who has just arrived from their travels, of the experience of displacement. In Estética do calor, the chronicler reinforces the climate’s relation to the ways of imagining and inhabiting space, and sought to apprehend the contrast and the dialectic between heat and cold which characterizes the southerner. In opposition or dissonance to the aesthetic of the cold, the collection of texts reflects upon the ways of life during the hot summer months in the southern hemisphere and invites the reader to dive “fearlessly” into the temperature of the heat in Porto Alegre and other relatively close cities.

Seven of the eight texts belonging to this series were also conducted by a character. It was, therefore, through a relationship with someone else (usually a friend) that he multiplied perspectives on present everyday life. The characters moved through the cities of Porto Alegre, Lajeado (our chronicler’s native city) and Pelotas. However, in the geography illuminated by the seasonal cycle of warmer temperatures, it is possible to notice the contrasting pallor of ruin, scarcity and loss that reverberate in the chronicles through the characters’ experiences. The chronicler’s wandering once again stands out; through peripatetic action, a reflective story emerges. This was the case with the story of the friend who visited the Menino Deus neighborhood and searched everywhere for lost parts of himself, indicating the strangeness of a place inhabited more in memories than in everyday life (CANEPPELE, 2013).

Another columnist who appeared in a monthly page between 2011 and 2014 was Ricardo Chaves, a photographer for ZH newspaper since 1992. Entitled Reflexo (“reflection”), the column’s main theme was photography seen from a very specific point of view, still based on journalistic hooks about regional and national events in the area, anniversaries, tributes and the discovery of archives. Chaves captured the temporal logic of the supplement in the cyclical rhythm of the symbolic recognition of ephemerides. At the same time, in this movement, he produced a writing of himself in fragments composed of brief texts and photographic records. If we look at the first column (February 5, 2011), we can see that the author invites us to follow, through photographic images, a boy’s first meeting with the sea on that southern summer, capturing him with a contemplative look on a sand dune in Capão da Canoa beach. Then, as we see the boy already focused on playing with the sand, Chaves adds his personal childhood photographs to the page, in which he is seen experiencing the same situation, at the same beach, in images taken at least 50 years before¹⁵.

The gesture of flipping through photographic albums points to Reflexo column’s chronotope-synthesis: not the captured moment which marked the photographer’s activity in daily journalism, but the slow contemplation of photography in a chronicle format, of his attempt to freeze the time which flows ceaselessly. Immersed in a context where the act of taking a photograph becomes a way of being and of authenticating the world, Chaves directed his focus towards the analogic time of the printed photograph and its condition as a vestige. With this focus, therefore, he opened his mother’s photo album from when she was a young woman in the 1940s, carefully organized with headings, and his own personal album: on his 60th birthday, in July, 2011, he assembled pictures of his birthdays since childhood¹⁶.

In the tune of reminiscence, the photographer took on the lens of an archaeologist and revealed a special appreciation for finding new archives, for the discovery of photography collections inside homes and farmhouses in the countryside of Rio Grande do Sul. The chronicler’s nostalgic tone is expressed by the conscience of ruin and loss more than by an idealization of the past. In this perspective, he framed pictures of the city of Porto Alegre, especially between the 1940s and 1970s — pictures of moving trams, scenes of the emblematic fight for Legality, in 1961, at Palácio Piratini. In certain situations, he mourned the carelessness with which the material and architectural memory of the city is treated and the disinterest of the State in the custody of the photographs.

Analyzing the whole, it is easy to notice the defense of qualities which make professional photographers’ artwork unique, the work of award-winning contemporaries, and, above all, the work of the exponents from the “school of photography” produced in Rio Grande do Sul, from which Chaves graduated. By talking about his colleagues, he talks about himself, about his formation, and ponders the radical change in the cultural practice of photography.

The intersection of the journeys

In the urban sphere, space is divided, fragmented, separated by the visible and invisible walls of social and hierarchical relations, territories whose topography is constructed by the act of writing. Through the analysis of these columns published in the Cultura supplement, we infer that the three selected authors extract parts of the city’s geography, producing a kind of (auto)biographical writing. All of them seek to comprehend the polysemic relations (social, political, cultural, and economic) which refer not only to physical space, but also to its inhabitants. The chroniclers give meaning to the place through the plane of experience and affection, as demonstrated by Tuan (1983).

Most of the places represented, especially in Fischer’s and Chaves’s texts, are located in the Historical Center neighborhood, which is precisely the region where the city was founded and which, for decades, was the nuclear peninsula of social, economic and cultural relations. Although each author offers a type of frame, a manner of anchoring and capturing the quotidian — Fischer’s reading cabinet, Caneppele’s wandering, Chaves’s re-visitation of photo albums —, the city that was written is the one measured by biographical space; writing about the place implies writing about oneself.

If a place can be defined as a pause in movement (TUAN, 1983), the long permanence which strengthens the bond was peculiarly felt by Fischer and Chaves, two names that persist throughout the years of the collected editions we analysed. Caneppele would be the exception and, even in his brief appearance, he fulfilled the purpose of airing out the feeling of proximity which is editorially cultivated by ZH newspaper. The author’s grounded movements of looking at a city through the maps of other cities, of shifting the focus onto foreign characters, produced a degree of strangeness which is typical of displacement.

We would like to highlight the fine harmony between the three columnists in their understanding of the city’s fabric as a palimpsest, where we must explore and where we see through the filter of memory, of a writing layered over another one. In the face of a combination of distinct spatialities juxtaposing each other and temporalities intersecting one another, this act of narration allows space and time, in their various layers, to be explained and understood.

In this sense, we note a somewhat melancholic aspect surrounding the trio of authors, a characteristic which was most apparent in Caneppele and which gained a nostalgic tone in Chaves. However, let us reiterate, we do not refer to the kind of nostalgia that idealizes or paralyzes, but to the sensation of looking at the present while bearing in mind the consciousness that something has been lost which cannot be regained. The present and the future, drawn through this lens, impose the past as a condition — the past that invades the present and the future in the signs of ruin, under the consciousness of loss, of impermanence and of finitude (CASSIN, 2014).

Final considerations

Finally, pondering the regionally and historically demarcated dimension of our “case study”, we believe that, although it does indeed echo a specific context, we have found wider traces for exploration. Firstly, we learned that the representations of the urban sphere indicate how much a geographical space is always preceded by everything that is told and foretold about it. It is, therefore, a narrative product composed of the physical manifestations, the discourses and the speeches it produces (OLIVEIRA JÚNIOR, 2014). Among the web of texts that sustain the living fabric of the city, we saw how much journalism inhabits it, generating space-time relations.

If all spatial relations imply a power dynamic, we have found in the supplement the construction of a distinctive space through the recruitment of specialists. In the heterotopic condition of being a counterpoint to the ephemeral time of the journalistic present, the cultural supplement — and, we underline, a significant part of cultural journalism —, is constructed in an environment conducive to the fusion of signs which characterize the chronotope, that is, time indexes that appear in space and, vice-versa, the space that is given meaning because it is measured by time.

By producing systematic mnemonic gestures as an editorial policy, ZH’s Cultura supplement demarcated a topography composed of the materiality of memories that reflect on the represented space, particularly on the represented space of Porto Alegre. The selected columnists, Luís Augusto Fischer, Ricardo Chaves and Ismael Caneppele, were special agents in weaving the chronotopes which, as Bakhtin (1993) reminds us, seek to gain meaning in the world and in the activation of the readers’ chronotopes.

Each of them opened up different focalizations for the urban sphere based on what constitutes the place, the space of experience, where it remembers, reinvents and auto-fictions (in the sense of something that is molded and constructed) itself in order to gain knowledge of oneself. In this journey, we stress the potency of the journalistic chronicle as a figure of the chronotope, when it reveals the city as (auto)biographical writing, produced by the outline of the personal and the social, the individual and the collective where wandering around the space implies, above all, travelling through time (BENJAMIN, 1997).

• 1
  Since 1992, the Cultura supplement has aimed at contemplating broad subjects and working as a forum where specialized knowledge can reach a supposedly wider readership. In the two decades of its existence, circulating always on Saturdays, it established itself as a hegemonic space for mediating knowledge in the daily news industry of the state of Rio Grande do Sul.
• 2
  This project was developed with support from the Productivity Grant which is given by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq).
• 3
  Bakhtin (1993) borrows the term from the mathematical sciences, based on Albert Einstein’s Relativity Theory, as an “almost” metaphor, emphasizing mainly the inseparability of space and time.
• 4
  All quotes in Portuguese have been freely translated. The original quotes can be accessed in the original version of this document.
• 5
  In “Of other spaces”, Foucault (2009) reflects upon heterotopias as real, effective places, linked to fragments of time (heterochronies) which are a kind of counterpoint within a culture.
• 6
  In her re-reading of Walter Benjamin, Cavalcanti (2020, p. 99) says: “The superficial experience of culture to which we are often submitted by journalism is, therefore, a mirror of the temporality that envelops it, whose produced memory tends to be surrounded and condemned to oblivion. However, cultural journalism, as the main mediator belonging to the artistic and critical press, contains in itself the ability of investigating the past which was denied by the temporality of the commodities and of reclaiming enthusiasm for it, intensifying it, propelling it forward and turning it into a more effective and vigorous reality”.
• 7
  173 editions belonging to the final phase of the supplement’s circulation were catalogued. A detailed account of the methodological approach and the research that was developed can be found in Golin and Rizzatti (2018, p.18-38).
• 8
  The concept of the “place” encompasses a profusion of meanings according to the adopted bibliography. We found it useful to adopt the perspective presented by Carlos (2007), who considers that spatial production occurs in the everyday plane and emerges in the ways of appropriation, use and occupation of a specific place.
• 9
  It is important to stress that we refer to the Cultura supplement exclusively in its final phase, from 2011 to 2014, a period during which there is no record of female columnists. On the other hand, Zero Hora is known for publishing various types of sections and supplements, in which columnists such as Martha Medeiros, Claudia Laitano, Diana Corso and Julia Dantas, among others, are published.
• 10
  The columns are: Muitas classes médias (“Many middle classes”), Zero Hora, Porto Alegre, 22 June, 2013. Cultura, p. 8; A voz das ruas (“The voice of the streets”), Zero Hora, Porto Alegre, 27 July, 2013. Cultura, p. 7; A cidade e a indiferença (“The city and the indifference”), Zero Hora, Porto Alegre, 17 August, 2013. Cultura, p. 7.
• 11
  The musician and composer Vítor Ramil coined the term.
• 12
  The first series, Diário de Berlim, was published between the 15 October, 2011 and 26 November, 2011. The second series, A estética do calor, was published between 05 January, 2013 and 23 February, 2013.
• 13
  From the original: “Berlim é um instante eterno para quem ousa habitar o seu gelado concreto atual. Um tempo presente que contém o eterno em quase todas as suas esquinas” (CANEPPELE, 2011a, p. 2).
• 14
  From the original: “ciclistas de alma” (CANEPPELE, 2011b, p. 2).
• 15
  Mergulho em dois tempos (“Diving in two times”), Zero Hora, Porto Alegre, February 5, 2011. Cultura.
• 16
  Faces de outrora (“Faces of yore”), Zero Hora, Porto Alegre, November 10, 2012. Cultura; Nesta data querida (literally, “on this special date”, but the expression is a reference to a verse in the Brazilian version of “happy birthday to you”), Zero Hora, Porto Alegre, July 9, 2011. Cultura.

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Edited by

Editor: Maria Ataide Malcher

Editorial assistant: Weverton Raiol

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  23 May 2022
• Date of issue
  2022

History

• Received
  20 Oct 2020
• Accepted
  28 Feb 2022