The Portela Samba School: pedagogy and power from the block

In this episode we host the cultural director of the Portela Samba School Rogério Rodrigues Santos to talk about Portela’s production and history in the periphery of Rio de Janeiro. We discuss the centennial history of the School and its origins in the Oswaldo Cruz neighborhood, where Rogério accompanied the development of the school since the 1970s. He also created the project www.portelaweb.org as a digital archive of Portela that presents their main figures and annual samba stories. We reflect on the politics of culture and the current cultural scene in Brazil to consider the theme of our second season, Art and Culture on the Peripheries