Stella do Patrocínio’s FalatórioNotes on Context and ContentIracema Dulley and Marlon Miguel

Asylums

Stella do Patrocínio was 21 years old when she was hospitalized in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1962. After having spent four years at the National Psychiatric Centre/Pedro II Psychiatric Centre–Odilon Gallotti Hospital, she was transferred to Núcleo Teixeira Brandão (a women’s pavilion) of Colônia Juliano Moreira psychiatric hospital in 1966, where she became patient number 00694 (Figure 1). Except for occasional walks in the neighbourhood at certain points of her internment, she never left this institution, where she died in 1992. Within the asylum, she produced a relentless and intriguing stream of speech, which was dismissed by the psychiatrists at the institution as ‘logorrhea’, a symptom that served to reinforce her diagnosis as schizophrenic and justify her prolonged hospitalization. This stream of speech, part of which was recorded and transcribed in the late 1980s and early 1990s, and which Do Beginning of page[p. 2] Patrocínio herself called falatório (‘chatter’), constitutes the core of this book.

Colônia Juliano Moreira was considered the ‘end of the line’ (in local parlance, fim da linha), a place to which the poorest, the ‘incurable’, and the ‘most undesirable’ subjects were sent (Figure 2). The name itself signals its function as a typical Brazilian psychiatric hospital modelled after the ‘colony’ system. In this sort of asylum, conceived Beginning of page[p. 3] at the beginning of the twentieth century and isolated from urban centres, patients were meant to work as part of their treatment, in accordance with the motto labor omnia vincit (‘work conquers all’). Like many other ‘total institutions’ across Brazil,11A total institution is a place where people both live and work under strict control and surveillance, cut off from the wider society. Examples include psychiatric hospitals, prisons, and military boot camps. According to sociologist Erving Goffman, they are ‘symbolized by the barrier to social intercourse with the outside and to departure that is often built right into the physical plant, such as locked doors, high walls, barbed wire, cliffs, water, forests, or moors’ (Erving Goffman, Asylums: Essays on the Social Situation of Mental Patients and Other Inmates (New York: Anchor Books, 1961), p. 4). these ‘colonies’ were conceived as places Beginning of page[p. 4] for all those branded as ‘undesirable’: alcoholics, the ‘retarded’, delinquents, prostitutes, the destitute, indigents, those considered to be enemies of the State or of powerful men, women who became pregnant as a result of rape — frequently by their bosses or lovers — or the daughters of influential landowners who had engaged in premarital sex.22On another asylum designed according to the typical colony model, see Daniela Arbex, Holocausto Brasileiro. Genocídio: 60 mil mortos no maior hospício do Brasil (São Paulo: Geração, 2018). As the author indicates, after having visited the Colony of Barbacena, Franco Basaglia compared it to a concentration camp.

These spaces quickly became overpopulated over the course of the twentieth century (Figure 3) and were characterized by their ‘concentrationary’ aspect.33See Psychotherapy and Materialism: Essays by François Tosquelles and Jean Oury, ed. by Marlon Miguel and Elena Vogman (Berlin: ICI Berlin Press, 2024) <https://doi.org/10.37050/ci-31>. In Brazil, this situation was intensified from the mid-1960s onwards, under the military dictatorship (1964–1985). Marked by abusive disciplinary methods, these institutions became part of what has been called the ‘industry of madness’: a model for the reproduction of mental illness and its ‘chronification’ based on long-term hospitalization (Figure 4).44Marcus Vinicius de Oliveira e Silva, ‘O movimento de luta antimanicomial e o movimento dos usuários e familiares’, in Loucura, ética e política: escritos militantes, ed. by Ingo Bernd Güntert and Silésia Delphino Tosi (São Paulo: Conselho Federal de Psicologia, Casa do Psicólogo, 2003), pp. 84–111 (pp. 87–88). The notion of ‘industry of madness’ resonates with Thomas S. Szasz’s reflections in The Manufacture of Madness: A Comparative Study of the Inquisition and the Mental Health Movement (New York: Harper & Row, 1997). Szasz was one of the proponents of anti-psychiatry and took part in debates on psychiatric reform in Brazil in the late 1970s, in particular at the First Brazilian Congress of Psychoanalysis, Groups and Institutions, held in 1978.Beginning of page[p. 8] This lucrative business made it possible for private hospitals to receive money from the state for each patient hospitalized. As a result, around six hundred women lived in the pavilion to which Do Patrocínio was sent; each room lodged around seventy interns, and the space between the beds was approximately thirty centimetres (Figure 5).55Information provided by Denise Corrêa de Almeida on 9 April 2024, informal communication with the editors.

The term ‘colony’ takes on an even more brutal resonance in the case of Colônia Juliano Moreira, as the institution was created on land that indeed had, decades earlier, been a colonial plantation (Figures 6 and 7). The new pavilions, built to accommodate the growing numbers of interns, stood alongside the original plantation structures: the slave master’s house (casa grande) — which housed the asylum’s administration until the 1960s — the slave quarters (senzala), and the church in the central square.66Gisélia Franco Potengy and Sigrid Hoppe, ‘Identidade e apropriações do espaço no bairro Colônia’, in O asilo e a cidade. Histórias da Colônia Juliano Moreira, ed. by Ana Teresa A. Venancio and Gisélia Franco Potengy (Rio de Janeiro: Garamond, 2015), pp. 273–308 (p. 286). Thus, Colônia Juliano Moreira was grafted onto a fundamentally colonial topology that its very name literalizes. Like the enslaved African people and their descendants who had been forced to labour under brutal conditions in the plantation system, the interns of the asylum were deprived of freedom of movement and held in dehumanizing conditions.

The official reason for Do Patrocínio’s hospitalization is the one-sentence diagnosis she was given at Pedro II: ‘psychopathic personality and evolving hebephrenic schizophrenia’, which was merely reproduced and slightly changed upon her admission to Colônia Juliano Moreira: ‘psychopathic personality and hebephrenic schizophrenia Beginning of page[p. 11] evolving under psychotic reactions’.77Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum, Stella do Patrocínio Archives. In Portuguese, ‘personalidade psicopática e esquizofrenia hebefrênica evolutiva’ (Admission form written by Dr. O. Salleiro, Pedro II Psychiatric Centre); ‘P. P e Esq. Hebef. Sob R. psic.’ (Admission form, Colônia Juliano Moreira, our translation). The exact circumstances under which she was sent to Pedro II in the first place remain unclear. However, in the Falatório, she talks about how she arrived at the institution and mentions the way in which she was brutally ‘grabbed’ (agarrada) as she was walking on the street,88Stella do Patrocínio, ‘[Audio recorded by Carla Guagliardi]’, in this volume, Audio 1, p. 64/65. then ‘ordered’ to be taken,99Stella do Patrocínio, ‘Verses, Reverses, Thoughts, and More…’, in this volume, p. 238/239. ‘ruled’ over (governada),1010Ibid., p. 206/207. put into an ambulance, and sent Beginning of page[p. 12] there. The admission form, preserved in the institution’s archives, notes that she worked as a ‘house maid’ (doméstica) and that she was sent to the hospital by the police — specifically from the 4th Police Division. At the time of Do Patrocínio’s arrival at Colônia Juliano Moreira, her mother, Zilda Francisca do Patrocínio, was also already a psychiatrized patient there. Two conflicting accounts affirm that either her mother died in the institution and was buried as an ‘indigent’, or that she escaped and was never seen again. In any case, it is most likely that Zilda and Stella do Patrocínio lived in the same pavilion for many years (Figure 8).1111According to Anna Carolina Zacharias, who identified and interviewed Do Patrocínio’s nephew, mother and daughter shared the same pavilion for about ten years (Anna Carolina Vicentini Zacharias, ‘Stella do Patrocínio: da internação involuntária à poesia brasileira’ (master’s thesis, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2020), p. 65 <https://repositorio.unicamp.br/Acervo/Detalhe/1149050> [accessed 6 May 2025]; see also a photograph of mother and daughter together, p. 195, reproduced in this volume as Figure 8). The version in which Do Patrocínio’s mother is said to have escaped is provided by Mônica Ribeiro de Souza in ‘Summary of Patient Care’ (1991), three pages, Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum, Stella do Patrocínio Archives.

During her life in the asylum, Do Patrocínio frequently performed the stream of speech that she herself called falatório. This term, which we here propose to translate as ‘chatter’, is of current usage in Brazilian informal expression and refers to a kind of speech that is not necessarily addressed to a particular person. It might seem random, devoid of important meaning, and can, as such, be the object of derogation or dismissal by others. It can also refer to a simultaneous plurality of voices perceived as loud, confusing, and chaotic in a certain space.

While Do Patrocínio referred to her own speech in ways that could be interpreted as ironical or self-deprecating, we argue that the term falatório bears Beginning of page[p. 13] the mark of its context. Do Patrocínio claimed to be disturbed by voices, and her falatório was produced within the walls of a sanatório — an institution whose name falatório notably echoes (Figure 9). The term sanatório (‘sanatorium’) was commonly used in Brazil to describe institutions like the one in which she spent most of her life. It carries a bitter irony, as its Latin root suggests healing, which was, in her context, never to be achieved for structural reasons.

The circularity, repetition, and aimlessness that the term falatório implies eerily mirror the dead-end positioning of Do Patrocínio in the violently stratified and racist society that diagnosed and imprisoned her for life (Figure 10). A 1977 medical record reflects this impasse, and the resulting imprisonment of consciousness, noting how she stated that her mind ‘gets confused, and she is not sure whether she is talking to her conscience or to the conscience Beginning of page[p. 14] of others’.1212Medical record, patient 00694, Colônia Juliano Moreira Archives, trans. by Regina Alfarano. This fragment reveals more than symptoms: it exposes the epistemic violence of a system that rendered her speech inaudible. Denied the possibility of being heard, Do Patrocínio became trapped not just in physical captivity, but in the endless loop of a discourse that was never to be received by others.

Little is known about the long years during which Do Patrocínio was kept as just another body among the arbitrarily imprisoned crowds, wandering (Figure 11) and surviving in the less-than-human conditions of the Colônia. As with many other institutions of this type, there were barely any registers, reports, or documents containing information on the hospitalized patients. The surviving fragments Beginning of page[p. 15] of Patrocínio’s institutional history consist only of scattered medical records (from 1973, 1977, 1981, 1986, three from 1988, and two undated), with no way to determine if others were lost or never existed. The sparsity of the archival record is very telling. Understaffed and overwhelmed — with mere handfuls of attendants monitoring hundreds of patients — the Colônia (Figure 12) operated less as a care facility than as a political necropolis:Beginning of page[p. 16] a repository for those the state had deemed disposable. The systemic erasure disproportionately targeted working-class and racialized bodies, most starkly evidenced in the children’s pavilion. Following the 1964 military coup, admission records ceased entirely — an entire generation of institutionalized youth effectively disappeared into a bureaucratic void.1313Information provided by curators at the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum, Carolina Rodrigues and Geovana Melo, on 21 March 2025, informal communication with the editors. This account has been directly confirmed by former patients of the Colônia — individuals who were institutionalized as minors many decades ago and now participate in the Atelier Gaia ergotherapy workshop. The very last patients of Colônia Juliano Moreira were finally deinstitutionalized in 2022. This was not negligence, but policy. The Colônia’s archival silences stand as material witnesses to its operation as an active machine of erasure — not simply mirroring the dictatorship’s governance, but constituting an institutionalized strand of the same eliminatory logic.

A very fragile thread of Do Patrocínio’s story survives in a lone document — a ‘Summary of Patient Care’ (Resumo de Atendimento às Pacientes), dated 1991, stored in the archives of the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum. Penned by psychologist-in-training Mônica Ribeiro de Souza after another psychologist at Núcleo Teixeira Brandão, Denise Corrêa de Almeida, asked her to look for biographical information about the patients, this document is a rare testament to Do Patrocínio’s existence against institutional erasure. Precious traces flicker between its formulaic lines: fragments of a life before confinement and echoes of familial ties severed by institutional walls. It provides most of the information from which we have been able to retrace the context of Do Patrocínio’s internment.

The fact that what Do Patrocínio said finally started to be heard in the late 1980s is not merely accidental.Beginning of page[p. 17] This period coincides with the end of the military dictatorship and the emergence of the Anti-Asylum Movement (Movimento Antimanicomial) in Brazil, which had been advocating for radical psychiatric reform since the late 1970s. In this context, activities started to be developed inside prisons and asylums to break the radical division between the inside of such total institutions and the outside of so-called ‘normal’ society (Figures 13 and 14). The movement Beginning of page[p. 18] was often framed as an attempt to ‘give voice’ to patients and prisoners — an expression laden with ambiguities to the extent that it reproduces the hierarchies according to which some people are more capable of vocal expression than others. More importantly, the movement began to draw connections between the deep social and racial stratification of Brazilian society and the operation of these institutions, highlighting what would today be recognized as institutional racism.

Source Materials

This book brings together, for the first time, most of the surviving materials of Stella do Patrocínio’s falatório along with their translation into English. These materials come from three main sources, which we have sought to reconstitute according to their most original, unedited form. This was done not because we believe it is possible to fully reproduce a supposedly original scene of utterance after it has been archived, but because we consider the performative dimension of Do Patrocínio’s speech to be a central element of her expression. To the extent that we consider not only the content but also the form in which her speech was delivered to be meaningful, we have sought to mark the context of utterance through our choices in the process of transcribing, annotating, and translating the falatório.

The first set of materials consists of recordings conducted by artist Carla Guagliardi in the context of the Workshop of Free Artistic Expression (Oficina de Livre Expressão Artística), held between 1986 and 1988 at Núcleo Teixeira Brandão. Following an invitation by Denise Corrêa, who worked as an Anti-Asylum Movement activist alongside her role at the institution, and Marlene Iucksch Paula, the workshop was conceived by artist Nelly Beginning of page[p. 19] Gutmacher from the Parque Lage Visual Arts School. Corrêa’s first proposal was ‘to do art’ from scraps and junk found in the asylum’s territory. In particular, three patients had already been producing objects: Maria José produced rag dolls; Nilza, dresses; and Iracema Conceição dos Santos, installations in her dormitory.1414The first two patients are known only by their first names. The Parque Lage team Beginning of page[p. 20] ended up using mostly cardboards and painting.1515Information provided by Denise Corrêa de Almeida on 9 April 2024, informal communication with the editors. Another key person who ran the workshop alongside Guagliardi was Márcio Rolo, a student at Parque Lage. The visual artist Brigitte Exter-Holck and her friend Gabriella Dorati were also involved, and seem to have played a role in documenting Beginning of page[p. 21] the activities, including Do Patrocínio’s falatório. The original tapes used in these recordings were later digitized and organized into four files, all of which have been transcribed and translated for this book and are made available on the accompanying website. The first audio was also filmed and the footage is included in the online version.

The second set of materials, ‘Verses, Reverses, Thoughts, and More…’, consists of edited transcriptions from new recordings made by the aforementioned psychologist-in-training Souza between 1990 and 1991. With only one tape available, and without having had access to the materials recorded by Guagliardi and the others a few years earlier, Souza transcribed the recordings immediately after each session. Most of the original transcriptions were lost or never found, with one notable exception: a four-page transcribed conversation between Souza and Do Patrocínio, which Anna Carolina Zacharias discovered in Souza’s personal archives and published in her master’s dissertation, and which we have included as an appendix to this set of materials.1616Our version of the appendix draws on Zacharias’s original transcription and adds to it a further excerpt available on a scan belonging to her personal archives. Despite not having had access to the original document, which is lost, we have done our best to reconstitute the less legible parts which were not transcribed by Zacharias. The first text of Verses (beginning with ‘I came to the Colony because I was walking on Voluntários da Pátria Street by Luiz…’), where Do Patrocínio recounts her hospitalization, likely represents the closest surviving approximation to the original transcripts Souza initially selected to compose the Verses. However, even this version betrays editorial intervention, for Souza left out her own questions and included only Do Patrocínio’s responses. Upon completing her internship at Colônia Beginning of page[p. 22] Juliano Moreira, Souza wrote two official documents: the aforementioned ‘Summary of Patient Care’ and a one-page certificate (atestado).1717This document takes the form of a sort of updated medical record. It recounts her hospitalization, the diagnosis she was given when interned, and a renewed evaluation. It ends with the following diagnosis and evaluation by Dr J. Jalom: ‘simple paranoid state; no possibility of social and psychiatric discharge’ (Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum, Stella do Patrocínio Archives). These documents accompanied her compilation of transcriptions, which she framed with the letter-style preface (Prefácio em forma de carta) included in this volume, and an alphabetical index of Do Patrocínio’s ‘texts’. It was Souza who titled this collection ‘Verses, Reverses, Thoughts, and More…’ — a designation we have retained here both for the sake of avoiding confusion and to be as faithful as possible to the context of inscription of Do Patrocínio’s falatório.

As the first person to transform Do Patrocínio’s spoken materials into text, Souza undertook significant editorial work as she reorganized them into verse form, reflecting her interpretation of the falatório as inherently philosophical and poetic. In the ‘Summary of Patient Care’, Souza documents her therapeutic approach to Do Patrocínio, which unfolded in three progressive stages: first, reinitiating the outdoor walks that Do Patrocínio had formerly practised independently but had discontinued prior to their work together; second, supporting Do Patrocínio’s renewed engagement with self-care, including both personal appearance and eating habits; and third, finally, ‘organizing a compilation of Do Patrocínio’s thoughts to recover her artistic-poetic side, which years of institutionalization failed to destroy’.1818Souza, ‘Summary of Patient Care’, p. 2. While Souza’s changes to Do Patrocínio’s falatório appear to be limited to: (1) formal restructuring into verse; (2) removal of Beginning of page[p. 23] her own interrogative voice; and (3) preservation of the original content and patterns of Do Patrocínio’s speech, we cannot definitively rule out other kinds of intervention. However, the stylistic consistency, rhythmic patterns, and thematic repetitions — which include repetitions of entire sentences — between Souza’s compilation and Guagliardi’s recordings suggest that no substantive alterations were made by Souza to the recorded material. As stated by Souza in her letter-preface, she acted against Do Patrocínio’s explicit consent by transforming the recorded material into text. However, she defended this breach as necessary to enable an internal critique of the asylum institution and as a sort of proof that Do Patrocínio had managed, against all odds, to resist the dehumanization that was the institution’s aim. We will come back to this.

Finally, the third and final source of transcribed materials included in this book is one of the only known existing moving images of Stella do Patrocínio. This footage was also recorded in the context of the workshop at various moments between October 1986 and June 1987 and was stored in Guagliardi’s personal archives. It contains segments that are absent from the audio recordings.1919The people responsible for shooting the images have not been identified. According to Carla Guagliardi they were volunteers in the workshop and among the possible names are Antônio de Almeida Rodrigues, Vitalino Muratori, and Adolpho Vaz. We have transcribed this video for inclusion in the book, which also includes a link to the video itself via its open-access version.

Readers will notice recurring phrases and patterns across the texts in this volume — repetitions and similarities that are also found in the medical records preserved in the archives. These recurring elements both manifest the circular nature of the falatório and reveal its elaborative Beginning of page[p. 24] dimension. Far from mere redundancy, these repetitions expose a fundamental aspect of the structure and performativity of Do Patrocínio’s discourse. The full resonance of this performativity is difficult to apprehend through textual representation alone. It becomes markedly clearer when listening to the audios and watching the videos. In this sense, these media, all of which are archived and accessible through the website of ICI Berlin Press, Beginning of page[p. 25] remain indispensable for understanding Do Patrocínio’s embodied practice — the physicality of gesture, rhythm, and presence that animated her speech.

By bringing these materials together, we have aimed to provide readers with a unified collection of Do Patrocínio’s materials in both Portuguese and English, with the quasi-impossible task of restoring her speech as faithfully as possible. The textual material is also accompanied by photographs from the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum collection and archives, as well as the personal archives of Marlene Iucksch Paula and Guagliardi. During our research, two new photos of Do Patrocínio were found in Iucksch’s archive, which are now part of the museum’s collection (Figures 15 and 16). Finally, the book includes reproductions of images of Do Patrocínio’s notebook, which was kept by Souza and photographed by Zacharias.

From the Museum’s archives, we selected three distinct series of materials. The first comprises two images from the 1950s produced by the then-Ministry of Education and Health; the second consists of photographs from one of the Colônia’s two women’s pavilions, Franco da Rocha; and the third features images from a 1980 workshop conceived and coordinated by psychoanalyst and photographer Hugo Denizart with patients of the institution. The project appears to have been envisioned as a form of institutional analysis and lasted six months. Patients were approached by a person named Mônica Dantas — likely a staff member at the Colônia — who asked if they wished to photograph their living spaces or learn basic photographic techniques. They were then given complete freedom to take pictures, without recommendations or restrictions, capturing whatever they chose. In Denizart’s words: Beginning of page[p. 27]

It is essential not only to assess the types of treatment inmates receive but also how they experience them and under what conditions. Photography is a tool capable of revealing dynamic, unseen aspects of life in the Colônia. When captured this way, these images profoundly enrich institutional analysis. With this goal, we produced a series of photos documenting inmates and daily life in the Colônia — one that would only be complete once the inmates themselves photographed their own visions of themselves and the institution.2020Hugo Denizart, ‘Projeto Juliano Moreira’, Collection of the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum.

In a later phase, as the photographs were developed, they were shared with the patients for approval, followed by interviews about their images.

Before the publication of this volume, an exhibition titled O ar do subterrâneo (Underground Air), held at Paço Imperial Museum in Rio de Janeiro from 1988 to 1989 (Figure 17), featured some materials from the workshop, including sentences from Do Patrocínio’s falatório, which were printed and put on the walls of the exhibition rooms. Works by the aforementioned patients were also included and most of them visited the exhibition. Many years later, Viviane Mosé edited, transformed, and rearranged most of Do Patrocínio’s materials registered by Guagliardi and Souza, and published a book titled Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome (Kingdom of the Critters and of the Animals Is my Name).2121Stela [sic] do Patrocínio, Reino dos bichos e dos animais é o meu nome, ed. by Viviane Mosé (Rio de Janeiro: Azougue, 2001). The volume remained the primary source for Do Patrocínio’s falatório for nearly two decades, and inspired theatre plays, films, songs, and poetry readings. Continuing the tradition of intersecting Do Patrocínio’s Beginning of page[p. 29] work with artistic practice, Sara Ramos is currently curating the project ‘Falatório na Rua’ (Chatter on the Street), in which street posters are pasted on the walls of Botafogo, the neighbourhood in Rio de Janeiro where Do Patrocínio was captured before being institutionalized.2222See Falatório na Rua: Stella do Patrocínio <https://www.falatorionarua.com.br/> [accessed 17 June 2025]. A renewed and critical reception of Do Patrocínio’s work has started to take place in Portuguese-language scholarship in the last few years. These new readings rigorously situate the falatório within the intersecting systems of racism, classism, and patriarchy that both shaped Do Patrocínio’s lived experience and condemned her to lifelong imprisonment. As the first English-language edition of this material, the present volume both builds upon and extends these foundational critical reappraisals through its editorial methodology and scholarly framework.2323Zacharias, ‘Stella do Patrocínio: da internação involuntária à poesia brasileira’; Anna Carolina Vicentini Zacharias, Stella do Patrocínio: ou o retorno de quem sempre esteve aqui (Rio de Janeiro: Telha, 2024); Sara Ramos, ‘Stella do Patrocínio: entre a letra e a negra garganta da carne’ (master’s thesis, Universidade Federal da Integração Latino-Americana–UNILA, 2022) <https://dspace.unila.edu.br/items/84d91349-d213-425f-975d-3d2da6e12b7c> [accessed 6 May 2025]; Bruna Beber, Uma encarnação encarnada em mim: cosmogonias encruzilhadas em Stella do Patrocínio (Rio de Janeiro: José Olympio, 2022); Tania Rivera, ‘para uma teoria da linha (Laura Lima e Anna Maria Maiolino, Stella do Patrocínio e Natália Leite)’, in Rivera, Psicanálise Antropofágica (Identidade, Gênero, Arte) (Porto Alegre: Artes & Ecos, 2020), pp. 103–27; Anna Carolina Vicentini Zacharias, Natasha Felix, and Sara Ramos, mediated by Diana Kolker, ‘Ensaio de escutas: o falatório de Stella do Patrocínio’, in Conchas, peneiras, bainhas: arte, clínica e cuidado na contemporaneidade, ed. by Jessica Gogan (Niterói: PPGCA/UFF e Instituto MESA, 2024) <https://institutomesa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Conchas-Peneiras-Bainhas_20241.pdf> [accessed 8 March 2025].Beginning of page[p. 30]

The Making of This Book and the Editorial Positions Taken

The task of restituting the speech of a lifelong, violently institutionalized patient does not come without ambiguities. The aim of this volume has never been to ‘give voice’ to Do Patrocínio — her voice was always present, though often unheard, whether complaining, criticizing, ironizing, or even laughing at the institution and surrounding society which imprisoned her. Do Patrocínio’s speech is indeed fundamentally traversed by rebellions against the intersecting structures of gender, race, class, and psychic oppression that characterize post-slavery capitalist Brazil. With this volume, we have sought to create the necessary conditions for others to hear and read her voicings, and to recognize her enduring subjective agency despite the extreme violence that sought to silence and erase her.

The constitution of this volume has presented particular complexities as a posthumous edition. Souza recounts Do Patrocínio’s stated preference that ‘the interviews should be kept only in recording […] since writing would be too time-consuming’.2424Mônica Ribeiro de Souza, ‘Letter-Preface’ to Do Patrocínio, ‘Verses, Reverses, Thoughts, and More…’, in this volume, p. 197. While the exact meaning behind this temporal concern remains unclear, it resonates with her established practice of oral expression — her falatório emerging through speech rather than writing. This performative dimension extended to her daily life at the Colônia, where she wandered the grounds with a tin can, bartering poetic recitations and songs with neighbours for coffee or tobacco (Figure 18).

Do Patrocínio’s precarious and marginalized social position reveals the fundamental question of who could legitimately provide such consent in her stead after her Beginning of page[p. 32] death. This ethical impasse could only be resolved through a somewhat arbitrary decision — one that necessarily carries its own violence. Yet we must ask: would consigning her voice to oblivion not constitute an even greater violence?

We have sought to address this impasse by trusting that her words were, in some way, addressed to others — and that we could, indeed, learn from them. We have also committed ourselves, despite all the challenges, to the task of restituting her speeches as faithfully as possible. Yet this has led us to another difficulty: the act of transcribing vocal performance. Transcription inevitably imposes a kind of violence to the original context of speech. In editing these materials, we have made a series of choices aimed at preserving the rhythm and the prosody, the tone, the intensities, and the distinctive character of Do Patrocínio’s vocalizations — seeking to make them as perceptible as possible in writing, while also ensuring clarity and readability.

When we started this project, a first set of transcriptions of Do Patrocínio’s speeches as recorded by Guagliardi had already been made by scholars Natasha Felix, Sara Ramos, and Anna Carolina Zacharias.2525Ramos, ‘Stella do Patrocínio: entre a letra e a negra garganta da carne’. Though we have used their work as a starting point, we have decided to retranscribe these materials according to new principles in order to establish a new version for this book. We have also transcribed the other existing video according to the same criteria. Not having found the original full transcripts of Souza’s interview sessions with Do Patrocínio, we have kept the decisions she made in the existing transcription and have reproduced her text ipsis literis, revising minor typos and details only. The final text of the transcription Beginning of page[p. 33] has been established with the aid of Lorena Avellar de Muniagurria, and the choices we have made are outlined below.

In terms of spelling and colloquial language in Portuguese, we have standardized certain contractions, replacing num with não and restoring plural endings when they had been elided in speech. Pronouns and verbs have also been adjusted to align with a more formal register — for example, cê has become você, and tô has become estou. However, expressions without a clear written equivalent in standard Portuguese, such as tá não?, have been left intact. While we have sought to maintain fluency in the text, we have also been careful to avoid exoticizing Do Patrocínio’s speech. As such, we have chosen to render the text in standard written Portuguese — a register in which Patrocínio demonstrated complete fluency — rather than artificially emphasizing perceived markers of social difference through orthographic deviation. Maintaining features of oral Brazilian Portuguese — such as contractions and plural endings — has been essential to avoid exoticizing markers that might otherwise reinforce the marginalized position institutionally and socially imposed upon her. The informal, colloquial tone she used was characteristic of any carioca (inhabitant of Rio de Janeiro) at that time, as is evident in the speech of her interlocutors as well.

In terms of formatting and punctuation, we have used ellipses to indicate long hesitations and shifts in register, while shorter pauses are marked with commas. Slightly longer pauses that interrupt lists are marked with semicolons, as in ‘segunda, terça, quarta […]; janeiro, fevereiro’ (Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday […]; January, February), etc. Interruptions in speech are indicated with a dash (–) attached to the interrupted word, and emphasis is marked Beginning of page[p. 34] in italics. To indicate intentional cuts in the text — moments that signal distinct shifts in the dialogue, or silences or breaks in the original recording (for example because the recorder was turned off) — we have inserted paragraph breaks separated by ‘~’. Nonverbal sounds that are not relevant to the meaning of the speech have been removed, while those that provide context have been retained.

Regarding grammatical consistency, we have adjusted cases of number agreement, correcting instances where pluralization was inconsistent in speech. However, we have not modified gender agreement, as Do Patricínio alternated between referring to herself in both masculine and feminine forms.

Finally, because the focus of this transcription is Do Patrocínio’s speech, we have generally omitted statements directed at third parties unless they engaged in direct dialogue with her. When a conversation heard in the recordings clearly took place between two other people, even if one of them was the interviewer, we have removed it. Likewise, brief interactions between interviewers and other people in the background are not included. These decisions have been made with the purpose of foregrounding Do Patrocínio’s falatório.

In the case of Souza’s transcription, we have made one additional adjustment: words that were originally underlined have been converted to italics.

Translation is never a straightforward task, especially when it comes to a body of work as singular and performative as Do Patrocínio’s falatório. To ensure that the English version remains as faithful as possible to both the form and content of her speech, we have worked closely with Regina Alfarano, a translator specialized in literary translation from Portuguese into English. Our priority has been to preserve not only the repetitions and the way images unfold Beginning of page[p. 35] in Do Patrocínio’s speech but also the rhythm and sonic quality of her voice, elements that we consider to be crucial to the force of her performance. Although only two videos of her falatório survives, the intensity of her speech remains palpable in the recordings we do have, and we have sought to carry something of that power into the English text. Understanding that no translation can ever fully capture the complexity of an original, we engaged in extensive discussions with Alfarano to determine how best to convey what we heard and perceived in her speech. These conversations focused on the nuances of specific terms, the cadence of her sentences, and the overall movement of her language. In so doing, we have aimed to allow her voice to resonate as fully as possible in the translation we offer you in what follows.

The materials presented in this volume have resulted from extensive collaboration with multiple contributors. Our work began in 2021 through initial discussions with Guagliardi and subsequent consultations of her personal archives. Zacharias’s contributions have proved equally vital, particularly given her prior archival research — which included visits to state repositories and interviews with individuals who knew Do Patrocínio personally. Critical to this project were our visits to the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum (located on the former grounds of Colônia Juliano Moreira) in 2024 and 2025, where part of Do Patrocínio’s archive is housed. However, this research revealed certain complexities: while receiving full institutional support, we encountered the dispersal of materials — notably her medical records and admission form, which remain under the custody of the Health Ministry rather than the museum. While the museum granted us permission to access all materials, the Health Ministry denied us access to Do Patrocínio’s medical records despite our insistence,Beginning of page[p. 36] reinscribing the opaqueness of asylum institutions in the very process of our research. Finally, an extended conversation in April 2024 followed by ongoing exchanges throughout 2024–25 with Corrêa provided essential insights for reconstructing Do Patrocínio’s institutional history and other aspects of asylum life.

In addition to Stella do Patrocínio’s materials and our contextualization, the book includes a preface by Mariléa de Almeida, a historian and psychoanalyst based in Brazil and specializing in Brazilian maroon communities, in which she discusses how institutions and Brazilian society at large contributed to silencing Do Patrocínio. This introduction is followed by Do Patrocínio’s falatório/chatter itself. Artist Carla Guagliardi’s text reflects on her participation in the workshop in which Do Patrocínio was first recorded. Anna Carolina Zacharias, a researcher who undertook the first academic and archival investigation into Do Patrocínio’s biography, explores the institutional silencing of her legacy. Finally, Carolina Rodrigues de Lima and Diana Kolker Carneiro da Cunha, curators at the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum, speak from the perspective of this institution’s current efforts to address the past injustices that took place within its premises. In these contributions — following common Brazilian practice — Do Patrocínio and other individuals are frequently referred to by their first names. We have chosen to retain this convention.

On the Contributions

Mariléa de Almeida reflects on the challenge of writing about Stella do Patrocínio without reproducing the invasive, objectifying practices that have historically silenced her. Almeida describes feeling overwhelmed by Do Patrocínio’s Beginning of page[p. 37] voice, recognizing the suffocating weight of being spoken for by others — a practice she likens to gossip, which imposes order, hierarchy, and familiarity while erasing what is foreign. Do Patrocínio’s life, marked by her institutionalization in 1962 following her unjust detention, stands as a powerful counterpoint to this silencing. For Almeida, the falatório resists being reduced to an object of study and functions, instead, as a ‘signifying machine’ that defies established norms and exposes the violence of psychiatric and social systems. As a Black woman, Almeida identifies with Do Patrocínio’s struggle and chooses silence as a means of truly listening, allowing Do Patrocínio’s voice to resonate without interference. Her text calls for honouring Do Patrocínio’s legacy by embracing the transformative power of her words.

Carla Guagliardi reflects on her transformative experience at Colônia Juliano Moreira, where she conducted workshops in the women’s pavilion and encountered Stella do Patrocínio. Do Patrocínio’s powerful presence, marked by her gaze, voice, and repetitive yet profound speech, left an indelible impression on her. She describes the environment as both unsettling and mesmerizing, where beauty and pain coexisted in a way that evoked both laughter and awe. This encounter with Do Patrocínio and the other psychiatrized women challenged the artist’s understanding of reality, leaving her grappling with the ineffable nature of the experience and the profound connection forged through shared humanity.

Anna Carolina Zacharias explores the profound and unsettling narrative of Stella do Patrocínio, whose marginalized voice reveals the intersections of racism, colonialism, and state-sanctioned violence. According to her, the falatório challenges the silencing mechanisms of both psychiatric and literary institutions, exposing how these systems Beginning of page[p. 38] perpetuate exclusion and erasure. Zacharias critiques the misrepresentation of Do Patrocínio in the literary world, arguing that institutional and literary reifications have overshadowed her true voice and intellectual legacy. The text calls for a shift from representation to presentation, urging readers to confront the systemic injustices that continue to suppress marginalized voices.

Carolina Rodrigues de Lima and Diana Kolker Carneiro da Cunha explore Stella do Patrocínio’s legacy within Brazil’s psychiatric system, as well as her profound impact on art, memory, and the Anti-Asylum Movement. They trace the deinstitutionalization of psychiatric hospitals like Colônia Juliano Moreira and the role of the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum in preserving the voices and histories of those silenced by systemic violence. Do Patrocínio’s falatório has become a central focus for the museum, inspiring exhibitions, research, and ethical practices that challenge dominant narratives of mental health, race, and colonialism. The authors highlight the museum’s initiatives, including listening sessions, residencies, and exhibitions, and emphasize the importance of orality and embodied listening as tools for social justice and memory preservation. Do Patrocínio’s voice, alongside other marginalized figures like Arthur Bispo do Rosário, guides the museum’s mission: to confront the violent history of asylums while fostering community healing and critical reflection. The text underscores the impossibility of fully redressing past injustices but highlights the ongoing efforts to honour Do Patrocínio’s legacy and amplify the voices of those who continue to resist systemic erasure.