Scenarios of popular events in Salvador: from cultural expression to standardization

Abstract

This paper presents a historical narrative about the municipal interventions that regulate the popular events in Salvador - Bahia, especially with regard to their food and drink tents. For this, a systematic literature survey was carried out in the online data of the Municipal Laws that identified 15 regulatory marks in the period between 1989 and 2018. Analyzing these regulatory marks, it was possible to see how the government was standardizing the party tents and reducing the possibilities of personalization and cultural production in these ephemeral urban objects that mark the landscape during the festivities. This research understands the popular events as unstable dynamic systems. By analyzing its history, it is possible to propose changes in order to recover cultural values that have been lost over the years. This work is an initial part of a doctoral research that aims to potentialize the recovery of the cultural and artistic production of food and beverage tents in popular events, using new digital fabrication technologies, especially the concept of mass personalization. Its major contribution is the systematization and analysis of the history of the tents, understanding and stressing the importance of legal frameworks in the development of these artifacts.