Reimagining Alice in Brazil

 

Adriana Peliano

(Generated by Adriana Peliano)

 

The movie Alice dos Anjos (2021, 76 minutes), directed by Daniel Leite Almeida, takes inspiration from Carroll's Alice to create a distinctly Brazilian narrative set in the sertão (the arid interior of northeastern Brazil), where dreams collide with drought and migrants confront powerful landowners. This Alice emerges not as an adaptation of the Victorian tale, but as an independent work that reimagines the concept of a journey through an alternative world. The film received six awards at the Brasília Film Festival, including Best Direction, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Makeup, Best Film by Popular Jury and Best Film by Special Jury, and traveled to festivals in Brazil and abroad.

 

On Thursday, September 25, 2025, I was invited to give a lecture about Alice's history in Brazil during the film's screening at the FLIConquista (Film Festival in Vitória da Conquista), Bahia. There I learned that the film would become an object of academic study and be included in the state's college entrance exams. The auditorium was packed with students who knew the original Alice and were preparing for these exams, eager to understand how Carroll's Victorian tale had served as a point of departure for this Brazilian cinematic experience.

 

These were the seven Alicinations that I organized as categories to think about and present Alice in Brazil during my lecture: the Creative Estrangement, the Collage Metamorphosis, the Carnivalesque Anthropophagy, Popular Culture appropriation, the Metalinguistic Game, Tropical Nexialism, and Collective Oneiric Resistance. Each served as a key to show how the character was reinvented in our cultural, artistic, and political context.

 

 

Alice's Brazilian Journey: A Tradition of Creative Reappropriation

 

In Brazil, Alice was never confined to the manners of a proper Victorian girl. In the 1930s, writer Monteiro Lobato published books in his Sítio do Picapau Amarelo (yellow woodpecker ranch) series for children, where Alice appeared as a visitor. There she became a traveler through hybrid geographies where Wonderland mixed with Neverland, the Thousand and One Nights, Brazilian folklore, and many other literary and media realms. At the ranch she met Popeye and Captain Hook, sucked tropical fruits straight from the tree, and even asked for recipes for homemade cakes. The rebellious rag doll Emília treated Alice as if she were already fluent in Portuguese, signaling how translation itself was an act of cultural reinvention.

 

This playful encounter dialogues with what the Brazilian Modernist movement theorized in the 1920s through Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto Antropófago (Anthropophagite Manifesto). The manifesto proposed antropofagia, a metaphorical cultural "devouring" in which foreign influences are consumed, digested, and transformed into something uniquely Brazilian. Through this process, Brazil could generate new forms of art and thought deeply rooted in its own soil. This approach has since evolved into rich practices of dialogue, research, and creative reappropriation that continue to shape how Brazilian artists engage with global culture.

 

Over the decades, Alice has assumed new forms in tropical wonderlands. In the 1960s, Darcy Penteado fragmented wonderland into kaleidoscopic collages that played with pop culture and experimental visual language. In the 1990s, carnival designer Joãosinho Trinta transformed Alice into a spectacle of resistance when Jorge Lafond, a Black and queer performer, embodied her in Beija-Flor's carnival parade in Rio. The performance shone not only as a manifesto against racial and sexual prejudice, but also as part of a broader social critique, denouncing poverty, exposing political corruption, and challenging inequalities. Artist Jô Oliveira later illustrated a book (São Paulo: Editora Ática, 1997) inspired by the rustic engravings of cordel literature, (original folk literature sold as pamphlets), giving Alice a new graphic language that connected her to northeastern popular aesthetics. Each incarnation pulled her further from Oxford and deeper into Brazil's inventive labyrinth.

 

It is within this long tradition of cultural transformation that Alice dos Anjos should be understood. By placing three generations of northeastern Black women: Alice, her mother, and her grandmother, at its center, and by replacing Carroll's caterpillar with an enigmatic pajé of the Tupinambá people, the film participates in a Brazilian artistic lineage that reimagines foreign cultural forms through local histories and voices. From Lobato and the Modernists to carnival and beyond, Brazilian culture has consistently privileged reinvention and the perspectives of the marginalized as central to its identity.

 

Daniel Leite Almeida’s film adapts the motif of a girl’s journey through an altered world but grounds it in Brazil’s realities. Carroll’s figures are reimagined through regional imagination: the white rabbit becomes a black goat, the contemplative caterpillar an enigmatic pajé, and the Queen of Hearts unfolds in the colonel’s wife, who repeats “off with their heads,” and in the cangaço queen, symbol of resistance in the northeastern sertão. At the heart of the story are Alice, her mother, and her grandmother, a militant teacher who dreams of equality. Their intertwined voices of ancestry, survival, and pedagogy transform Carroll’s inspiration into a tale deeply rooted in Brazilian culture.

 

 

 Brazilian Literary Traditions: Manoel de Barros and Regional Voices

 

One of the film's most striking foundations emerges through its incorporation of Manoel de Barros, one of Brazil's greatest poets. The landscape is inhabited by the boy who tries to hold water in a sieve, a poetic character from Barros's work whose impossible task creates its own logic.

 

While both Carroll and Barros explore alternative forms of knowledge, they do so from different cultural contexts. Barros fabricates verbal and poetic inutensílios "useless-tensils" like the sieve for carrying water or the buckle for fastening silences, which emerge from regional Brazilian speech, popular wisdom, and resistance to instrumental reason.

 

In Alice's encounters with the reimagined figures (the pajé, the Severinos, the cangaceira) the film invokes not only Manoel de Barros but also João Cabral de Melo Neto, whose long poem Morte e Vida Severina (Death and Life of a Severino) narrated the desperate migrations of northeastern workers. The film's Severinos, poor migrants struggling against landowning elites over the construction of a hydroelectric dam, echo Cabral's portrait of inequality and survival in the sertão. This literary foundation demonstrates the film's free dialogue with Carroll: it doesn't adapt Victorian nonsense; it creates a distinctly Brazilian narrative voice.

 

  

Landscape as Character: The Sertão and Social Struggle

 

The landscape itself becomes the film's primary terrain of meaning. The sertão, the arid interior of northeastern Brazil, has long functioned in Brazilian culture as a territory of trial, resilience and social conflict. This is not a translation of Wonderland but an entirely different symbolic geography with its own cultural weight.

 

The struggle between the Severinos and the local coronéis (landowning elites) over the dam becomes the film's central conflict, grounded in Brazil's actual history of land disputes and class struggle. The film invokes Paulo Freire's Pedagogy of the Oppressed, positioning Alice's grandmother as a Freirean educator who teaches through dialogue and critical questioning, encouraging Alice to read the world around her and understand the power structures that shape it. The film makes explicit reference to Angicos, the city where Freire conducted his revolutionary literacy experiment. Even Orwell's pigs from Animal Farm make an appearance, their critique of corrupted revolution finding new resonance in Brazilian political reality.

 

The film's visual language evokes the paintings of Tarsila do Amaral and Cândido Portinari, who gave Brazilian modernism its grammar of social struggle, while its soundtrack speaks in a deeply Brazilian musical idiom.

 

 From Inspiration to Independent Creation

 

Alice dos Anjos raises important questions about the nature of creative inspiration and cultural transformation. Rather than adapting Carroll's text, the film uses the Alice figure as a starting point to create a new work rooted in Brazilian literature, history, and social concerns.

 

The film demonstrates that a character can migrate across cultures and become something new, reimagined through local traditions, aesthetics, and political urgencies. This is neither adaptation nor simple appropriation, but cultural dialogue in practice: the devouring and transformation of foreign influence into something authentically local.

 

The film's reception reveals its success as an independent work. In Brazil, critics recognized its visual poetry and social consciousness. The six awards at the Brasília Film Festival suggest that the film resonates as a distinctly Brazilian achievement. International festival circuits embraced the work not as a Carroll adaptation but as an example of how global cultural references can spark entirely new creations rooted in local traditions.

 

Looking Forward

 

At the film's end, Alice reads Through the Looking-Glass, signaling that this work is the first chapter of a planned trilogy, with the next two films already in the editing phase. For scholars of cultural studies and Brazilian cinema, Alice dos Anjos demonstrates how international literary figures can serve as catalysts for original works when reimagined through distinct cultural lenses.

 

By reading Alice through Manoel de Barros and João Cabral, through Paulo Freire's pedagogies and the aesthetics of Brazilian modernism, the film creates something new: an independent work that stands on its own artistic and political merits.

 

Alberto Manguel once said that Alice is an infinite book, useful for discussing almost any question. In the debate after the screening in Vitória da Conquista, Daniel Leite Almeida stated that the film consciously drew on decolonial references. To watch this film is to realize that Wonderland is not one, but many, and that in Brazil, Alice becomes a kaleidoscope of voices rooted in both literary tradition and local invention. The film demonstrates that some narratives carry within themselves the power to traverse impossible worlds not because they are universal, but precisely because their openness allows each culture to inscribe upon them its own urgencies, memories, and dreams of transformation.

 

Collage by Adriana Peliano weaving Paulo Freire’s pedagogy, Manoel de Barros’s poetry, Orwell’s rebellious pig, and an Alice reimagined through Tarsila do Amaral’s Abaporu.

 

 

ALICE NO CINEMA: Uma recriação de Jan Švankmajer

Dirce Waltrick do Amarante*

Alice, de Jan Švankmajer  

No final de Alice no País das Maravilhas, do escritor inglês Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898), a irmã mais velha de Alice imagina como será aquela menininha depois de crescida e se pergunta se ela ainda guardará da infância a imaginação fantasiosa:

"Por fim, imaginou como seria essa mesma irmãzinha quando, no futuro, fosse uma mulher adulta; e como conservaria, em seus anos maduros, o coração simples e amoroso de sua infância; e como iria reunir outras criancinhas à sua volta e tornar os olhos delas brilhantes e impacientes com muitas histórias estranhas, talvez até com o sonho do País das Maravilhas de tantos tempos atrás; e como iria sofrer com todas as suas mágoas simples dessas crianças, e encontrar prazer em todas as alegrias simples delas, lembrando sua própria vida de criança, e os dias felizes de verão" (CARROLL, 2009, p.149).


O filósofo alemão Walter Benjamin afirma, todavia, que resgatar o passado por inteiro é tarefa impossível. Segundo Benjamin (1995, p.105), o passado vem sempre envolto na “poeira de nossas moradas demolidas” e influenciado pelas nossas experiências posteriores. O passado só consegue sobreviver, portanto, como ficção, como adaptação dele mesmo. Sendo que a adaptação, como afirma a estudiosa canadense Linda Hutcheon, é sempre “uma repetição, porém sem replicação, unindo o conforto do ritual e do reconhecimento com o prazer da surpresa e da novidade. Como adaptação, ela envolve memória e mudança, persistência e variação” (HUTCHEON, 2011, p. 229-230).

Talvez Alice, se a considerarmos agora uma pessoa real, nunca mais contará seu sonho da mesma forma, como supôs a sua irmã, porém não devemos apressadamente concluir que, por causa disso, o seu “novo” sonho não terá valor. O “novo” sonho será uma adaptação do primeiro, e essa adaptação não deverá seu “sucesso” à fidelidade ao texto original.

Além disso, quem poderá nos garantir que a história narrada oralmente por Lewis Carroll, durante um passeio de barco com Alice Liddell e suas irmãs, é exatamente aquela história improvisada que ele posteriormente decidiu passar para o papel e que agora nós lemos como um dos clássicos da literatura de língua inglesa?

Alice no País das Maravilhas ganhou muitas adaptações (muitas traduções, eu diria) ao longo dos anos, desde adaptações “simplificadas” para crianças -- como se o livro não tivesse sido escrito a pedido de uma criança, a própria Alice Liddell -- até versões muito mais enigmáticas e soturnas do que próprio livro, como é o caso da versão para o cinema do cineasta tcheco Jan Švankmajer (1934 -), Alice, de 1989.

Em Alice, Jan Švankmajer combinou técnicas de animação com a atuação de uma atriz mirim, Kristyna Kohoutova, o que, num primeiro momento, pode levar o espectador a associar o filme diretamente com o público infantil. Esse, porém, não é o caso da adaptação cinematográfica de Švankmajer  que, do enredo original de Carroll, ressaltou o seu aspecto onírico explorando o que nele tem de mais sombrio e apavorante. O filme do diretor tcheco assume, assim, características de verdadeiro pesadelo e adentra, muitas vezes, o gótico e o grotesco.

No filme de Švankmajer  Alice não é mais uma inocente garotinha (tal como ela foi retratada originalmente por John Tenniel), que se vê de repente sozinha num mundo do qual desconhece as regras mais elementares de convivência social. Na adaptação tcheca para o cinema, que entendo aqui como um tipo de tradução de uma mídia (a página) para outra (a tela), Alice é um ser enigmático e se revela, aos poucos, tão ou mais apavorante do que os outros personagens desse estranho País das Maravilhas.

Alice, de Jan Švankmajer  

Alice, de Jan Švankmajer  

Outro personagem conhecido de Alice no País das Maravilhas é o Coelho Branco, que na versão original parece mais assustado – sempre com receio de chegar atrasado ou de fazer algo que mereça punição – do que assustador:

"Era o Coelho Branco caminhando de volta, devagar, olhando ansioso para todos os lados como se tivesse perdido alguma coisa; e ela o ouviu murmurar consigo mesmo: ‘A Duquesa! A Duquesa! Oh, minhas patas queridas! Oh, meu pelo e meus bigodes! Vai mandar me executar, tão certo quanto doninhas são doninhas!" (CARROLL, 2009, p. 43).

No filme de Švankmajer  contudo, o Coelho Branco é tão ameaçador quanto a Rainha de Copas, e está sempre carregando facas, tesouras, alfinetes. Nesse pesadelo tcheco, que certamente paga tributo a Franz Kafka, o espectador não encontra nenhum momento de conforto, ao contrário do que acontece com o leitor de Alice, de Carroll, que sempre tem motivos para sorrir, mesmo quando ele se depara com personagens absolutamente agressivos, como é o Grifo, a Lagarta etc. No nonsense de Carroll, opina Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1994, p. 100), a preocupação com o agon é exagerada demais para ser sincera. Desse modo, não conseguimos levar totalmente a sério os xingamentos dos personagens do escritor inglês.

Coelho Branco, Alice de Jan Švankmajer  

O leitor de Carroll encontrará, em suma, passagens leves e engraçadas, repletas de arbitrariedades. No capítulo 3, “Uma corrida em comitê e uma história comprida”, por exemplo, algumas aves e outros bichos se espalharam por uma pista de corrida e começaram a correr quando bem entenderam, de modo que não foi fácil saber quando a corrida havia terminado. Contudo, quando estavam correndo já havia uma meia hora, e completamente secos de novo, o Dodô de repente anunciou: ‘A corrida terminou!’ e todos se juntaram em torno dele, perguntando esbaforidos: ‘Mas quem ganhou? (CARROLL, 2009, p. 36).

Poder-se-ia dizer, talvez, que o filme de Švankmajer está muito mais próximo da estética “absurda” do dramaturgo irlandês Samuel Beckett (1906 – 1989), sem excluir algumas pitadas estratégicas de Kafka, do que propriamente do nonsense inglês de Lewis Carroll, muito mais ameno e poético.

Roland Barthes afirma que a dramaturgia de meados do século XX, na França, em especial aquela que foi chamada de “teatro do absurdo”, e da qual Beckett era um dos pilares, “tende, não a contestar a pessoa humana, mas, o que talvez seja mais incômodo, a fazer como se ela não existisse” (BARTHES, 2007, p. 301). Carroll não contestava a pessoa humana, contestava apenas que essa pessoa tivesse uma ideia imutável sobre ela mesma, uma vez que Alice está sempre em transformação. Quando a Lagarta pergunta a Alice quem ela é, ouve a seguinte resposta: “Eu... eu mal sei, Sir, neste exato momento... pelo menos sei o que eu era quando me levantei esta manhã, mas acho que já passei por várias mudanças desde então” (CARROLL, 2009, p. 55).

Enquanto Carroll faz Alice diminuir e crescer, ou seja, modificar-se, Švankmajer faz a personagem desaparecer, restando dela, muitas vezes, só uma boca sem rosto, a qual narra a história, numa cena muito semelhante à boca que “atua” na peça Not I (1972), de Samuel Beckett. A Alice de Švankmajer não mais dialoga com personagens “impossíveis”, mas mergulha num interminável monólogo sombrio que nos leva a pensar numa desesperada solidão, própria dos personagens beckettianos.

Alice, Jan Svankmajer

A complexa “tradução” de Švankmajer não parece ter levado em conta um público específico. O filme do cineasta tcheco não “estica e encolhe” com tanta facilidade quanto o livro de Carroll, que fascina leitores das mais variadas idades. Contudo, Švankmajer não parece preocupado com um receptor ideal, a qual caracterizaria, segundo Walter Benjamin, a intenção de toda má obra, seja ela uma tradução convencional ou, como neste caso, antes de tudo um diálogo entre duas mídias:

"Nunca, levar em consideração o receptor de uma obra de arte ou de uma forma artística revela-se fecundo para o seu conhecimento. Não apenas o fato de estabelecer uma relação com determinado público ou seus representantes constitui um desvio; o próprio conceito de receptor ‘ideal’ é nefasto em quaisquer indagações de caráter estético, porque estas devem pressupor unicamente a existência e a essência de um homem em geral" (BENJAMIN, 2010, p. 203).

Em sua adaptação de Alice, Švankmajer adota uma estética pessoal e dialoga com os conceitos de grotesco, de horror e de surrealismo... Sua adaptação, portanto, não pode ser comparada a outras da Disney, nem mesmo à recente adaptação de Tim Burton, cujo mestre, no entanto, é Edward Gorey (1925-2000), discípulo de Carroll e Edward Lear, os pais do nonsense inglês.

As adaptações da Disney têm um público específico, as crianças, e fala para esse público específico como todo filme comercial. Além disso, as versões da Disney, principalmente a de Tim Burton, enfatizam os momentos de ação e redundam na aventura eletrizante, e, desse modo, visam acima de tudo satisfazer a um tipo estereotipado de espectador. Esses diretores aparentemente compartilharam os princípios elucidados por Erwin Panofsky, em destaque o simples prazer “de as coisas parecerem mover-se, não importa que coisas fossem” (LECERCLE, 1994, p. 345).

Se nos filmes da Disney sobra movimento e aventura, reduz-se neles o conteúdo estético. No filme de Švankmajer  os poucos movimentos e, em decorrência, as poucas ações nos conduzem, graças à sua elaborada linguagem, a uma atmosfera claustrofóbica, como se estivéssemos caindo na estreita toca do coelho ou trancados para sempre na casa do Coelho Branco.

Referências

CARROLL, Lewis. Alice. Tradução de Maria Luiza X. de A. Borges. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2009.

BARTHES, Roland. Escritos sobre teatro. Tradução de Mário Laranjeira. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2007.

BENJAMIN, Walter. Rua de mão única: obras escolhidas. Volume II. Tradução de Rubens Rodrigues Torres Filho e José Carlos Martins Barbosa. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1995.

BENJAMIN, Walter. “A tarefa do tradutor”. Tradução de Susana Kampff Lages. In HEIDERMANN, Werner. Clássico da teoria da tradução. Florianópolis: UFSC/ Núcleo de Pesquisa em Literatura e Tradução, 2010, p. 203.

HUTCHEON, Linda. Uma teoria da adaptação. Tradução de André Cechinel. Florianópolis: Editora da UFSC, 2011.

LECERCLE, Jean-Jacques. Philosophy of nonsense. Londres: Routledge, 1994.

SVANKMAJER, Jan. Alice. Magnus Opus, 2007. DVD

* Professora da Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina. Autora, entre outros de James Joyce e seus tradutores (Iluminuras). Traduziu uma adaptação clássica de 1903 de Alice no País das Maravilhas (Rafael Copetti Editor), de Lewis Carroll.

E-mail: dwa@matrix.com.br

extra: Explosição do surrealista Jan Švankmajer  

The Hunting of Alice in Seven Fits

found at alicismo 

"A caça a Alice em 7 crises" 

publicado em português na revista LITERARTES

 "Publicação científica digital 

do grupo de pesquisa Produção literária e cultural 

para crianças e jovens da USP".

© Adriana Peliano

translated by: Alex Watson

This text originally appeared as an article in:

Knight Letter

The Lewis Carroll Society of North America

Winter 2011

Volume II Issue 17

Number 87

The images were selected to this post.
Footnotes are missing.

Elena Kalis

1. River

Alice was raised on a ship of dreams, in a liquid looking-glass, following the currents of desire, imagination, and curiosity. She was born on a river, with its switchbacks and reflections, following and fighting the flow, in the geometry of laughter and strange paradoxes. We do not read a book; we dive into it. It surrounds us, constantly. Sitting on the bank, Alice would ask herself: and what is the use of a book without pictures and conversations? Alice has been perhaps the most illustrated book of all time. This shows that we continue to answer the question that Alice did not ask: and what is the use of a book with pictures and conversations?

A river child, Alice moves amongst mazes where one is lost and found in mysterious rhythms. The great paradox running through Alice’s adventures, according to Deleuze, is the loss of her own name, her infinite identity, her eternal becoming. When the caterpillar asks, Who are you? Alice does not know the answer. I know who I was . . . but I think I must have been changed several times since then. In her typically paradoxical manner, Alice says no, but also says yes: I know who I am; the transformation continues. Like Alice, when it seems we know who we are, we’re already someone else, and what we think we are, is what we once were. And the world that we know is changing every second. The girl, born into the River of Heraclitus, knows that being and nonbeing are in constant conversation, in an eternal cycle that is being created at all times.

When Alice says that she only knows who she was, she is saying that we are always in motion. And when she was drawn by John Tenniel in Victorian England, a tradition of Alices was born that would follow in this path. But Alice is no longer the Victorian Alice, instead she is a living kaleidoscope of all of the possibilities. How many artists were in fact driven by the need to overcome the stereotypical imagery of the girl and her amazing world, and by the quest for new adventures in expression? Instead of the question “Who is Alice?” there are now paths leading to that which Alice might come to be. . . .

As the twentieth century progressed, the concept of illustration underwent profound transformations, in dialogue with the radical changes happening in the visual arts. Artists broke down the barriers between the outside world and the experiences of the mind, questioning the idea of a mimetic approach to illustration. The transformations in the universe of the arts and counterculture were re-creating Alice’s experiences in the mêlée of her dream world and wonderland. At the end of that century, Alice’s looking-glass shattered into a million pieces, spreading within the collective imagination new meta-Alices in a nonsensical, magical hourglass of alicinations.

The artists and illustrators were driven to discover or invent new relationships between text and pictures. The identity of the subject was subverted by the allure of the unknown and inexplicable. Rather than repeat, illustrators started to provoke and transgress. They questioned the classic idea that art should imitate or interpret an exterior reality. They also began to seek out subversion, paradox, and experimentation. The present time is filled with otherness and difference. Intertextual readings, metalanguage, multiple assemblies, nonlinear narratives. Abracadabra!

Suzy Lee

Since the beginning of the last century, each decade, through its different visions and styles, created its own Alices: art nouveau, art deco, surrealist, pop, psychedelic, futuristic, Gothic, naïve, ethnic, dark, steampunk, pop surrealist. Alice is, by turns, a sweet and ingenuous girl, a questioning feminist, a perverted child, a mad and bloody assassin, a drugged adult, a seeker of worlds beyond conscious thought, a delirious psychedelicist, or an armor-clad and shielded warrior, always multiple and mutating.

Alice moves beyond illustration into art, into movies, into fashion, into animation, into games, into comics, into the mix that now reigns and requires other comprehensions. And they all coexist in our alicinatory times of mixtures and countless seams and transitions through multiple networks. I do not know of another girl with so many faces, a traveler from an imaginary world, bringing with her the paradoxes that defy our senses and our common sense. The Alice books do not fit into any mold or explanation, instead spreading a worldwide net of creative possibilities.

We live in an image culture of collage and montage, of velocity and voraciousness: one image quickly devours another, transforming into another image, ready to be devoured, Norval Baitello explains. Images seduce and absorb us, but with the loss of our ability to create consistent connections and sensible relations, the devouring process is reversed: We go from indiscriminately devouring images to being indiscriminately devoured by them. We lose ourselves in labyrinthine deserts, and instead of always seeing the otherness in that which is the same, different Alices upon each reading, we find ourselves mired in the sad adventure of always seeing sameness in the other; we see nothing new in the thousands of Alices in circulation. Decipher me or I will devour you.

Querida Companhia

The story of Alice is already so well known that it becomes fragmented, repeated, displaced, deconstructed, gnawed upon by artists from everywhere, in every way. With her serpentine neck, Alice navigates among hybrid identities, blends, contrasts, oddities, merchandise, gato por lebre, and senselessness that everybody buys and believes without understanding why. She sets out for the new and looks back to reinvent herself all over again. This is Alice. Alice is all of them and none of them, and she opens herself up like the largest kaleidoscope ever seen. Good-bye, feet!

Alice strolls along the margins and between the lines; she crosses borders, a traveler through the unknown, but also through stock phrases, clichés, the commonplace, distortions and cheap simplifications that insist on impoverishing life and art. As we travel through Alice’s landscapes, we also travel through our own interior landscapes. New Alices learn that a path has not been set; rather, it opens as one goes forward, according to the poet Antonio Machado.

Sissi Venturin

Alice is an invitation to duplicity (for this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people), multiplicity (she began thinking over all the children she knew that were of the same age as herself, to see if she could have been changed for any of them), becoming (I know who I was, but I think I must have been changed several times since then), and the loss of one’s own name (This must be the wood where things have no names. I wonder what’ll become of MY name when I go in?). We must create new forms of expression to give way to new Alices more sensitive to these subtle and free becomings.

Why continue living as Alice seated at the table set for tea, sullen and silent, as depicted by Tenniel? What we now seek is a way to remain time’s friends (as the Hatter suggests) and to free ourselves from the senseless and repetitive rituals in which the guests at the tea party find themselves trapped. It is an invitation to new Alices—nomadic, mutating Alices, multiple and simultaneous. Marcel Duchamp was “convinced that, like Alice in Wonderland, [tomorrow’s artists] will be led to pass through the looking-glass of the retina, to reach a more profound expression.”

2. Underground

In Carroll’s own illustrations from the Under Ground manuscript, Alice is spontaneous and spiritual, but also anguished and melancholic, close to the idealized image of the artist’s soul. She echoes romantic myths of the Pre-Raphaelites and their languid feminine figures, with oblique gazes and overflowing locks that would enchant the surrealists. She seems closer to a magical world than a logical one. At the same time, we glimpse hybrid and metamorphic creatures in the book that invoke the grotesque beings of Hieronymus Bosch. Are these drawings not among the precursors of the surrealist bestiaries, a mix of dream worlds and fabulous monsters?

But when the expanded work was published in London, it was illustrated by John Tenniel, a famous illustrator from the Victorian periodical Punch. A commonly held belief remains that rarely was an author as well served by an illustrator as was Lewis Carroll by John Tenniel, even though the work has been illustrated subsequently by thousands of artists throughout the world.

We still confuse the images and the text, which together seem to tell the same story. We often lose sight of whether the images are in fact faithful to the text or whether we create, from them, a new text. Is fidelity possible among images and texts of these Alices? Does Tenniel’s Alice remain the most perfect illustration of the work for the contemporary eye?

Who passively defies the Queen, with her arms crossed?

Who confronts a mad cat, in search of new directions, with her hands behind her back?

Polixeni Papapetrou

If I empathetically project myself onto Tenniel’s Alices, I feel like a tamed and contained Victorian girl who would not dirty her dress, would not throw herself into the well, would not unfold herself into a serpent to discover its dangers, would not think of eating bats. (These Alices, who are in the text, do not appear in Tenniel’s pictures.) Tenniel’s Alice doesn’t change, and awakens at the end of the book essentially the same. Really?

Alice is not transformed; Alice is transformation. How many adventures might she still experience, how many paths would she choose, how many Alices might still come into being? If life is a dream, Alice is unable to wake up; instead, she awakens. I am talking not only about what was written, but also about understanding that we ourselves are different with every reading, and that new Alices are born within us. Alice extends beyond the borders of the book and will live a multitude of adventures among constellations of dreams, thoughts, and emotions.

Tenniel’s Alice sits sulking at the table where tea is served, without free will. Similarly, all those who insist on reproducing the commonplace formulas remain trapped in a repetitive tea-time ritual. Many of today’s Alices unfold in new manners of expression and pictures, awakening in different arts, taking on a life of their own in a multitude of cultures. Considering these friends from modern times, what Alices are we capable of?

Through readings and re-readings, I have selected artists in seven groups, in which I find:

• Enigmatic Alices that destabilize the commonplace and suggest new readings: Alain Gauthier, Dušan Kállay, Jonathan Miller, Martin Barooshian, Nicole Claveloux, and Unsuk Chin.

• Metalinguistic Alices that reflect on language and expression and challenge the standards of representational art: Abelardo Morell, Anthony Browne, Catherine Anne Hiley, John Vernon Lord, Ralph Steadman, and Suzy Lee.

• Conceptual Alices that inhabit labyrinths and paradoxes: Randy Greif, Iassen Ghiuselev, Julia Gukova, Luiz Zerbini, Oleg Lipchenko, and Sergey Tyukanov.

• Alices that cross intertextual borders and visit characters from other stories: John Rae, Dorothy Furness, and Edward Bloomfield.

• Alices of metamorphic bodies challenging hybrid identities: Arlindo Daibert, Jean Claude Silbermann, Nicoletta Ceccoli, Tania Ianovskaia, Tanya Miller, and Vince Collins.

• Alices that journey through the world of dreams and the marvelous, proposing magical games: DeLoss McGraw, Elena Kalis, Kokusyoku Sumire, Maggie Taylor, Phoebe in Wonderland, and Alice-themed tea houses in Tokyo.

• Some Alices that journey through leftover nightmares and challenge the frontiers between the mind and the unconscious: American McGee, Anna Gaskell, Camille Rose Garcia, Alice in the Underworld (Dark Märchen Show), Trevor Brown, and Jan Švankmajer.

Alice is Alices is Alice.

3. Marvelous

Let us now journey through time with Alice herself as our guide on her adventures in being depicted by artists other than Tenniel.

Alice became lost in imaginary labyrinths until she arrived at the Gradiva art gallery, created by André Breton in1937. She saw the name Alice above the door, among other surrealist muses. She then read a passage from the gallery’s pamphlet:

From the book of children’s images to the book of poetic images.

Surrealism had transported the Victorian girl to the book of poetic images. That was when she saw a grin hovering in the air that said Alice’s adventures down the rabbit hole or through the looking-glass encourage us to seek out other cracks leading to the marvelous.

Lewis Carroll left the doorway to our dreams open a crack. Alice went through it and found herself in a labyrinth of mirrors, an endless game, projections of herself created by surrealist artists. Surrealist muse, sphinx, femme enfant, Alice unfolds into multiple visions of a modern myth. She enters portals to the unknown, plumbing the depths of the unconscious, rites of passage; the revelation of a sibylline and archaic female, she becomes mixed with landscapes of a world in ruins, in the echoes and phantasms of the nightmares of war and of the dawning of a new world.

Carroll was broadly shared by the surrealists. He was read, and often invoked, by Paul Eluard, Gisele and Mario Prassinos, Guy Levis Mano, Max Ernst, Dorothea Tanning, Leonora Carrington, Henri Parisot, Frédéric Delanglade, Henri Toyen, René Magritte, and Salvador Dalì, among others. Max Ernst would illustrate some of his words, and confess that he was his second favorite writer after Lautréamont.

Continuing her journey, Alice entered a portal and was taken aback by a series of prints and illustrations by Salvador Dalì that depicted her adventures in Wonderland (Maecenas, 1969). She became a mysterious figure jumping rope through a landscape filled with Dalì’s obsessions, such as the melting clocks of the Persistence of Memory series. The clock became the Hatter’s table, set for tea, with time madly stopped at six in the afternoon. If the clocks reveal the mechanics of measuring linear time, the melting clocks refer to relative time and the universes of memory and pleasure.

Salvador Dali

Dalì simulated delirium, speculating on the propriety of the uninterrupted becoming of every object upon which he carried out his paranoid activity. Dalì’s counterfeit paranoia, the “paranoiac-critical method,” allowed him to reorder the world according to his inner obsessions. The limits between the real and the imagined became ambiguous. And his paintings began to represent a space in which everything that can be seen is potentially something else. Wonder, dreams, and the unconscious serve as the stages for metamorphoses, where the objects, symbols of irrational desires, are subjected to sudden mutations, an uninterrupted becoming. Clocks, mushrooms, caterpillars, butterflies, cards, shapes are constantly being diluted, blending and transforming. Wanderer in a dream world, Alice is stunned to discover that everything is in a constant creative flux.

The constant presence of Alice’s shadow in all of Dalì’s images refers to the Romantic dilemma of the double identity, suggesting a loss of bodily identity. In Dalì, Alice was a faceless silhouette, a mirror of herself in shadow and reflection. Surrealist Alices are bodies in metamorphosis and becoming, in a space of dreams and wonder. Dalì’s Alice gives way to the ghostly and kaleidoscopic presence of a multitude of double Alices, nameless in the contemporary imagination. Dalì’s Alice opens doors to new Alices, who ask new questions of the smile in the air—without Dalì.

4. Fabulous monsters

Alice went to visit the Czech surrealist Jan Švankmajer, who illustrated the two Alice books in two rare and strange Japanese editions. His drawings went beyond the limits of conventional illustrations, creating unexpected relationships between pictures and conversations. They are collages that reinvent the world imagined by Lewis Carroll, proposing new mysteries and paradoxes along a surrealist journey.

Svankmajer

Metamorphosis in surrealism became a violent and animalistic need, straining the limits of human nature. Life is a dream. The surrealist monsters showed Alice that subjectivity was not that safe and stable place that she had been made to believe. Alice found herself inserted into an imaginary jungle of sphinxes and chimeras, among collages with multiple identities that emerged from subterranean, strange, and archaic worlds. The drawings were mounted and dismounted, metamorphosing between images of biology and botany, dolls, Victorian illustrations, and sex symbols—double, multiple becomings.

In the Jabberwocky’s portmanteau words, there was a bestiary of beings such as toves and mome raths. Word collages were turned by Švankmajer into monster collages, hybrid and enigmatic beings. Alice’s body was unstable and mutating, a puzzle without any right answer. Alice is a portmanteau of impossibilities. When the caterpillar asks Alice, Who are you?, Švankmajer’s Alice is a drawing, a doll, a mushroom, lace, texture, pulse. The caterpillar and Alice meet with a vital élan, filled with the power of becoming.

Alice continued along and watched fragments of Švankmajer’s experimental animated film that revealed unsuspected dimensions of herself. Much of the animation was created through an explosive mixture of stop motion and a wide variety of surreal objects and hybrid, bizarre bodies. The characters might be played by machines, socks, clay, antique dolls and toys, meat, and even skeletons and the remains of bodies used in taxidermy experiments. The settings were ruins: decadent, subterranean landscapes, transformed into a somber and dissolute atmosphere.

Švankmajer adapted Carroll’s story according to a personal dialogue with the dream world and his own childhood: a world inhabited by desires, latent sexuality, fears, anxieties, mysteries, and obsessions. We are also confronted with our own childhood, our own Alices, fears, and shadows: inner alchemies. Each time we watch the film, we dream anew and Alice becomes a different one, among silences and whispers. I am reminded of the letter Paulo Mendes Campos gave to his daughter, Maria de Graça, when she turned fifteen and received Alice as a present: This book is crazy, Maria, the meaning is inside of you.

5. Merchandise

 

Alice looked at her reflection in the water of the river, and it transformed into the silly, naïve girl in a blue apron known by many, for many years, as the “real” Alice. Her story, recreated in a cartoon by Walt Disney’s dream factory, would become powerful, diluting the collective imagination, and stunting the metamorphoses of the girl who was constantly in transformation. Inspired by Tenniel’s original illustrations, this Alice would turn into the new ultimate icon, imposing for a long time a fixed and hegemonic public identity on the girl of many faces.

In the cartoon, Alice laments the fact that nonsense has been converted into moral lessons and good behavior. Like Walt Disney’s princesses, the cartoon Alice is a passive and defenseless young woman facing a crazy, senseless world. Wonderland showed insanity to her so that she might desire sanity even more. It showed misfits, so that she might want to fit in. The characters showed her how the system worked, so that she could learn to integrate herself into it, toe the line, and assume her role in society.

Alice realized that Disney’s cartoon simultaneously brought her story to the world and hid her critical and subversive potential. But at the same time, Disney’s movie became a countercultural and psychedelic icon in the 1960s as an ode to surrealism, insanity, and creativity. Alice was curious to see how each work remained open to multiple, contradictory, and oftentimes paradoxical readings.

Alice discovered that many years later, at the start of the twenty-first century, Disney would produce another film about her, this time directed by a dark and imaginative director named Tim Burton. In this film, after many years, Alice returns to “Underland” in order to defeat the terrible dragon, the Jabberwocky (sic), as had been foreseen in a prophecy. Everyone asks her: Are you the real Alice?

She decides that she is not. In this movie, the nonsense is contained within reductionist formulas of a hero’s journey. Alice is expected to become a warrior, to defeat and destroy the enemy in a Manichean world, to kill the dragon in order to awaken and assume her colonizing role in England’s world domination. Alice takes over her father’s project of conquering China.

The real me, Alice thought, is not a warrior, but an explorer. She does not kill the enemy, but learns through him. She does not want to take over the world, but instead comes to know herself. For her, Wonderland is not a battlefield, but a voyage, a game, a garden, and an adventure. That is why this movie is so unbearable, Alice thought. Because it shows the nightmare and the insanity that we now inhabit.

Once more, thanks to Tim Burton and Disney, with their considerable investment in promoting the film, Alice’s presence in the collective imagination was strengthened in an unprecedented manner. This is not only because of what the film shows, but because of what it stimulates. Even with the insistent repetition of symbols of consumption, possibilities for new becomings and friendships are reborn over time. Countless creative and existentialist possibilities might arise from among both those pleased and displeased with the film. The film offered them a chance to reread the book, to discover other images, other means of expression, other voyages; to produce, to create, to feel, to discover, and ultimately dialogue with and embark on an adventure, each in his or her own way, in this exciting world that still challenges us to take the plunge.

6. Arisu

Kokusyoku Sumire

The first time I read Alice, I imagined myself falling down with her until we reached the other side of the world, where people lived upside down. For a child in Brazil, this meant Japan. Many years later, I find that Japan is home to some of the most stimulating Alices alive today, in ordinary life in the city of Tokyo, sharing dreams, creating new worlds. Girls and boys who are children and adults at the same time dress as Victorian dolls, reinventing John Tenniel’s illustrations, among other passions and pursuits. With gestures, mannerisms, aprons, lace, socks, ties, and ruffles, Alice is becoming a new way of living the counterculture in alicinatory neighborhoods such as Harajuku, Shinjuku, and Akihabara, places where otherness and altered-ness are celebrated, embracing the wonder within the contemporary cartography, journeying through time and the invention of oneself.

The birth of the Gosu-rori (Gothic Lolita) culture coincided with the translation of Fushigi no kuni no arisu by Sumiko Yagawa, as Sean Somers showed me in his thought-provoking article Arisu in harajuku. She is my white rabbit, leading me to this surprising, and in large part misunderstood, reality. Yagawa stimulated the blooming of a counterculture that frees the imagination from repressive and repetitive social routines, opening the possibility of new friendships with time.

Wonderland (Fushigi) reveals an atmosphere of sensations, including charm and wonder, but also mystery, strangeness, and fear. Fushigi no kuni no arisu was translated in order to penetrate the existential needs of a generation, particularly the marginalized and outcast youth, who could, in this way, face malaise, depression, violence, and rejection through the wonder manifested in everyday life.

Fushigi is not an inducement of daydreams or escapism, Somers points out, but a creative therapy and an “alchemy of metamorphoses,” a subversion of the standards for women, breaking down barriers between ugly and beautiful, sweet and perverse, violent and delicate. Lolitas seek to prolong their childhood and question dominant culture in a childish manner and a dollish pose, in a game of being and nonbeing that crosses the line between art and life. Do Hello Kitties eat bats? Do bats eat Hello Kitties?

Yet, it is important to keep in mind that the practice of wandering metamorphosis is now part of the logic of contemporary fashion. The creation and expression of oneself as an exercise in creativity has now become a marketing gimmick. We live in a culture of “differences” that combines alleged creativity with a desire to be unique, but only according to static formulas of existence. As Cristiane Mesquita points out: “Clothing serves as a means of expression in an existential landscape. But fashion also offers the market ephemeral and easily substituted identities.” How can one be distinguished from the other? Alice is our challenge.

7. Fringe

Yayoi Kusama

I, Kusama, am the modern Alice in Wonderland, stated Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama, who since the 1950s has alicinated psychedelic worlds. In paintings, collages, poems, daring acts, sculptures, fashions, weirdness, and surprising installations, she shares patterns, repetitions, obsessions, and visions of the infinite.

Kusama was hospitalized for years for mental disorders, and her works reflect her challenging perception of reality, where the boundaries between the body, the self, and the environment mix and mingle in proliferations of repetitive dots that pulse and vibrate with the cosmos. We’re all mad here . . . otherwise you wouldn’t have come, said the Cheshire Cat. Kusama plays with mirrors and kaleidoscopes to produce bright patterns with stunning effects, incorporating an almost hallucinatory vision of reality, in an experience that is at once sensory and spiritual.

 Yayoi Kusama

In the 1960s, the artist went to New York, where she carried out a series of political “happenings,” under the philosophy “Love forever,” promoting a reaction against the Vietnam War and all authoritarian, repressive, and conservative powers. These body paintings and orgiastic choreographies were performed before the sculpture of Alice in Central Park, in 1968. For Kusama, Alice was the grandmother of the hippies, and she became Alice, a year after Grace Slick sang “White Rabbit” with the Jefferson Airplane.

Kusama arrived in Central Park as the Hatter, with her nude dancers, inviting everyone to drink the tea that was being served under the magic mushroom. Red, green, and yellow dots could represent the earth, the sun, or the moon, according to Kusama. She painted little circles on the bodies of those present, so that people would divest themselves of their outlines to return “to the nature of the universe.” From a criticism of the repressive powers symbolized by the social routines of Alice’s teatime, Kusama has moved towards friendship with time, crossing boundaries between bodies and cosmic rhythms, diluting the boundaries of the self.

Dialoguing with the ideas of Rosane Preciosa about the existence, Alice is able to disturb, to intrigue, to destabilize. She puts us in contact with uncertainty and the untamed. Breaking with hegemonic models of existence, the new Alices must invent universes by paying attention to their own inner landscapes. Alices give themselves over to existence and say: I am a question.

And if Alice were not in the dress, but in its folds? If she were not in the blue material, but in the shadow and the light of a multicolor prism? If she were not in the hair, but in the rumors of its movement? Not in the apron, but in the traces of an intimate encounter? Not in the shoes, but in the steps into the unknown and the uncertainty about which path to take? Not in the pictures, but in the conversations? Not in the conversations, but in the question marks? Not in the words, but in the pauses that breathe between them? Not in the behavior, but in the beating of the heart? Not in a face, but in a dream? Not in a being, but in the becoming?

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found at alicismo 

form the movie  Dreamchild