Inauguration address delivered by Gilberto Gil, minister of Culture of Brazil

When president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva appointed musician Gilberto Passos Gil Moreira as minister of Culture, heavy criticism, oscillating among demerit, disbelief, and mockery, was poured down on presidential decision. Some said that was a senseless choice, demagogical and baseless; some foreshadowed a disaster, linking Gil’s image as a public administrator to his term as a city councilman in Salvador (1990–1994), in which there had been an unbalance between his duties and his artist career.

Whether for those who saw the potency of that lecture, or for those that lacked enlightening for what was being said, there comes a bullet point, containing the most important excerpts of Gilberto Gil’s inaugural address as minister of Culture of Brazil:

From the start, Gilberto Gil presented concepts with which we would work not only throughout the speech, but also along all of his term ahead of the Culture office. Here the concept of a deeper Brazil, meaning a country with continental dimensions and a diversity befitting its proportions that needs to be seen and respected in its complexity, rejecting unifying theories, which are based only in the surface of capital cities and that flatten differences using such bar. A country that is compared to a body—another analogy he makes in the beginning, before getting back to it later on, making it a conceptual figure. A body, whose metaphor is the fundamental paradox of being full in its unity, but divided into several parts, which are required to work in communion and complementarity.

When he refers to president Lula as “a deep Brazilian, simple and straightforward, a Brazilian seen by each one of us as an equal, as a fellow,” he is not looking to flatter him but instead to bring another concept: the one of cultural citizenship. Gil intended to raise the comprehension of a citizen as a being in the world, embedded with his own identity, who correlates with the identities of others, in order to, from there, be part of the decisions made in the community where he exercises its citizenship.

Gilberto Gil, here, while talking of his biography, recalls that not only he is a son of this deep Brazil—a Bahia-born from Salvador, i.e., naturally out of the Rio-São Paulo circuit, but was also raised in Ituaçu, in the caatinga scrub, in Bahia state. In this snippet, the “ministartist” also recalls his role in Tropicália, a musical and behavioral movement led by him and Caetano Veloso in the late 1960s, when, for the first time, he proposed rethinking Brazil as a body unique by its diversity. This concept, which was part of the Tropicália ideals, costed them their freedom and permanence in the country: the military dictatorship running the country after a coup d’état in 1964, found it way too subversive for a group of artists to get average Brazilians thinking that their political power could be in their cultural identity.

Gilberto Gil comment on this in the testimonial he gave in 1987 to the exhibit “Tropicália 20 anos”: “[Tropicália] talked of customs, of it all, of behavior. Questioned the Brazilian soul. It made people take different stands, review them...so it was a hassle.”

In this line, he express what would be the touchstone of his acting in the ministry: Brazilian culture must have centrality in the talks of a project of nation, for it is a transversal question, passing through all identitary spheres of an individual and its relation to the world. He rejects a perception that encloses culture within the dimension of mere entertainment or subject, without any interlocution with the political, economic and practical universes, and proposes a strategic vision of culture. Meaning a shift in the perception of culture as mere producer and dispensary of cultural goods, which would led, according to this market logic, to an understanding of further cultural manifestations as folklore. That transmutes the perception of culture into a “… set of signs of each community and the entire nation. Culture as a set of signs of each community and the entire nation. Culture as the sense of our acts, the sum of our gestures, the sense of our ways.”


The dissemination of a reference of Culture as a “plant of symbols of a people”, is relatively recent in the agendas of cultural discussions in Brazil. The very discussion of a political thought for Culture is new. In Brazil, there is a historical lack of understanding of this as a strategic activity, which is a place of speech, empowerment, political and social positioning, symbolic understanding, unity in diversity and sustainability. Understanding Culture and cultural activity as strategic to build a strong nation, for example, led the United States, from the post-war period, to a political and economic role in the world.

The speech proposed a subversion of the values that transited in the Brazilian political cultural trade, who traditionally planned culture, its fostering and its appreciation in a superficial way and apart from the agenda of the major national issues. Develop public policies goes beyond the market culture x access culture dichotomy. The public policies for culture cannot be underpinned in partisanships, which would be against its continuity. It goes beyond the fostering to the production of cultural goods. A ministry which handles measures as “applied anthropology exercises” proposes to understand the Brazilian culture in what a nation has of most valuable and indelible: its symbolic goods.

Here, Gilberto Gil weaves a clear criticism to the neoliberal model, practiced in the previous administration by president Fernando Henrique Cardoso, which proposed the minimal state and thought of culture as a “good deal.” This means that for a product to be financed, in a mercantilist view that would give the market the power through fiscal incentives, we had to decide which national symbolic goods were valuable enough to justify their production and distribution, and that were worth of being brought to light, at the expense of others, which had a reduced bargaining power.

Once more, Gil formulates the matters within the centrality of culture as something transversal to the life of the individuals in society, as well to their comprehension as citizens within a socioeconomic structure that requires their active participation. The “ministartist” urges everyone to exercise their cultural citizenship, under the perspective of formulating their intents and needs as beings in the world and social and relational beings, attached to the symbol set of which they are made and over which they can have influence, in order to transform the “old ways of living.”

This is the most controversial point of the entire speech, the one that generated mockery and deleterious comment. Here, the sworn in minister is accused, among other things, of being hermetic; of referring to serious issues with improper language; of lacking the sobriety required by the seat; and of approaching the topic without actually saying a thing about it.

Yet, what Gilberto Gil meant by his “anthropological do-in” has surgical precision. The artist, who in the search for his spirituality has always worked hard on getting to know the oriental practices—having crossed paths, throughout this life, with several of their religious traditions and other movements—, brings back the millennial do-in practice to explain the role of an amplified concept of culture, which he mentions in his speech. Firstly, do-in sees the body in a holistic way—the parts of a whole. Based upon this premise, the Chinese technique for self-massaging rooted in the Chinese Traditional Medicine [CTM], makes use of the same acupuncture points, according to the body meridians, to activate them through fingertip pressure, hence treating those in need, relieving or stimulating such points, in order to normalize the energy flow where it is stagnant or unbalanced.

In this way, Gilberto Gil wanted to show that the Ministry, by leaving the fixed logics of the market which was to dictate what cultural goods could exist, fulfills the role of hearing the Brazilian demands as a holistic cultural body, with its own needs, supplanting mere production and financial fostering. Throughout the entire speech, he builds the concept of citizenship e power that people would detain as vector of their culture, to make them understand that the ministry is there to, beginning with its formulations and needs, walk together, stimulating, fostering, keeping, and balancing the cultural tissue.

In this paragraph, Gil revisits the concepts he brought in his address: the creation of a national sovereignty starting with what there are of most robust, rooted and unifying in Brazil—its culture, shared by everyone, even those who do not recognize it and give no value to its existence. Ultimately, as the “ministartist” would define in the same address, culture is “the meaning of our actions, the sum of our gestures, the meaning of our ways.” And, in order to this “building of a nation” to fulfill itself, the creation of State public policies are required—not the government’s, as these are essentially party-based and subject to the feelings of those who hold public offices from one election to another (this vicious cycle of changings is what he calls “adventures”). Policies that not only hear the emulation and demands coming from cultural citizens, but also foresee the needs for these projects to be carried out. Because of it, Gil brings culture to the center of discussion, as it is the alpha and the omega, from where everyone comes and to where everyone goes, what congregates all human beings within a symbolic boat, down the river of memory and habits.