Projeto inumeráveis: narrativas de luto e memória na pandemia de Covid-19

Abstract

The present research proposes to investigate the Inumeráveis project, a digital memorial created with the objective of honoring the victims of Covid-19 in Brazil. Aiming to understand how the mediations of technicity and narratives, constitutive of the project, build memory and grief experiences in relation to the pandemic. Given the complexity of the empirical object and everything it encompasses, first, a contextualization of the Covid-19 pandemic is made from its beginning to the end of 2022, with several important facts for Brazil, seeking a synthesis of this historical period. A transdisciplinary discussion is proposed, conceptualizing the event, death, grief, memory and the mediations traversed by the communicational perspective and digitalization of the same. In order to respond to the research problem of how the Inumeráveis are configured as an environment for building memory and grief narratives, a multimethodological arrangement was chosen that combines perspectives in order to better understand this multifaceted object. It starts with exploratory research, is reflected from the approach of Media Archeology, and adapts to the Critical Narrative Analysis. It presents a work of excavation of the empirical object and expedition around it to understand the production logic of the project, its creators, the aesthetic and symbolic aspects and the relationship with the mediations, especially with the technicity. As well as, in the instance of the narrative, it brings the analysis of 26 tribute texts from the memorial to think about the construction of the character, the "moral of the story", that is, the message that the story passes and the constructions of grief and memory carried out over the course of the texts. As a result, we interpreted the site's symbology as a kind of virtual cemetery and the interactions in digital social media as a ritual that takes us back to funerals. We noticed how the memorial, on its platforms, provides other types of content that focus on helping to understand grief and other topics. Another relevant result was understanding how the volunteer collaboration network is what moves the project and enables the different manifestations of grief work. In addition, through the narratives we identified seven characters who help build a national and political memory through the representation of Brazilian citizens who mobilize empathy and awareness about Covid-19.