Corner item

sound and memory between the streets and social media

Abstract

This article, the fruit of a joint interest in the themes and of the authors' research and experiences, aims to present part of a study on activities that were concentrated on the corner between Divinópolis and Paraisópolis streets, in the Santa Tereza neighbourhood of Belo Horizonte, notoriously associated with the group of musicians predominantly from Minas Gerais  known as Clube da Esquina. Considering the weight they have gained among these informal activities, we have chosen here to present an analysis of the digital records of places in the surrounding area that we consider in their different ‘incarnations’: Godofredo Bar Musical, then Bar do Museu Clube da Esquina; Clubinho da Esquina, then Travessia. Our choice was to select, from among the digital records, those that gave us a sense of the construction of the environment and, from there, to think about how Clube da Esquina was used in its conception. From a cultural history perspective, these sources combine image, text and sound (although in this case, mainly indirectly), allowing us to show how the articulation between digital and face-to-face can have an impact on the apprehension of urban space. We conclude that the construction of social memory and senses of place that underpin an informal perception of heritage, and eventually the patrimonialisation of aural objects such as popular music, needs to be understood within the articulation between the experience of urban space and that of digital social networks.