Playing with dolls: a Benjaminian essay on mimesis

Abstract This essay proposes to discuss, from a Benjaminian perspective, a mimetic circuit in which dolls that are similar to ancestral riverbank dwellers enter into relations with people living on the banks of the river, who become similar to dolls. The gesture of an artisan to populate the banks of a river returns with the force of a field which is energized by dolls and riverbank dwellers, invigorating the latter in their determination not to be removed from their homes. Images of people from the past who made their homes and fished from the banks of the Piracicaba River and of Amerindian Paiaguá or evuevi “river people” articulate with the present in a moment of danger in which dwellers are threatened by a city government project of “reconquest of Riverbank Street” associated with the restoration of a bandeirante (backland explorer and Indian slave-hunter) heroic imaginary. Attention is called to the way in which residues of the city and its history, collected by an artisan in a cart pulled by a horse named Otter, come to life in the form of riverine dolls.