During this past month, I found myself repeatedly drawn to the exhibition Complexo Brasil at the Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon. I went back four times. Not just to walk through the rooms, but to sit with the works, to listen, and to attend conversations unfolding around Brazilian culture. On my last visit, I attended a talk featuring José Miguel Wisnik and Raí — a meeting of thought and gesture, of reflection and lived experience.
José Miguel Wisnik is a Brazilian composer, essayist, and professor of literature at the University of São Paulo, widely known for his work on music, culture, and Brazilian identity. His book Veneno Remédio: O Futebol e o Brasil explores football as both metaphor and diagnosis of the country’s contradictions
Raí is a former Brazilian footballer and captain of the national team, remembered not only for his career at São Paulo FC and Paris Saint-Germain, but also for his social engagement. He is the co founder of Fundação Gol de Letra, an organization dedicated to education and social development for vulnerable youth in Brazil.
Bringing them together in the context of Complexo Brasil felt less like a talk and more like a continuation of the exhibition itself.
What I witnessed was a talk that unfolded within the framework of the exhibition Complexo Brasil at Gulbenkian, inspired in part by José Miguel Wisnik’s book Veneno Remédio. It did not feel like a conventional discussion about football. It felt more like entering a living reflection on Brazil itself. Through Wisnik’s lens, football emerged not merely as sport, nor as industry, nor even primarily as politics, but as form. As art. As a language through which a society thinks about itself.
Wisnik approaches football with the sensibility of someone who understands music. He does not reduce the game to tactics or nationalism. Instead, he treats it as a space where rhythm and structure coexist in tension. What stayed with me most was not the seriousness of football in Brazil, nor its tragic undertones, but the aesthetic intelligence embedded in it. Brazilian football does not move in straight lines. It curves. It delays. It invents solutions under pressure. The dribble is not simply technical skill. It is the body negotiating constraint. It is improvisation as thought.
Beautiful Raí’s score against Barcelona whilst he was playing for São Paulo FC.
Placed inside the broader context of Complexo Brasil, this understanding deepens. The exhibition does not present Brazil as a harmonious narrative. It embraces density, contradiction, unfinished histories. Football mirrors that same complexity. It carries joy and violence in the same gesture. It holds brilliance alongside inequality. On the pitch, the country seems to rehearse its own ambiguities. It stages them and transforms them into choreography.
What moved me most was realizing that football in Brazil operates as cultural language. The rules may have been imported, but the rhythm was not. The rhythm is local. It comes from music, from collective improvisation, from a society accustomed to absorbing external forces without dissolving entirely. Like Tropicalismo digested electric guitars and mass media, Brazilian football digests structure and returns it with swing. It does not reject form. It bends it.
And then there is Raí. His trajectory on the field and his work with Fundação Gol de Letra extend the meaning of the game beyond spectacle. If football is art, then its continuation off the field becomes responsibility. Gol de Letra transforms symbolic capital into social practice. It recognizes that beauty cannot remain abstract. It must circulate. It must return to the communities that shaped it.
What became clear to me through this talk is that football, in Brazil, is not a distraction from culture. It is culture. It is a way of organizing time. A match stretches, hesitates, accelerates. It creates silence before eruption. It allows invention within rules. It stages uncertainty and resolution without guaranteeing either. Watching it or reflecting on it through Wisnik’s writing, you sense that the field is not simply a site of competition. It is a surface where society performs itself.
Football as art does not romanticize Brazil. It reveals it. It reveals a country capable of improvisation under constraint, of excess and vulnerability, of brilliance and fracture. It shows how contradiction can coexist without immediate resolution. It suggests that popular culture is not secondary to thought, but one of its most powerful expressions.
Perhaps that is why football continues to matter so deeply in Brazil. Not because it simplifies reality, but because it embodies its complexity. It does not stand outside history. It moves inside it, rhythmically, unpredictably, beautifully.
by Rods Rodrigues // Membrz Club General Manager
