Last December, Clarice Lispector’s new website, launched on the author’s centenary, on December 10, 2020, earned second place in the Best Digital Design category of the Brasil Design Award.
The award has been given since 2009 and is organized by the Brazilian Association of Design Companies with the aim of recognizing and highlighting the creative and innovative capacity of Brazilian design. It is currently the biggest national design award, in which the main creative companies of the country participate.
Clarice Lispector’s official website was developed by Estúdio Cru in partnership with the Literature Coordinator of the Moreira Salles Institute (IMS), which holds an important part of the writer’s collection. The agency’s directors, Bernardo Winitskowski and Maria Alice Leal, explain the proposal:
“The idea was to create an immersive experience that conveyed the principles of the author’s work: visceral, poetic, and labyrinthine. This experience, which we call a narrative, is a non-linear way of navigating the timeline. The starting point was a process of profound research and investigation. Together with the IMS literature team, we developed a narrative, selecting the main visual and thematic elements that would be capable of creating the desired effect on the user.”
The Estúdio Cru team that participated in the creation of Clarice Lispector’s new website was composed of designers Felipe Barbosa and Fernanda Morgan, developers Pedro Rivera and Raincake (led by Heric Reis and Letícia Yokoi), producers Maria Alice Leal and Alexandre Caetano, and project manager Gérome Ibri. The curatorship, research, and content were under the responsibility of Eucanaã Ferraz, Bruno Cosentino, and Elizama Almeida, from the Moreira Salles Institute.
The film portrays the famous Ulisses, Clarice Lispector’s dog and a prominent character in her life and fiction. He is present in the posthumous novel A Breath of Life, he is the narrator of the children’s book Quase de verdade (Almost True), he was mentioned in countless chronicles, and today he is immortalized, alongside his owner, in a bronze statue at Leme Beach, in Rio de Janeiro.
Clarice Lispector spent her childhood in Recife, but at the age of 15 she moved with her father and two sisters to Rio de Janeiro. It was in the then capital of Brazil that the writer lived her youth and early adult life: she completed high school, graduated from law school, had her first professional experiences in the press, got married, and in 1943, released her first book Near to the Wild Heart.
It has become commonplace to say that Clarice Lispector’s writing seeks to overcome the limits of language which the author names “it,” “nucleus,” “thing,” “unsayable,” “silence.”
In addition to confirming the value of the biographical genre as a privileged means to meet the demands of a curious public about the past of famous personalities, Teresa Montero challenges the genre’s conventions by reconstructing the family life, personal experiences, friendships, and creative process of Clarice Lispector, an author who, with all her strengths, gave life to her vocation for literature as a fatality and a salvation.
The second part of the original manuscripts of Um sopro de vida (A Breath of Life) was delivered by the writer's son, Paulo Gurgel Valente, to be incorporated into the Clarice Lispector Collection
