What it is
A name in scientific Latin applied to an aesthetic, as if cataloguing a species. It keeps the coldness of taxonomy and the irony of classifying the unclassifiable. It is not a genre, it is a way of seeing: in Brazil, horror does not live in darkness, it lives in an excess of light, and the saturation of tropical color is not innocent.
Gothicus brasiliensis begins where Tropicalism stopped dancing.
It inherits the inversion of the Manifesto Antropófago and the fragmentary accumulation of Pau-Brasil, and it is the critical heir of Tropicalism: it keeps the tension that Tropicalism resolved through celebration. The monsters of the forest, such as Matinta, Curupira, and Boiuna, are not imports from European Gothic. They precede it.
How it works
It began as a solo project, a space to think through an aesthetic without needing it to be a movement first. It is now published at its own domain as a web-native editorial object: a manifesto, a bestiary of 62 Brazilian mythological creatures (mapped across 9 works by 4 authors), an interactive map of the 27 states, a card deck, a divination oracle, and ongoing dispatches of texts, audio, and images.
The design of the site is part of the work: dark, typographically spare, structured like a scientific catalogue that takes itself seriously enough to be playful about it. It is an ongoing project, and the door is open.
How it was built
The HTML prototypes were built with AI support, on top of years of written research. The project also became a lab to test how design and development can work together with AI: extracting design tokens from the code, versioning them on GitHub, and taking them to Figma. The process is in the article How I used AI to reverse-engineer my own design.