The Sound of Political Critique in Augusto de Campos’s Popcretos

This article examines the Popcretos, a series of collage works by Brazilian concrete poet Augusto de Campos, situating them within the broader trajectory of his experimental poetics and the political context of Brazil’s military dictatorship. While existing scholarship has focused primarily on the series’s visual and semiological dimensions, this article argues that sound operates as a structuring element across the Popcretos, shaping how images are arranged and meanings emerge. Drawing on sound studies scholarship and critic Carrie Noland’s concept of sound-sensitive visuality, the article traces how the tension between noise and silence informs de Campos’s work from his earliest poems through the concrete poetry movement’s political turn in the early 1960s. Close readings of three works from the series (“The Anti-Noise,” “An Eye for an Eye,” and “Hush!”) reveal how sonic categories are mobilized to critique cultural imperialism, mass media spectacle, and authoritarian censorship. The article concludes that the Popcretos exceed ocularcentrism, functioning also as a multisensorial form of “auditory writing” within its sonic–visual materiality.