Playing with Wonders: Objects, Role-Playing Games, and the Cultural Legacy of Bispo do Rosário for the City of Rio de Janeiro

This paper examines how physical objects can stimulate imagination and new modes of thinking, using the art of Arthur Bispo do Rosário as a foundation for micro role-playing games set in Rio de Janeiro. The authors introduce the concept of "Living Objects," elements designed to carry narrative and provoke wonder beyond rational thought, drawing on theories of the marvelous from Sarah Tindal Kareem, the "poetics of delirium" articulated by João Frayze-Pereira, and the Romantic concept of witz as a sparking fragment. The central artifact is the Storytelling Cloak, a double-sided, reconfigurable garment inspired by Bispo's Presentation Cloak, to which participants attach removable elements that can be reused and recombined by subsequent users.

The study reports on small-scale experiments with volunteer participants, some familiar with Bispo's work and some not, and some experienced in storytelling or role-playing and others not. Each participant produced autobiographical, fictional, and historical narratives related to Rio de Janeiro, followed by a debrief and feedback collection. Examples include a participant who built a childhood-to-present autobiography using a pen as a prop, a collaborative role-playing game in which a character's life is continued across players, a narrative contrasting three socioeconomic perspectives on the city, and a nurse's recollections of Colônia Juliano Moreira that incorporated a hospital tile.

The authors conclude that the cloak functions as both a creative instrument and a collector of narratives, expanding a city's intangible heritage into a "collective imaginary cartography" that incorporates official, unofficial, and marginal memory. The evidence is qualitative and anecdotal, drawn from a limited number of participants without a formal sample size or systematic analysis, so the claims about imaginative effects remain exploratory.