A show shuttle, as a delimitation of a space of representation, exposes one of the recurring symbols of indigenous culture, the hammock, an enigmatic point of Brazilian identity. The show points to the past of primordial roots and presents the networks in the arts and visual culture in Brazil associated with idleness, laziness, resting place and shroud. The historical and political perspectives cross at this moment of difficult reflections on the indigenous universe and explode with repressed energies. The discourses and concerns surrounding major exhibitions about Brazilian roots tend to bypass simple and prosaic objects like this one. shuttle it makes the conventions of time, space, form and color, governed by the artistic canon, obsolete and presupposes the body as a flow of energies and perception of forms. The collective opens to experiments, performances, paintings, sculptures, installations, photographs, videos, documents, comics, divided into thematic and historical centers. The set materializes as a form of enunciation and reflection on art from a focus that goes from the oneiric to the cruel, with slaves transporting their master in hammocks.
The exhibition spaces have the power to undo the classic thinking about primitive objects, taking the spectator to surrender movements, from the relationships with colors to the metamorphosis with the environment. The hammocks are synthetic works of lines that govern the anatomy, the form, with the man's participation. The approximately 350 pieces by 141 artists from all over Brazil are spread across the CCBB in São Paulo. Strictly speaking, they are not in space, they are spaces shaped by volume, weight and movement. The show is an invitation to voyeurism, with each piece wrapping a story according to its time, local, regional or universal value. Some material compositions seem to get rid of the fixed limits of circulation and value.
Anthropology, much more than art and literature, discusses, in different fields, the new vision of identity. The works gathered here create a loci reflection around the complex relationship between art and society's ethical problems. The cast brings together from indigenous artists to star names in art history such as Tarsila do Amaral, Tunga, Claudia Andujar, Djanira, Bispo do Rosário, Ernesto Neto, Luiz Braga, Bené Fonteles, Frida Baranek, among others. As a whole, in one way or another, they make a fragmented “opera” about colonial Brazil, with contradictory desires and different identity belongings. They acquire a territorial symbolism, from indigenous tribes to riverside populations, to river boats crowded with people in hammocks, to metropolises across the country. Hammocks are images of everyday life, icons that populated the imagination of the European invader who demarcated the Brazilian territory on old territorial maps with this image. Raphael Fonseca, a scholar on the subject and curator of the show, says that the exhibition is the result of a four-year research he carried out in his doctorate in art history at Uerj on hammocks. “From 2012 to 2016, I gathered about 900 pieces that have Amerindian technology and became part of Brazilian daily life after the arrival of the discoverers”. Raphael wrote the thesis, analyzing how these iconographies were transformed in the process. He cites the letter by Pero Vaz de Caminha which speaks of the Tupinambás' networks.
The sertanist Orlando Villas Boas, the greatest authority on indigenous peoples that this country has ever known, revealed to me, in an interview, that “the most immediate and surprising qualities of the Brazilian Indian hammocks is the strict geometry of the conception”. Vaivém brings in the cast about 30 contemporary indigenous artists, such as Arissana Pataxó, Denilson Baniwá, Duhigó Tukano, Gustavo Caboco, Jaider Esbell, who join significant names in Brazilian art history. The language analogy is established as a logical guideline that takes the visitor to the works of Bené Fonteles, Cláudia Andujar, Bispo do Rosário, Ernesto Neto. when walking shuttle we have the illusion of living in a world of communications and other natural or unconnected phenomena such as neurotika, photos by Hélio Oiticica; Ernesto Neto's suggested hammocks from 1980 and Tunga's skulls on hammocks that lead us to a discourse of life and death. Jobs, installation by Paulo Nazareth, now reworked, brings the “performance” about a job vacancy advertised in the newspaper, for an employee to remain lying on a hammock installed in the middle of the exhibition, eight hours a day, until the end of the show. What matters here, despite appearances, is not a relationship with the real, but with the desire that provokes the critical social experience.Works by Hans Staden, Jean-Baptiste Debret and Johann Moritz Rugendas are points of reflection from the European perspective on the “savages”. The works hide more than they reveal about the world of slavery and subjugation of the Indian and the slave.
Literature takes place with the classic of tropicality, Macunaíma, 1929, by Mário de Andrade, and Baptism of Macunaíma, a little-exposed drawing by Tarsila do Amaral. From the furniture by Paulo Mendes da Rocha and Sergio Rodrigues emerge the clean, elegant and economical character of the indigenous matrices. Maureen Bisilliat's photographs of the northeastern hinterland are witnesses to the strength and richness of the culture of this region disrespected by the Brazilian government. Tunga, one of the fundamental names of contemporary art, is present with a new version of bells fall, with photographic records of the performance 100 Network. He was the guest artist to inaugurate the CCBB São Paulo, in 2001.
shuttle rescues the hammock as an inflection point on the course of colonial Brazil and expands beyond a final narrative.
shuttle
Banco do Brasil SP Cultural Center: Rua Álvares Penteado, 112 – Downtown
Until July 29, 2019 – Free admission
Every day from 9 am to 21 pm, except Tuesdays
(11) 3113-3651
