PIPA 2024
Nara Guichon, Aline Motta, enorê, Aislan Pankararu: Opening of the PIPA 2024 exhibitions, Photo: Fabio Souza

The winning artists of the PIPA 2024 Award are Aislan Pankararu, Aline Motta, enorê and Nara Guichon. They are part of an exhibition at Terreiro do Paço Imperial, in the center of Rio de Janeiro, which will be on display until October 20th. In the next room, an exhibition recalls PIPA's 15 years with works by artists awarded in other years, such as Berna Reale, Paulo Nazareth, Renata Lucas, Arjan Martins, Éder Oliveira and Denilson Baniwa.

Instituto Pipa was created by Lucrécia and Roberto Vinháes, she with a background as an interior architect and exhibition producer, he an investor, as well as patrons of the arts. The institute's curator is Luiz Camillo Osório, former curator of the Museum of Modern Art in Rio de Janeiro, professor and current director of the philosophy department at PUC Rio. The winners are chosen by a jury at the institute after being nominated by a committee of professionals, renewed every year. The award also serves to guide the formation of the institute's art collection, with acquisition negotiations that may take place in the process. 

Each year, four artists have been chosen by PIPA and receive the spotlight. This year, they each receive R$15 in donations, funds that help pay for work and transportation for their participation in a collective exhibition. If the monetary value seems small, it is good to remember the difficulty of support and financing that visual artists face in a country like Brazil, which keeps its educational and cultural institutions, including its museums, in poverty, while the betting industry (bets, in the habitual anglicism) earns R$68,2 billion in twelve months. 

Regarding this year's award winners, it is necessary to mention ancestries and contexts as they are what feed their artistic creation.

Aislan Pankararu is an indigenous person from the semi-arid backlands of Pernambuco, born in Petrolândia in 1990. His mother village is Brejo dos Padres. During the process of colonization and acculturation, their people lost their original language, but maintained their spirituality, the cult of the enchanted, body painting in white clay and certain rituals. These people carry the story of forced displacement to the banks of the São Francisco River, from flooding to  construction of a hydroelectric plant and the destruction of the waterfall where he interacted with his ancestors.

At the age of 17, Aislan left her parents' house, took the university entrance exam and went to study medicine in Brasília. In his statements, he says that there he noticed structural racism in questions about being indigenous, the place of indigenous people as an object of study at university, but not always welcomed as a presence. He missed the caatinga biome. In the republic where he lived, he began to alleviate pain and nostalgia in a ritualistic way, painting with a toothbrush and gouache on kraft paper. A way to reconnect with your people, culture and geography.

His work, he says, is to exalt the tall country Indian, who paints himself with a sacred element that is white clay taken from a specific location. In his paintings, elements of the pankararu cosmogony appear, his praiás (ritual masks), the entities, the messengers between the Earth and the sky, the festive rites, the mandacaru, the shooting of the umbu, the caatinga, as well as references to the world of biology and genetics, living and breathing cells. 

Enorê was born in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. He graduated in painting from the School of Fine Arts at UFRJ, but lives and works in London. He works between digital media and physical processes. He prints 3D ceramics, but considers his work to be interdisciplinary, involving drawing and painting, sometimes video and projection, as well as a scanner and printer from which heads, faces and hands emerge. 

In his testimony for PIPA, he talks about challenging or crossing different temporalities, about things that do not dissolve, do not destroy themselves, “remain in this recursiveness of existence”. How would these digital ghosts work, leaving the screen and returning, being constructed, dissolving again and being constructed again? Although he is talking about his own work, the artist also seems to be talking about life in the digital age.

His recent works have titles such as Glitch 3 (destroyed face); cold to the touch; when you lose your body; dissolution; they are all you (appearance); All I Can Hold (Fragments). He writes many titles in lowercase letters, and that is also how he spells his name. 

Gaúcha Nara Guichon, born in Santa Maria in 1955, has lived in the south of the island in Florianópolis since the 1980s, and has made a life dedicated to knitting, crochet, embroidery and weaving. She has received design awards from institutions such as the Museu da Casa Brasileira. Nara is also a well-known environmentalist, she worked in the recovery of the Atlantic Forest and is dedicated to collecting and reusing polyamide (petroleum) fishing nets abandoned at sea. These networks account for half of the world's ocean pollution.

His impressive artistic work has been developed, in his words, with “the material that is out there”. She reuses fishing nets with new oxidations and natural pigmentations, knits them, articulates them with wires, plastic bags and discarded industrial fabrics. Her sculptural work has organic shapes that evoke the nature of the planet, plant and animal life and more specifically the landscape of the bottom of the sea. 

“My need is to work asking for help for the planet. My art is portentous because ocean trash is portentous,” she explains.

Aline Motta was born in Niterói in 1974, studied cinema and worked as a continuation artist until embracing an artistic career and moving to São Paulo. She comes from an interracial family and dedicates herself to extensive iconographic and documentary research before creating her works. She found evidence that a great-great-grandmother was born around 1855 on a farm in Vassouras, the epicenter of Brazilian slavery at that time. 

Just like Aislan Pankararu, Aline brings her ancestry to the work. “A lot of my work is about my own family, especially my grandmother,” she likes to say. For her, “lineage is language”. 

At the PIPA exhibition, Aline Motta shows Celestial Body III, from 2020, an installation in which drawings and proverbs from the African languages ​​Kikongo and Umbundu, brought to Brazil and other American countries with the enslaved people from the Congo and Angola region, are projected onto the floor.

The main reference of this work is the so-called bakongo cosmogram and the diagrams known as scratched points, used in Umbanda to invoke spiritual entities. Bakongo literally means “Kongo people”. Their language is Kikongo. The bakongo cosmogram is a type of mandala also known as “diekenga”, which symbolically represents the great cycles of the sun, life, the universe and time. A cross divides the circle into four steps or times. A horizontal line, also called kalunga, represents the sea or the separation of the worlds of the living and the dead.

In Aline Motta's animation, the sun, moon, stars, crosses, snail, coral snake, tortoise, armadillo, vessel and proverbs appear. Among the proverbs are: “Fire is not stronger than water, the pan is what sets a barrier”; “Old principles, to understand new ones”: “Clear moonlight is not sun”. The work was created in collaboration with percussionist Rafael Galante and belongs to the Pinacoteca de São Paulo Collection.

It is curious that this exhibition is being shown in Terreiro do Paço, the servants' room of the building opened in 1743 as the Casa dos Governadores, transformed into the dispatch house of the Viceroyalty of Brazil in 1763, when the headquarters of the Viceroyalty was transferred from Salvador to Rio de Janeiro, and promoted to Paço Real in 1808, with the arrival of the Portuguese royal family. During the reign of Pedro II, the servants' yard was transformed into artistic workshops for the German Ferdinand Pettrich and the Frenchman François-Auguste Biard, respectively the author of the first marble statue made in Brazil (Emperor in majestic attire) and the painter of several portraits of the imperial family.

The building was given new meaning over the years, hosting the Mint, the Real Armazém, recording historical events such as coronations, the Fico Day, the Abolition of Slavery and the Proclamation of the Independence of Brazil, until it was listed as a Historical Heritage Site in 1938 and became a cultural center in 1985 linked to IPHAN. The day has come when it is no longer the history of the powerful taking place there, but rather the imagination and contemporary visions of artists, eventually revisiting facts from the past, hardships of the present and revealing the cultural diversity that the process of domination and exploitation sought and still seeks to erase and massacre. 


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