Collective exhibition "Lunchbox"

A Anita Schwartz Art Gallery, in Gávea, South Zone of Rio, inaugurates the collective Packed lunch, which brings together artists from different generations under the curatorship of Ulisses CarrilhoThe exhibition chooses an object from everyday Brazilian life as a guiding thread to examine the relationships between work, hunger, and desire in the country. Few objects have circulated through so many areas of national life.

A companion to factory workers and commuters in large cities, the lunchbox served as a political emblem as early as Eurico Gaspar Dutra's presidential campaign in 1945, when the "lunchbox carrier" became a character in one of the most memorable jingles in Brazilian electoral history. Since then, the container has never left the scene: it has simultaneously embodied the precariousness and dignity of work, scarcity and the guarantee of sustenance.

Its recent trajectory reveals other layers. The lunchbox migrated from the factory world to gyms and diet apps, becoming a commodity of fitness culture and body management. In spoken language, it also gained an unexpected meaning: it became slang for informal romantic relationships and non-monogamous relationships. Between food and eroticism, the utensil has transformed into a synthesis of Brazilian social fantasies.

The exhibition's starting point is the collection of porcelain lunchboxes gathered over the years by gallery owner Anita Schwartz. Faced with these pieces, the curatorial team formulates the questions that organize the show: how does an object created out of necessity cross class boundaries? What happens when a survival tool enters the circuit of collecting, design, and art?

“Marmita starts from the premise that objects possess a social life. Few artifacts traverse as many scales of Brazilian experience as the lunchbox: from work to desire, from survival to collecting, from domestic intimacy to public circulation. The exhibition follows the movements of this object to investigate how seemingly banal material forms condense relations of class, affection, and political imagination. But these objects also belong to the realm of fantasy and fetish: they are supports for projection and identification. I am interested precisely in making these layers visible, exposing the ways in which Brazilian culture invests its objects with symbolic and erotic value.”

The historical dimension of the exhibition is built upon fundamental works of Brazilian art that investigate the relationships between food, labor, and material culture. Among them is Lute [Marmita] (1967), by Carlos Zílio, produced in a context of intensified political repression in the country and now recognized as a landmark of conceptual art. The exhibition also includes the drawings Órgãos na Bacia and Carne na Tábua, by Anna Bella Geiger, in which household utensils and body fragments bring together intimacy, consumption, and symbolic violence. “In Marmita, this sign runs through the exhibition as a gesture related to the history of Brazilian inequality and the context of the Military Dictatorship in which many of these works were produced,” observes Carrilho.

The recurring presence of rice and beans in Carlos Vergara's historical works refers to food as a constitutive element of the Brazilian social experience, while Cildo Meireles's Um Sanduíche Muito Branco (1966), one of the artist's first conceptual works, shifts food to the field of language and critique.

Artists such as Waltércio Caldas, Lenora de Barros, Farnese de Andrade, and Ivens Machado expand upon this trajectory, revealing how everyday objects can condense memory, imagination, and power relations. In dialogue with this genealogy, Andréa Hygino's recent work re-inscribes words like "rice," "beans," and "meat" in contemporary debates about scarcity, value, and symbolic hunger.

In terms of references, the exhibition evokes two foundational texts of Brazilian thought on hunger and culture. In *Estética da Fome* (1965), Glauber Rocha argued that the material deprivation of Latin America was not merely an economic problem, but a historical experience that generated language and invention. Decades earlier, Oswald de Andrade's *Manifesto Antropófago* (1928) had already proposed the act of eating and devouring as an operation that is simultaneously biological, political, and symbolic. In the exhibition, hunger expands beyond the plate: hunger for recognition, for contact, for pleasure, for belonging, and for the future.

The issue remains at the center of public debate. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations (FAO), Brazil will be removed from the Hunger Map in 2025, with less than 2,5% of the population experiencing undernourishment in the three-year period 2022-2024. However, IBGE (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics) figures indicate that inequality persists: in 2024, approximately 48,9 million Brazilians lived below the poverty line, of which approximately 7,4 million were in extreme poverty. In 2023, approximately 64,2 million people lived in households with some degree of food insecurity.

It is in this space between progress and threat that the exhibition is situated. The wellness industry, regimes that control the body, and the constant exposure of lifestyles on social media have transformed the act of eating into an aesthetic, economic, and affective dispute. By bringing artists together around a seemingly banal symbol, Marmita proposes a portrait of the material and emotional economies of Brazil: between the container and the body, between the meal and desire, the exhibition pursues that which circulates, overflows, and escapes any attempt at containment.