Page 105 - ARTE!Brasileiros #48

EXHIBITION RECIFE | PAGES 80 TO 83 considering the growing interest in the Other as an ethnographic turning point.
ADRIANA VAREJÃO: FOR Varejão’s show was inserted by Mamam in its project Solo Exhibitions of Women Artists,
being the third in the series. The director Mabel Medeiros comments that the museum is
A CANNIBAL RHETORIC currently re–studying the collection with attention to female production, still scarce in the

THE EXHIBITION MARKES THE FIRST SOLO SHOW BY ARTIST IN THE NORTHEAST, collection. The exhibition Adriana Varejão – for a cannibal rhetoric should continue until
the end of the year to other Brazilian states outside the Rio/São Paulo axis.
TERRITORY OF STRONG BAROQUE HERITAGE AND COLONIAL SLAVERY

BY LEONOR AMARANTE EXHIBITION RECIFE | PAGES 84 AND 85
THE EXHIBITION Adriana Varejão – for a cannibal rhetoric rekindles the inquiries about the NHEË NHEË NHEË, GENEALOGY

baroque and the Brazilian colonization under the sharp eyes of the artist born in Rio. OF THE TROPICAL LEISURE
Exhibited at Mamam – Aloísio Magalhães Museum of Modern Art, in Recife, the show
brings together 25 works produced between 1992 and 2018 and brings out obscure LUDIC, BRAVE AND EXISTENTIAL, MÁRCIO ALMEIDA RECOMMENDS THE LEISURE
points in Brazilian history. TO COME TO A CREATIVE MOMENT OF TRUTH
The interest aroused by these works, already known from the Rio/São Paulo axis, now comes
from the correct combination of curator Luisa Duarte’s cut, with specific works inserted BY LEONOR AMARANTE
in the Northeast, territory strongly influenced by the Baroque. Above all, a privileged
place to think about the colonization that made forced use of slave labor in the massive I AM OUT OF TIME! We can’t waste time! Forget these expressions before entering the exhibition
exploitation of sugar cane. Just remember that the Pernambuco Captaincy, in 1534, was Nheë Nheë Nheë: Genealogia do Ócio Tropical, by Márcio Almeida at Sesc Santo Amaro,
the richest and most powerful among the 14 created by the Portuguese. To experience Recife. Try to plunge into idleness, relax and think that life is an existential adventure.
this confrontation is to surface submerged impressions of a vast undigested past. If you feel like sitting or lying in the exhibition space, after all this can be your moment of
The exhibition begins with the visitor being led, naturally, to the screening room where discovery, enjoyment, pleasure to meet with yourself. To be in idleness is to be in peace
Transbarroco, video installation authored and directed by the artist and Adriano Pedrosa, is by redesigning life and mediating the place of creative transgression. Experimental
displayed on a large screen. Chosen scenes from four films, with simultaneous projections, loitering is nurtured by doing nothing creative. In short, it is what conveys this subtle
show fragments of Brazilian Baroque churches. The visual excitation of the images show of striking formal cleanliness, and which reflects on labor relations, from the time
functions as a living organism, entering each other in such a way that the viewer does of colonial Brazil to the present day. The concept has other contours and reaffirms the
not remain in a contemplative state. The soundtrack mixes Oludum percussion, Mariana’s thought of Antonio Negri, Italian Marxist philosopher when he defines: “Work is capacity for
Church organ chords, ringing bells, samba rhythms. Almost like a whisper, one hears production, social activity, dignity, but on the other hand is slavery, command, alienation”.
the voice of the Angolan writer José Eduardo Agualusa speaking an excerpt from Casa The exhibition is aligned with three previous works and the most recent, Nheë Nheë
Grande e Senzala, by Gilberto Freyre. Transbarroco is a free interpretation that puts the Nheë, is the result of Márcio Almeida’s residence at the Usina de Arte Santa Terezinha,
visitor in the midst of photography, cinema and installation, reinforcing Mário Pedrosa: in Zona da Mata, south of Pernambuco. For a few days he experienced moments of action
“art is an experimental exercise of freedom”. and rest. It produced within free time, which nowadays is in danger of being eliminated
Mamam’s architecture, as a spatial plane, suspends time in poetic reverie and embraces by the government. Not working formally is seen by the system as vagrancy, laziness,
exposure without interference. Some works, born in different temporalities, dialogue with idleness. Hannah Arendt, in The Human Condition, reminds us that all European words
the contemporary as the painting Incisions a la fontana, 2000, which exposes the internal for work also mean pain and effort - in Latin and English labor, in Greek ponos, in French
matter, living human flesh, inspired by the famous canvas of Italian–Argentine artist Lucio travail, in German Arbeit.
Fontana. In the course of a revisit to colonialism, it is worth reflecting on the Proposal for What is distinguished in this work is the way to combine elements that sprout in the
a Catechesis – Part 1 Diptytic: Death by quartering, 1993. This work alone gives explores exhibition space, since the title of the show born in the origins of our indigenous language.
the concept of catechesis, defended by Varejão. In a detail of the work, a man is impaled, Ñheé, according to anthropologist Adolfo Colombres, means speech. Therefore, Nheë,
a method of torture and execution that consists of inserting a stake in the body of the Nheë, Nheë can be a free translation of chatter. It also refers to a form of control exercised

victim until his/her death. The transgression of the scene resets the senses and opens by religious in an attempt to unify tribal languages to facilitate forced catechesis.
a new place to feel and think about the violence in Brazil today and its colonial heritage. In the introductory text, curator Beano de Borba comments on Márcio Almeida’s work
There is a strong authorial mark in Varejão’s works inspired by tiles, an icon of as a traditional idleness and savage rite, sustained by an insurgency of free time. The
Portuguese culture, by the systematization of the repetition movement and multiplicity artist’s intention is to “draw a parallel between the issue of western work and tropical
of geometric shapes, present in both older and newer works. The Jerked–beef Ruins, idleness”. In this context, it is based on the interference of religions and the strategies
2000, simulates pieces of architecture with paintings of these tiles, interspersed of the colonizers in catechizing the indigenous. Leisure and freedom is the binomial that
with the representation of beef jerky. Throughout her research Adriana has collected runs through all four installations that make up the show. “In the curation process we
over six thousand of them, recorded by her since 1988, with images that inspire her. started from the new work, Nheë Nheë Nheë, and included other works, developments
Consuming various poetics, digesting and returning them in an authorial work, is part linked to the Western logic of work and reflecting the distortions practiced by the system.”
of the record of reality and fantasy that populate the production by Varejão and almost The Nheë Nheë Nheë installation, which is the title of the exhibition, is a delicate exercise
all Brazilian art. The inaugural mark of national anthropophagism may be the episode in made up of thirteen pieces created with olive twigs, shovels and pit iron that shape the
which Father Don Pero Sardinha is devoured by the Caetés Indians in 1556, in a cannibal work tools. Despite the relatively small space of the gallery, the works flow. The floor-to-
ritual on the northeast coast. This occurred 372 years before Oswald de Andrade’s The ceiling glass wall does not disturb, on the contrary, it incorporates the external landscape,
Anthropophagic Manifesto was launched in 1928. mimicking the vegetation with the dry branches. In another installation, Nosso Descanso
Varejão’s interest in Baroque comes from her early days in the arts when I met her in é Carregar Pedras, serialism is present in the set of hospital time cards on which the
1988 at Thomas Cohn Gallery in Rio de Janeiro. It was her first individual when she was artist illustrates with watercolor images of stones, symbolic elements of slavery since
23 and said the paintings on display were the result of a trip to Minas, where she was biblical times. The time clock marks the time demanded by the system which, according
surprised by the baroque churches. This inspiration that persists to this day led her to to Foucault, becomes a form of labor control.
study and research in Salvador and Cachoeirinha (Bahia), Recife (Pernambuco), Mariana The most comprehensive of these, Waiting for Work is marked by photography, a series
(Minas Gerais) and later in Portugal. Hal Forster, in his text The artist as ethnographer, of ten images that capture the resting moment of employees after lunch break. The time
talks about the role that anthropology as discourse plays in contemporary production, to do nothing, free reflection and communication between colleagues. This reality of the

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