Bela frase apanhada de uma placa no metrô…

“Amar é dar razão a quem não tem.” – Nelson Rodrigues

 

Culture and Sustainability at Rio+20

I made the trek to relatively unfamiliar Gamboa yesterday to attend a dialogue on creativity and sustainability. Unfortunately, the two people I had wanted to hear from, Bia Lessa, who designed and directed the Humanidades 2012 installation that has received at least a couple of hundred thousand visitors at the Copacabana Fort, and Heloisa Buarque de Hollanda, a literary and cultural critic and mediator who I've come to rely on as a very helpful guide for contemporary Brazilian poetry, both canceled their appearance.  The rest of the panel, though not of direct interest to my research, might have been enough to hold me, but the scene for the dialogue was just troubling enough that I decided at the last instant that I didn't want to be a part of it, and slipped out before the first speaker got started.  I became distinctly aware of center/periphery or big-house/slave-quarters opposition and hierarchy in the larger context of this dialogue, in its production and relationship with the other events happening in the space, the so-called Galpão da Cidadania, or Citizen Warehouse, a freshly renovated events space that is part of the city's revitalization of the long decaying port area, which includes the removal of homes and families.  This dialogue, part of series called "European Union - Brazil Sectoral Dialogues) was on the second-floor, in a glassed in, air conditioned space, registration and credentials carefully managed by a friendly contingent of elegantly dressed young women, "de boa aparência", and introduced by a highly made-up woman in business attire who spoke in the carefully trained, excitedly articulated voice of a newscaster.  The moderator then re-introduced the speakers and described the format for the questions to follow, which would only be taken virtually.  That is, we could submit questions via mobile internet device, and vote via mobile internet device which questions the speakers should respond to, but we would not, seemingly, be able to ask a question by live voice and presence.  Meanwhile, downstairs, in an open, non-air-conditioned and laxly monitored space, representatives of Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian communities congregated to discuss environmental justice claims.  At one point, a group of Indians knelt together before the forum to sing together what seemed to be both a prayer and a denunciation of the environmental degradation witnessed in their territory.  Around the rest of the building there were ethnographic and folk arts exhibits dedicated to Brazil's regional and ethnic diversity.  Outside, a large group of Landless activists marched past, and the private security personnel closed and padlocked shut the large gated entrance to the building.  Nobody was allowed to leave until the march was well out of sight.

Inhotim Images -- Flora and Gardens

Inhotim

Inhotim, the arts complex and botanical garden built by Bernardo Paz in rural Minas Gerais, about an hour and a half south of Belo Horizonte, is both breathtaking and unsettling in its power and beauty.  Paz has built a contemporary, tropical version of Versailles, immanently thoughtful and hyper-modish in its every detail and at every scale in its design, landscaping, and architecture and boldly thrusting Brazilian art, again, into the most venerated ranks of the global avant-garde.  With its series of monumental galleries and gardens built among lush tropical vegetation (including the world's largest collection of palm species) to permanently house works by the superstars of Brazilian and international art worlds, Inhotim is a sensory bacchanal, brilliantly containing within its expansive form the imperative signs and contradictions of our times.  It is a monument to tropical nature and landscape created by the private fortune generated by iron mining and smelting.  It is a monument that successfully contains and displays the counter-cultural, and anti-art desires and trends that mark contemporary art (performance, earth art, arte povera, situationism, conceptualism, sound sculpture, etc.) in a sense signifying their capture and transformation into permanent acquisitions and objects of display (a couple of hyper-illustrative works in this sense are Yayoi Kusama's "Narcissus Garden Inhotim" and Chris Burden's "Samson", the first of which was meant to comment on the narcissism of the institutional art world and its spectators and the second of which a machine that if left activated -- which, I confirmed, it was not -- would, with the help of each individual spectator, eventually destroy the gallery structure from within).  I have felt this latter tension in other contemporary arts venues, but they were somehow heightened or refreshed here, as were those between the center's parallel progressive agenda of environmental research and preservation and regional development, citizenship and social inclusion (as noted on the center's website) and its aura of luxurious exclusivity. Perhaps I'm being cynical, or perhaps there is simply nothing new under the contemporary sun, and I would have responded with the same awe and ambivalence to the freshly inaugurated MASP or MAM-Rio.  And in fact, Mass-Moca, more recently built as a temple to the contemporary and cutting edge in the hollowed out factories of a deindustrialized New England town, is both thrilling in the art and ideas it houses and disconcerting in its aura of working class ruins.  In any case, check it out Inhotim if you can -- the art is amazing, the flora is amazing, the whole place is amazing, palaces and palatial grounds, open to the public six days a week, for R$20 (purchased online in advance), free on Tuesdays.  Stay in Brumadinho or surroundings and give yourself two days at least if you want to see everything. 

Images coming soon, when my internet connection is a little less finicky....

And in the meantime, check on the NYT's recent piece on the place and its founder:

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/10/world/americas/bernardo-pazs-inhotim-is-vast-garden-of-art.html

Humanidade 2012 -- I

Last Wednesday evening, I visited the monumental Humanidades 2012 multi-media exhibit constructed on the Copacabana Fort as part of the parallel events and cultural programming of the Rio+20 conference.  Under the direction of the artist, theater director and set designer, Bia Lessa, the exhibit includes a number of interconnected, temporary gallery spaces dedicated to concepts, questions, and areas of debate and reflection under the fluid and expansive signs of development and sustainability.  It opened to the public on June 11 and is expected to remain through the 22nd.  There are a total of 16 gallery spaces in the roughly 6 story temporary structure build from scaffolding and a recycled composite material.  On this visit I had time to see just the first four galleries:

"Reception / Free Territory"
Including a temporary garden with species of plants representing Brazilian biomes, text from Padre Antonio Vieira's "Saint Anthony's Sermon to the Fishes", and information on Brazil's Atlantic and Amazon forests.

"The World We Live In"
Curated by the Museu do Futuro, this room intends to represent the advent of the Anthropocene age, illustrating the advent, development, and scale of human activity on the planet.

"The World Divided"
Taking a quote from Brazilian economist Celso Furtado as its starting point, this room intends to draw the connection between environmental degradation and socio-economic inequality, or between redistributive justice and environmental sustainability.

(Can't get this one to post vertically)  Translation:  If we've changed everything about us, there's one thing we forgot to change: our selfish attitude towards life.  And that's what was most important!  -- Mario de Andrade

Translation: The challenge we face at the turn of the 21st century is nothing less than the reinvention of civilization, dislodging its axis from the logic of means for short-term accumulation toward the logic of ends: general well-being,  the exercise of freedom, and cooperation among peoples. -- Celso Furtado

"Chapel / Space for Humankind"
Described as the center of the installation, a space dedicated to the human potential for the generation and transmission of knowledge and imagination through our capacity for language. A provisional library and reading room filled with books selected by 120 Brazilian public figures -- writers, artists, scientists --  as fundamental to their affective and intellectual development and as contributions to a universal notion of humanity.

Um reduto de poesia no Rio, II

Outra valiosa tentativa de definir a prática poética, esta vez do Raúl Antelo, como posfácio ao livro de poesia de Manoel Ricardo de Lima, em Quando todos os acidentes acontecem (2009):

“... aquilo que a poesia sabe é justamente o saber de uma ausência.  Diante dessa lacuna, desse hiato, pode-se avançar ou recuar, mas seja qual for o sentido que se empreenda, ele sempre deriva de uma decisão tomada, justamente, no ponto extremamente dramático em que mais de uma alternativa era possível.”

Siron Franco, "Brasil Cerrado," MAM-Rio

The featured Brazilian artist for Rio+20, invited by the Brazilian Environment Minister and given 600 square meters of exhibition space at the Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro (located next to the Parque Flamengo, where most of the parallel People's Summit is being held) is Siron Franco, who has put together a multi-media installation called "Brasil Cerrado."  I had not heard of him before, but he apparently exhibited during the 1992 Earth Summit as well, when the MAM mounted an enormous exhibit by the artist and environmentalist, Frans Krajcberg, featuring monumental sculptures made of charred trees and which clearly denounced the burning and clearing of Brazil's iconic rainforests.  "Brasil Cerrado" similarly intends to rally the public against environmental destruction in Brazil, this time focusing on another, lesser known biome or eco-region, the vast, intensely bio-diverse, tropical savanna that stretches across a fifth of the country's territory.  Given its less iconic, scrubbier vegetation -- as compared with the Amazon -- the cerrado landscape and biological diversity has not gained much popular attention, nor much protection from development.  Only 1.5% of the cerrado has been given protection through federally established reserves. 

Franco's exhibit attempts to immerse the public into the cerrado through a series of multi-media, multi-sensorial, ambient installations, featuring passages through video projections of water and fire, photo-projections of flora and fauna, intensely floral fragrances that then turn to the smell of smoke, digital maps documenting burnings under the sounds of lowing cattle, and a series of silhouettes of displaced animals.  The use of mirrors throughout helps to expand the space and intensify the immersive effect of the installations and also places the spectator into the frame of reference, placing him or her within the representation of the region, evoking feelings of vulnerability and responsibility.

Xingu -- O Filme

Not really directly part of the Rio+20 programming, but an important and timely film, given the continued infrastructure and agribusiness push into the Central West and Amazon and the continued genocidal results for the regions' Indigenous communities and cultures.  The film itself is well done, though the tone is a bit overly epic and edges toward the melodramatic.  For the amount of history it tries to cover, I would have preferred to see a documentary, but I hope it's a success with the public, and it's certainly something I would consider screening for students and faculty at Smith as soon as the DVD is out....

http://www.xinguofilme.com.br/

Um reduto de poesia no Rio

Feliz de estar estes dias no apartamento do Jorge, que e' realmente um depósito de livros, principalmente de poesia portuguesa e brasileira.  Achei nas primeiras explorações uma bela síntese do que se acha aqui:

“... a expressão da realidade poética, a partir de uma interpretação pessoal do real, questiona os significados socialmente fixados em significantes produtores de outros sentidos . . . .” (JFS, 2008)