A symbolic invention of Brazil: Africa and Baroque

Colonial Brazil was a society marked by miscegenation and traumatized by africans slavery at the indigenous land violently conquered. Such were the extremes of Brazilian violence, deemed as “the history of the defeated” (Walter Benjamin). From 1701 to 1810, enslaved Africans brought to Brazil numbered 1,891,400 – more than the current population of the city of Campinas (SP) (Schmidl).

Slavers tore people away from their society, deprived them of their freedom and shipped them to Brazil as commodities. In Africa, they were traded for goods from Brazil such as tobacco, flour and white rum, or cachaça. Here in Brazil, slaves were sold on directly or auctioned. Like horses, their price was set upon inspection of their teeth, health, strength, willingness to work, and tame submission.

South Atlantic economies complemented each other: sugar grown in Brazil for slaves traded in Angola. In this symbolic war, blacks were stripped of their names, family nuclei, and rights to their own faith and culture. They had to be de-socialized so they could be dominated. “The Brazilian market has a long history based on looting and trading, while the Brazilian nation has a short history founded on violence and consent.” (L. F. Alencastro).

Legally treated as res (Roman law’s “thing”) and source of unpaid labor, slaves were counted among owners’ chattels and properties, together with their animals, sugar mills and land. Some writers wondered whether an African slave had a “good soul” (Montesquieu). For some children of slaves and freedmen, art was a process of sublimation, social integration, symbolic compensation, negotiated survival, resistance, and emancipation.

Paulo Herkenhoff

Expression and rationality

The exhibition starts by posing a polarization that informed Brazilian art and artistic creation throughout the 20th century: the dichotomy involving expression and rationality. Maria Martins (1894-1973) was a member of a group of surrealist artists who moved to New York as World War II refugees. They all shared a same interest in psychoanalysis and viewed the unconscious as a driving force of art creation. Her The Impossible (1945) shows two anthropomorphic figures, male and female, facing each other. Their mutual attraction-repulsion generates intractable tension. The sculpture has been interpreted as depicting the impossible wholly loving relationship.

The other side of the first level features works by successive generations of Brazilian constructive artists. Concrete art was new in Brazil in the early 1950s, along with bossa nova music, modern architecture and the first Bienal de Arte de São Paulo in 1951. The movement’s members believed art would have to reject representation – figurativism, naturalism – and turn to language itself. For starters, painters had to leave aside the illusion of perspective and take up the flatness of the picture plan. The utopian horizon for Concrete art proposals in Brazil had it that rationally-organized forms would correspond to society becoming more modern, functional, transparent and egalitarian.

Notwithstanding their being heirs to this discussion, subsequent generations introduced other issues in the aesthetics field. Echoes of Maria Martins’ subjectivity may be found in the work of Leonilson (1957-1993), whereas chromatic and formal investigation typical of Brazilian Concrete artists may be seen in Sergio Sister (1948- ). However, artists who began their work in the 1980s reveal other emerging features of contemporaneity: the emancipation of the spectator, the use of materials from various sources, and the emergence of pop culture.

Thaís Rivitti

From numismatics to cybernetics

Assuming origin and destiny to be polarities pertinent to beings and taking their creations as part of this living whole, we approach the notion of art as an ethical regime of image identification which articulates the relation between the ways of being and manners of existing of the individuals and communities that produce them.

Given this proposition, one may wonder what determines the character of these productions – nature, origin, purpose?

In terms of a distinction between eye and gaze, posed by the phenomenologist Merleau-Ponty (1918-1961), from the proposition of innovative observation logics emerges the capacity of new world’s apprehension.

In view of the possibilities of discursive articulation, the concept of konstellation engendered by the critic Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) becomes a guiding principle to establish a mediation between artwork and spectator. In this way, the constitution of “significant clusters” meant to pose heterodox interpretations for works imbued with historicizing discourses enables us to look for new meanings and enunciate them.

When asking ourselves about the dialogues that may be generated from collections and their canons, we delve into the potentiality of art holding, the reasons for assembling and the ramifications of its continuity. We do this in view of the particularities of our time and space – early 21st century Brazil – and the changes through which contemporaneity is unceasingly confronting us with memory, process of ongoing metamorphosis, as the structuring axis of culture.

Leno Veras

The Itaú Cultural Library is featured in the exhibition Modos de Ver o Brasil: Itaú Cultural 30 Anos and presents publications connected with the subjects of the exhibition, with the graphic design materials and products produced by the institute, and with the Cantinho da Leitura, a space dedicated to children.

Specialized in visual arts, music, theater, dance, film- and video-making, design, architecture, literary criticism and cultural policy, the library at the institute's head office is visited by artists, researchers, and art students for pre-scheduled consultations. Learn more at the website and check our publications on Issuu.

The graphic design materials and products displayed in the library make part of the collection of Itaú Cultural's Centro de Memória, Documentação e Referência, the department in charge of treating and keeping the institute's historical documentation. To schedule a research consultation at the center, please send an e-mail to cmdr@itaucultural.org.br.

The Cantinho da Leitura is a space in our head office dedicated to children's literature. It is open from 11:30 am to 4:30 pm on Saturdays and Sundays and is located next to the Feirinha de Troca, where kids can exchange their books, comic books, and DVDs for others. Both initiatives are part of the Fim de Semana em Família, a set of events for parents and children.

Rumos Cinema e Vídeo: uma retrospectiva

A selection of short films from two editions of Rumos Cinema e Vídeo – public notices 2009-2011 and 2012-2014 – in two blocks: Web Documentaries and Experimental Movies and Videos.

A Verdadeira História da Bailarina de Vermelho, de Alessandra Colasanti e Samir Abujamra 2010, 17 min

Polivolume: Conexão Livre, de Claudia Afonso, Gabriel Gutierrez e Pedro Vieira 2010, 9 min

O Som do Tempo, de Petrus Cariry 2010, 9 min

Trans*lúcidx, de Miro Spinelli 2013, 10 min

O Ponto Cego, de Chico Bahia 2013, 10 min

Boca de Rua – Vozes de uma Gente Invisível, de Marcelo Andrighetti 2013, 10 min

Sinoâncias, de André N. P. Azevedo e Carol Argamim Gouvêa 2013, 9 min

São Paulo

On this floor visitors are prompted to take a closer look at São Paulo’s history, its architecture and population, and the artists doing creative work locally. These simultaneous approaches pose the plural dimensions of a city that eschews apprehension.

In his Tristes Tropiques, the French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908-2009) noted: “What astonished me in Sao Paulo in 1935 was not newness, but the rapidity with which time’s ravages had set in … Certain European cities are dying off slowly and peacefully; the cities of the New World have a perpetual high temperature, a chronic illness which prevents them, for all their everlasting youthfulness, from ever being entirely well.”

This set of works, especially photographs and paintings, points out this toppling temporality and shows places and scenes that are familiar but quite unlike the way we see them today: they reveal increasingly rare instants of being enamored of a city in which conflict gives way to a generous and affective view.

Hence the journey through the exhibition space recalling the flourishing economy of the coffee boom period, the delightful turn of the century city center, the 1922 Week of Modern Art, the breakthrough of Brazilian Concrete art and the vigor of modern architecture. In the more contemporary works, stark economic inequality and social invisibility mark everyday life. Such are the contradictions of a city that has always combined dynamism and destruction.

Thaís Rivitti