LETTER FROM SAO PAULO
A steel caterpillar track, door debris and charred parts that look as if they’ve been ripped from a burning vehicle are among the intriguing, even disquieting, items resting on a metal structure that looks like a barbecue grill. The installation, by artist Frederico Filippi, sits majestically near the entrance to Panorama, the traditional and prestigious biennial of Sao Paulo’s Museum of Modern Art. And this is no coincidence.
In fact, the institution has chosen to call the 38th edition of its festival “A Thousand Degrees,” which features over 130 works by contemporary artists. “In Brazil, the expression ‘a thousand degrees’ can mean, depending on the context, something very positive or, conversely, an extreme and tense situation. It’s extremely ambiguous,” explained Germano Dushá, Thiago de Paula Souza and Ariana Nuala, the exhibition’s three curators.
For the organizers, this extreme heat evokes not only the “high intensity” inherent in artistic creation, but also global warming and the fires ravaging Brazil’s environment. The pieces brought in by Filippi come from tractors used by illegal gold miners in the Itaituba region of the Amazon, which were set alight by the police. Placed on a grill, they represent “our self-destruction, our own cannibalization as a civilization,” explained the 40-year-old artist.
“In my work, art and ecology meet,” he continued. Filippi is far from alone: at Panorama, desert landscapes by painter Lucas Arruda intersect with photographic portraits by Labo and Rafaela Kennedy, showing men with the look of disturbing ninjas posing with their faces surrounded by tropical leaves.
Foremost a fight
Joseca Mokahesi Yanomami, an artist from the Yanomami people born in 1971, uses colored pencils to depict scenes from his Amazon village, where ordinary inhabitants live side by side with xapiri, forest spirits that take the form of evil harpies, nocturnal monkeys or jabuti turtles. But far from any aesthetic exoticism, Mokahesi’s art is first and foremost a fight. “I don’t draw to be looked at, but to be understood. So that the white man knows the forest better and protects it, so that he respects our people and our indigenous culture,” stated the artist.
As diverse as it is, the Panorama biennial is in reality only the tip of a much deeper movement affecting the Brazilian art world. More and more local artists are taking inspiration from the destruction of the environment, between concern, fascination, the will to act and the desire to sound the alarm.
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