There is a lot of uncertainty regarding our global future, with financial, social and political issues worrying most of us. Yet there are unconventional ways to learn about the future and one of them is stepping back into the past and trying to read between its lines, as as an exhibition entitled "The Hand of the Brazilian People" currently on at Museu de Arte de São Paulo (MASP) is currently doing.
When architect Lina Bo Bardi designed the MASP she focused on simplicity and on an architecture that could immediately transmit a sense of community and collectivity to visitors.
While working on the building, Bo Bardi was inspired by the simple and basic crafts of ordinary people, and destroyed the perception of a museum as a bastion of intellectual snobbery by turning to Arte Povera (Poor Art), stripping down the walls and reducing the building to a bare concrete structure, while redesigning concrete plinths on which she anchored the works of art in the museum collection.
In 1969 Bo Bardi worked with the director of the museum Pietro Maria Bardi, filmmaker Glauber Rocha, and theater director Martim Gonçalves, on an exhibition that paid homage to local crafts.
Entitled "The Hand of the Brazilian People" the event looked at creativity in local crafts, presenting a vast panorama of objects, a bazaar-like environment that included figureheads, votive figures, textiles, garments, furniture, tools, utensils, machinery, musical instruments, ornaments, toys, religious objects, paintings, and sculptures.
The exhibition moved from a quote by architect Bruno Zevi, stating "The art of the poor frightens the generals", published in a 1965 article commenting on the closure of a Rome exhibition about the same topic that was shut down upon orders of the Brazilian military government. These exhibits scared the authorities because they tried to reconstruct and reconfigure the histories of art and culture in Brazil ignoring the mores, tastes, and protocols of the dominant classes.
The MASP was famous for its collection of European masterpieces, but giving relevance to local art meant to shake away its past of colonization, while showing the difficult conditions of life in which these crafts were produced. A painting by Brazilian modernist Candido Portinari and a hoe were therefore both considered proper works reuniting and embodying three concepts - art, artifact, and craft.
The current "Hand of the Brazilian People 1969/2016" (until 29th January 2017) exhibition aims at restaging an iconically radical exhibition, re-establishing specific links between objects and exploring them in depth, considering them from new political and social perspectives with emphasis on the "popular art" VS "popular culture" dichotomy.
Since it was not possible to perfectly recreate the exhibition, the new one features similar works and object typologies all made before 1970, but the architecture follows that of 1969 (with some adaptions).
The curators tried to spark a new dialogue with artists from different generations including Candido Portinari, Jonathas de Andrade, Lygia Pape, and Thiago Honório. Pape's intervention is particularly interesting and revolves around a short documentary film entitled "The Hand of the People".
Made in 1974, the film focuses on the disappearance of popular artisanal traditions. Pape, a strong creative mind in Brazilian art history, known for her mesmerising rigour, was affiliated to the concrete and neoconcrete groups in the 1950s, and mainly worked with the constructive and geometric semantics.
As the years passed, she started working with filmmakers shooting films about social issues such as the liminality caused by poverty, illiteracy and exploitation, eventually producing her own experimental documentaries that she considered as anti-films.
In her 1980 masters thesis entitled "Catiti-Catiti: na terra dos brasis", Pape stated that misery could be "a common denominator that triggers the creative process" but also identified a constructive impulse in the production of the Brazilian people, adding "we recognize a constructive tropism in Brazilian art that easily refers to indigenous and African origins in the recycled objects of the Northeast, in the permanence of geometric elements of carnival, in the patchwork quilts of Minas Gerais, in popular ceramics, in the spontaneous seaside architecture."
This new edition of "The Hand of Brazilian People" is therefore a brave attempt at establishing new connections with the past to find fresh inspirations for the future based on traditional crafts and materials.
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