Cycle: Poetic or Political Curated by João Baeta
(... that I also do not get sick of Brazil!)
...que eu também não adoeça de Brasil!
Mupi Gallery
02.07 — 19h00 Until 29.07
Mãe Paulo
We got sick. Suddenly such obviousness was assimilated by me on April 27, 2019, when the São Paulo Fashion Week fashion show proceeded in its entirety soon after the sudden death of a model on the catwalk in front of the entire audience. The death of the model did not move enough for the desire to consume the new trends to be put aside at least in that context. I recognized once and for all the rottenest capitalist essence in the emphasis given to the excessive hedonism and individualism generated by consumption. I abruptly assimilated clear information and saw more clearly a world that was completely sick. On that fateful day, I literally vomited. There is an article called "Sick of Brazil" written by journalist Eliane Brum, where she evaluates the rise of the current president of Brazil and his entire neo-liberal project associated with a neo-Nazi program as responsible for the emergence of a specific type of illness in some people, which is related to the precariousness of work in recent years and the lack of hope for a more just or less violent future and, certainly, it is to this article that Mãe Paulo alludes in his exhibition. The artist chose two dark moments from his country's recent history and smashed them through the collection of posts, memes and random comments found on social networks about the two selected periods: the "Day of Fire" - an action orchestrated by rural producers in northern Brazil to burn several points of the largest rainforest in the world - and the day when Roberto Alvim, former Secretary of Culture of Brazil, announced a new arts incentive program with plagiarized text by Joseph Goebbels (Minister of Propaganda of Nazi Germany) and, as background music, an opera by Richard Wagner German composer exalted by Hitler. Mãe Paulo made a kind of collage from shards, gathering fragments of all the content he compiled, ordering sentences, ideas and images of diverse authors that dissipated on Facebook and Twitter at a frenetic pace from April 2019 to January 2020. Also, through the appropriation of a perceptible frame (despite the pixels) from the film Marina Abramović in Brazil: The Space In Between, Paulo highlights a phrase said by the Serbian artist in counterpoint with a statement present in the middle of one of the immense texts where we read: "it is not because we do not live a history that we stop feeling it. It is this capacity that humanizes us". We clearly perceive that anthropological research and contemporary culture with an engaged nature are creative processes skillfully
recurring in their way of conceiving works that mix texts and images, where politics and poetics are unthinkable independently. At the beginning of this writing, I expose the unease I experienced and the consequent active expulsion of all gastric content through my mouth to reinforce how much a realization of a fact made me need to expel something excessively indigestible. In order not to get sick from Brazil, Mãe Paulo vociferously spits, vomits everything he consumes daily in his arduous task of reading and seeing an immense toxic waste deposited on the Internet. "... that I also do not get sick of Brazil!” brings a dense and totally uncomfortable content, but forces us to understand something that Judith Butler recently announced about how we should become "social beings", aware of our "social and ecological interdependence" in a global way. Tales Frey
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Mãe Paulo Lives and works between Portugal and Brazil. He is an artist and independent curator, founding member of Cia. Excessos and eRevista Performatus, and organizer and director of Mostra Performatus. Currently, he is a Master's student with a Pathway in Sculpture the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Porto in Portugal. Also, in that same faculty, he did a specialization in Contemporary Artistic Practices and, in the Faculty of Arts of that same university, he graduated in Art History. He has integrated national and international collective exhibitions, and some of his works are permanently part of the collection of some museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil), the Museum of Contemporary Art of Niterói (Niterói, RJ, Brazil) and the Memorial Foundation of Latin America (São Paulo, SP, Brazil). He participated in the following artist residencies: Despina Residency Program (Rio de Janeiro, RJ, Brazil, 2019); Fjúk Arts Centre (Húsavík, Iceland, 2015-16); and Casa do Sol - Hilda Hilst Institute (Campinas, SP, Brazil, 2014).