Jonathas de Andrade and Chiara Banfi exhibit at Galeria Vermelho.
“Museu do Homem do Nordeste”
(São Paulo, Brazil)
“Museu do Homem do Nordeste”, a solo show by Jonathas de Andrade at Galeria Vermelho, from 01 October to 09 November 2013.
The third solo show by Jonathas de Andrade, at Vermelho, Museu do Homem do Nordeste features three of his most recent projects: the installations Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste [Posters for the Museu do Homem do Nordeste] (2013), 40 Nego Bom é 1 real [40 nego bom for 1 real] (2013), and O Levante [The Uprising] (2012–2013). The works are articulated as a collection in parallel to the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, located in the city of Recife [PE]. Created in 1979 by Gilberto Freyre, the anthropological museum has a collection of more than 15.000 pieces representative of the region’s ethnic, historical and social makeup. In this series of works, Jonathas de Andrade experiments with new bases and methodologies for the original museum, and presents at Galeria Vermelho the first version of this paramuseum.
To create the installation Cartazes para o Museu do Homem do Nordeste, Andrade published ads in the newspapers of Recife in search of workers interested in posing for the poster for the Museu do Homem do Nordeste. The posters of the installation vary according to each encounter, in a construction of identity – of man, of the museum’s image – based on an ambivalent, anthropophagic and eroticizing relation.
An installation that is currently participating in the 12th Biennale of Lyon, France, and which recently garnered Andrade the Prix de la Francophonie [Lyon, France], 40 Nego Bom é 1 real is based on the hawker’s cry used to sell this banana sweet in the markets and streets of the Brazilian Northeast. In this project, Andrade constructed a fictitious factory where 40 characters work in the making of the sweet based on a recipe. In a second phase, the installation uses printed texts to reveal a settling of accounts in which the relations of work are made explicit, taking into consideration the subtleties of the personal relations that ultimately come into play. In the project, Andrade takes a fresh look at the theory-myth of a harmony couched in camaraderie, and approaches the echoes of a post-colonialism and post-slavery that constituted a culture of naturalness with the relations of power and dependence, of naturalness in the face of servility, of exploitation attenuated by apparent politeness, and by veiled racism incorporated as a social dynamics.
The third installation that is part of the Museu do Homem do Nordeste, O Levante, is an outgrowth of the 1st Corrida de Carroças no Centro do Recife [Street-Cart Race in Downtown Recife] organized by Jonathas on the streets of Recife, in 2012. As the circulation of rural animals is illegal on the streets of Recife, all the horse-pulled carts in the city become invisible to the law. Only by treating the race as a scene in a film, that is, as fiction, could the event obtain the official authorizations necessary for it to take place in the public space.
For Andrade, the presence of the horses and their owners – normally people who are at the fringe of the city’s (and the country’s] developmentalist logic – generates a contrast in the urban space that resounds as an echo of ruralness, revealing the origins of this region. The video and the photos, records of the action in the streets of Recife, represent documents concerning the laws and their non-application, while silently revealing that the laws were made for the few. Andrade’s O Levante accentuates the contrast between the idea of development sought for by the city and the clandestineness that pervades all the public and private sectors of Brazilian society, allowing it to operate.
Museu do Homem do Nordeste is a project underway by Jonathas de Andrade which presents a new version of the “Museu” each time it is set up, cumulatively incorporating new projects and research developed by the artist.
“Museu do Homem do Nordeste” by Jonathas de Andrade
From 01 October to 09 November 2013
Opening hours:
Tuesday to Friday – 10am to 7pm
Saturday – 11am to 5pm
Rua Minas Gerais,350 – São Paulo – Brazil
CEP: 01244-010
55 11 3138.1520
“Gravações Perdidas”
(São Paulo, Brazil)
“Gravações Perdidas” [“Lost Recordings”] continues the research developed by Chiara Banfi about musical instruments and sounds. Banfi’s relationship with the sound that permeates her work in the form of collages, drawings, performances and paintings,reveals the artist’s intimacy with the living substance of things, the fact that, for her, is always associated with music.
In the solo “Gravações Perdidas”[“Lost Recordings”], Banfi shows seven new works of her newest series entitled “Silêncio” [“Silence”]. In it, Banfi applied analog magnetic tapes used in recording old vinyl on aluminum plates of 160 x 126 cm each.The observer can view horizontal fields left by the transfer of sound on magnetic tapes, creating a sound made written groove and gaps that correspond to pauses between songs.
The polyptych “Edições em uma gravação perdida”[“Editions in a lost recording”] (2013) can be considered an offshoot of the series “Silêncio” [“Silence”], as it employs the same technique above, including, however, a greater variety of shapes and colors. In this universe
connected to the music, “O magnífico mundo novo da música” [“The magnificent new world of music”] series “Disco Vazio”[“Empty Disk”] (2013), materializes the completion of a process endangered days today. A set of 36 vinyl records, or LPs, are presented alongside the envelopes that protect them in wooden frames, suggests completion of a ritual anachronistic on this days of MP3, which involved a different relationship between the body (hearing) and sound.
“GRAVAÇÕES PERDIDAS” [ “Lost Recordings’]
by CHIARA BANFI
From 01 October – 09 November, 2013
Visiting hours:
– tue. to fri. – 10am to 7pm
– sat. – 11am to 5pm
RUA MINAS GERAIS . 350 . CEP: 01244-010 . SÃO PAULO . SP . BRAZIL
55 11 3138.1520