Jaime Lauriano

“Assentamento”, by Bernardo Mosqueira

(to my love)

The exhibition “Assentamento” (Settlement), Jaime Lauriano’s second solo show at Galeria Leme, presents 8 works that continue his research on the vivid inheritances of colonization in Brazil, around an axis formed between violence and resistance. In recent months, just as the national political crisis has strengthened, a parliamentary group that defends the interests of large farmers against workers’ rights, this artist has returned much of his interest and production to agrarian issues in the country.

The title of the exhibition refers to the settlements of landless workers of INCRA (National Institute of Colonization and Agrarian Reform, fundamental federal instrument for the struggle for land in Brazil), while alluding to a sacred gesture of the religions of African matrix.

In Candomblé , one of the meanings of “settling” (“assentar”) is “planting the axé “, that is, making the ground of the “terreiro” a sacred, living territory, a direct extension of all members of the community, where axé comes in the form of force and to where axé goes in the form of sacrifice. At a certain point in the settlement process, the members of the “terreiro” collaborate in order to “plant” some of their vital energies on the ground, thus making them all responsible for the site. “Assentamento” (settlement) is, more commonly, the consecration of an object constructed and dealt with from secret and ancestral knowledge to materially represent an “orixá”. From the religious point of view, making a “assentamento” is to strengthen the connection between an individual or group and the orixá from a spatial delimitation, is to create a sacred place to worship and care for the deity in the most appropriate way.

It is interesting to note that the settlement of landless workers is also a process that allows people to become responsible for a territory in order to become potent and productive, engaging their work and their most primordial energies in the direction of a more balanced life. These two types of “settlements” have historically been developed as forms of resistance of unprivileged people. This two-folded approach proposed by Lauriano inspires us to think of the power of creating a stronger network of solidarity between the struggle for land and the anti-racist battle.

Jaime Lauriano’s work investigates colonization in Brazil not only by turning to historical data and events of the past, but by looking at the persistence in the present of the echoes of the violence of colonization and of popular resistance. For this, the artist creates documents that we can use to rearrange our thoughts and memories and also counter- cartographies that we can use to locate ourselves and others in the contemporary exploitation landscape.

In the work “Invasão” (Invasion) (2017), Jaime creates a map that exposes the relation in Brazil between the use of state force and the procedure of territorial occupation. To this end, Lauriano juxtaposes references to different situations such as the process of Portuguese enslaved colonization, the deforestation of the trans-Amazonian, the construction of huge hydroelectric plants on indigenous lands, the reintegration of previously idle land that was occupied by the homeless population, the eviction of alternative urban communities from abandoned real estate, the forced removal of low-income population to exclusive infrastructure works for the Olympic Games, etc. The work is a drawing made with white traces on a red fabric, which can allude to the bloodiness of these processes and to the flag of the landless movements.

In “Combate #1” (Fight #1) (2017), Lauriano organizes on the wall instruments used in work in the field referring to the cartographic design of the Capitanias Hereditárias. This system of division and territorial administration was in force during the first phase of colonization in Brazil, where the patrons, responsible for the 14 giant fractions of land, had an intimate and direct relationship with the Portuguese Crown. The mixture between feudal and proto-capitalist principles, structural to that system, represents the root of the way in which large landowners today deal with the Brazilian territory, their private interests, and public power.

The link between the naturalizing survival of images of slavery and the maintenance of a racist culture is the object of interest of the installation “O trabalho de Debret” (The work of Debret) (2017). In this work, Jaime gathered commonly used objects (t-shirts, mugs, decorative objects, etc.) recently bought in tents, shops and virtual auctions in several cities with plates textually exposing real reports of people who were subjected to different types of racist attacks. Brazil is a country that has lived for more than three centuries of violent enslavement of black men by white men until less than 130 years ago. This work, even if it is an installation, respects the same kind of fragmented structure and the same vibrant organizational procedure of Jaime’s maps. This work also highlights the importance of raising this issue and creating more positive images, narratives and experiences for black people in Brazil.

In the work “Armas de fogo o meu corpo não alcançarão” (Firearms my body will not reach) (2017), Lauriano uses a package to transport grains from Africa to Brazil as a support for the encounter between the image of a pillory and part of the prayer of St. George. It is interesting to note that while the pillory, a major symbol of the brutality of slavery, was made from screen printing (a graphic process whose technology carries within it the will for repetition and productivity), the prayer was drawn manually with white and black pemba, a kind of sacred chalk used in many Candomblé rituals.

When Jaime alludes to elements of Afro-Brazilian religiosity, he recognizes that for many centuries this was the main space of resistance of black culture in Brazil, a true civilizing nucleus, the living school-museum of Africanness, the greatest responsible for the survival of a culture that understands the body as the abode of power and not of sin, which understands joy as the greatest of virtues and not universal love, which values more the aggregation of people than the concentration of income.

The European white modernity (whose surviving privileges are guaranteed by Brazilian laws) had its great interest invested on time and the sense: progress, speed, productivity, effectiveness, and the end of the pause are its issues. However, non-hegemonic cultures of African origin are interested in space and power. Axé itself, the vital power, the fundamental element of Afro-Brazilian life, is actually the power of realization, of creation, in space – which is very explicable for a diasporic culture that has gone through processes of deterritorialization and was cast on a land that could not be theirs.

The exhibition “Assentamento” gains even more strength when there is an attempt to flexibilize the definition of slave labor in the country; in which INCRA has been dismantled in exchange for support from the ruralists in Congress; in which native and quilombola people have the rights over their questioned lands; in which the “grilagem” in the Amazon is regularized by a Provisional Measure increasing the deforestation and the concentration of land; in which by the new labor legislation a landowner can return to the work of peasants only with housing, food and more work in inhumane conditions. Articulating elements of the colonial past and this alarming present, Lauriano points to a tragic character in our history and, thus, inspires insurrection and revolt for a new liberation from slavery. But, this time, with prominence of Afro-Brazilian workers, besides princesses , and with the strength of the orixás.

“In this land, whatever is planted will grow”, by Germano Dushá

Dated May 1, 1500, the letter by the secretary of Álvares Cabral’s fleet, Pero Vaz de Caminha, addressed to the king of Portugal, Dom Manuel, described a land where there was no gold or silver, or anything made of metal or iron. Yet he observed that if one wanted to take advantage of this land, it would yield everything. And moreover: that the greatest fruit that could be achieved here was to save the inhabitants.
Although they had previously plundered with abandon, here they seemed to have found a divine (and always mercantilist) calling, which guided their intense efforts of exploration, plantation and catechizing. Armed, and with their flag held high, they went into the land, murdering, enslaving and laying claim. They paved the way for a host of things that came from abroad: everything from agricultural products to the Portuguese court’s control systems and the rites of Catholicism. And what was already here, they exploited to exhaustion.
The phrase that provides the title for this exhibition by Jaime Lauriano – Nesta terra, em se plantando, tudo dá [In This Land, Whatever Is Planted Will Grow] – despite being attributed to Caminha’s letter, is not found in its lines. But it is nonetheless popularly believed to be there, due to a widespread error of citation. Perhaps precisely for this reason it has become an icon of Brazil’s founding myth.
Through operations that involve possible relations between the colonial period and the social problems that beset Brazil today, the artist deals with open wounds that unrelentingly mark the day-to-day life of a country that maintains itself on atrocious inequalities. We can therefore, fortunately, think critically in regard to what has been done in this country and, especially, how its histories have been told. What was planted, and what grew.

“Jaime Lauriano –  A conceptual transition”, by Leonardo Araújo

The supposed office built by the artist, called by him a cabinet, transforms what is most important to him in a artwork production, to a work of intimate relations of his research objects, that are completely supported by his books, videos and mainly, by his work colleagues. Friends that are often encouraged by Lauriano to discuss and reflect new ideas that might change the slope of his artwork completely, or that might alter the course of the contemporary artistic production, as it happens in the debates of glances, listening and other histories.
In a transition moment, Jaime Lauriano leaves the traditions about the art languages aside, twists the conceptual and aesthetical values of his work itself, claiming the completeness of an exhibition as an specific space to the critical and reflexive production of the memory, enhancing the importance of rethinking the history, even if it is your own.
Anyhow, this solo exhibition wasn’t thought mandatorily for harboring works of art of its artist, it is a artwork by itself, it is the transformation and the maturation of a young artist, who mixes certainties with intellectual conflicts, modifying the researches during the production time of his art objects.

“Impedimento”, by Daniela Castro

In his exhibition for the Centro Cultural São Paulo, Jaime Lauriano summons us to re-locate historical subjects who predicated two great objects of Brazil’s memory: the military regime and the 1970’s World Cup. ‘Impedimento’ is a project that holds the article as its Sisyphus stone. Jaime’s incursion as an artist-historian through national files in São Paulo and in Rio de Janeiro wasn’t observing ‘A Brazil’, but ‘The Brazil’ instead. The undetermined article would achieve a Brazil of many possibilities: a Brazil that is indeed able to emancipate; the one that appreciates the oral tradition from the quilombolas and the Indians; the one that wouldn’t be satisfied with being an economic model receptor or a late capitalism laboratory; who is to say, an anthropophagic Brazil, and even – why not? – a revolutionary Brazil. The one that could hold a real PAC – Growth Acceleration Program, understood as a governance project that needs to be improved (of course, if that was true, the letter C, in PAC, would correspond to “Consciousness”.

However, The Brazil of Jaime’s researches, is the same one that had its independence declared by a Portuguese king; the one in which its own enslaver class abolished the slavery; it’s the Brazil of the amnesty law written by the military junta for “both sides”. The Brazil that understands that to stop being oppressed, one has to become the oppressor. Brazil’s problems are elite problems: thought by the elite and made for the elite. Love it or leave it. It’s the Brazil founded by PAC – Pedro Alvares Cabral – the gaunt and semiliterate hero, of a history eagerly kept by elementary teachers; the Brazil that as sketched and built by the dictatorship and its marketing campaign, it is the one that Goes Forward, Save the (soccer) Team!, built as an overly patriotic subject, filled with aspiration, angst and complexes.

‘Impedimento’ is about the artist-historian operating in the transversalities of the history production as an institution and from the subject’s institution in the history. The parallelism in which Jaime’s research proposes itself, achieves a Brazil draft where the subject doesn’t predicate an object but predicates itself, in an everlasting return to the reactionary elite, to the monoculture economy, to the fear of someday seeing themselves walking in the Indians shoes instead of Hans’.

Mistaken is the one who understands that soccer has predominance in the parallelism with the military dictatorship traced in Jaime Lauriano’s research. Soccer is inserted in ‘Impedimento’ as an instrument to create a myth of the Brazilian Family. And, to an overly-patriotic-subject-government, the family is the constitutive institution to which “It” must belong. In the words of the then president, Médici about Brazilian victory in the 1970’s World Cup:

By the time the National Soccer Team definitely conquers the World Cup, after a memorable campaign, in which they tackled and won the most honourable adversaries, I want everyone to see in the President of the Republic, a Brazilian, just like any other […] “Médici: I can relate to the joy and emotion on the streets”. O Globo (Newspaper) July 22nd, 1970 (1)

This is how the myth works: it exhausts the meaning of the sign, or anything it intends to mythicize (soccer); it deviates the literal meaning of the sign. At the same time, it fulfills the sign with mythicizing content (soccer as a moment of union and equality among all Brazilians), building up a new significance, the myth one (the Brazilian Family). The myth is seducing in its own etymologic foundation: seducere = to draw aside. The myth, therefore, is at the same time a monolithic and dynamic element. That is, it operates in a constant deflection movement, so the myth can replace the original sign. And, for this to happen, substantial information is used in order to prevent this deflection movement to stop.

In the memory of the soldiers, the unknown General Médici was chosen because of his good physique and his love for soccer. Veja, a Brazilian magazine, wrote

…In front of TV cameras, the newcomer Emílio Garrastazu Médici has shown some qualities. His voice is very impressive: it’s strong, it’s solemn, great for leading roles. His appearance is serious, quiet and erect, he has the right size and physique for that kind of role (the beauty, by the way, wouldn’t be indispensable: in similar performances, the world has already known some bizarre characters) (Veja, 15/10/1969) (2)

It falls back to this image the desire of “making everybody see in the President of the Republic, a Brazilian, just like every Brazilian”, consolidating his figure as the Father of the Nation, who summons all his similars before him. For a while, a tabula rasa is enforced into the ethnic diversity and into the brutal social inequality and “everyone” starts a Brazilian Family, that shares the same values, the same color, that goes to the same bar to celebrate the love for the soccer/for the military regime. Soccer is a “national passion”, a myth that hides the most relevant reasons found in the United States diplomacy reports, that justify the choice of the then unknown General:

Médici criticized Costa e Silva’s patience before the anti-government protests and, in December 1968, he strongly supported the creation of the Institutional Act nº 5 (…) Even though Médici wasn’t relating himself as part of the so called Army hard-line, his resistance, last year, to the restrictive political measures adoption indicates that he will possibly be less tolerant than Costa e Silva was with the radical opposition. (General Records…………………..)

Just as the myth, the predicating subject is paralyzed (monolithic) and paralyzing (dynamic). The nomination of one of the most bloodthirsty presidents of the military dictatorship period took place to benefit the politically strategic United States economic position. The International Monetary Fund, key figure financing the military dictatorships of Latin America, had as its director the unknown General Médici himself, from 1967 to 69. The soccer as an instrument of ideological construction of the Brazilian Family myth dissembles The Brazil as a prodigal son with poliomyelitis in a complicated relationship with a physically absent father, but psychologically pervasive and idolized. A hindered Brasil.

Notes

1 Wall text of Impedimento’s Exhibition, by Jaime Lauriano, in the I Mostra do Programa de Exposições de 2014 at Centro Cultural São Paulo.
2 Janaina Martins Cordeiro, “The defeat after the victory: the military memory about Médici and the dictatorship”. Electronic magazine Tempo Presente (accessed in June 18th, 2014)

“A History narrated in the first-person singular”, by Isabella Rjeille

A story narrated in the first-person singular, presupposes a lived fact or a past history to the narrator. This subject, in turn, tells us, and through his oral performativity, reconstructs a situation in the listener’s imagination. A History, narrated in the first-person presupposes an experience of the passing of time, and attentive listening to the echo of the past in the present, lived in the narrator’s skin, which with difficulty departs from him. It is through orality that ancient mythologies are passed and are updated in their sacred narrators – Holy Fathers (Pais de Santo), Holy Mothers (Mães de Santo), Shamans, among others.

Language has operated an important role in the process of colonization in the Americas: First, men and women from different African nations were mingled, so as not to communicate; Second, the neo-Latin languages were imposed as mandatory languages and cultures in that diaspora situation. Thus, colonialism goes beyond physical and material subordination of the subjects, providing the colonized the means of communication and expression – this is an epistemological colonialism. In the first chapter of the book Black Skin, White Masks, martinican psychiatrist Frantz Fanon (1925-1961), analyzes the relationship of the colonized black population with the language of the white colonizer. For him “(…) to talk is to absolutely exist to the other. (…) is to be able to employ a certain syntax, possess the morphology of this or that language, but it is above all to assume a culture, support the weight of a civilization.” Language not only transmits information, but has an almost spiritual contingency upon the culture in which it is used – to intervene in language is to intervene in the subjectivity of a population. Thus, the Jesuits soon started using the word Tupanasu (derived from Tupã, means “God Almighty”) to talk to the tupinambás about the Christian god. Sounds like Tupi, it signifies like Portuguese.

Thus, the historical process of tensions, which brought into contact religions of African origin with Catholicism, is the result of a very particular situation in which men and women, who were separated from their land, had to find some way to keep in touch with the spiritual, under this colonization process. Today, the Umbanda yards and the Candomblé fields, keep alive a way of understanding the world, transmitted and transformed by different agents and in different regions of the country, telling a History of resistance. It is also assumes that oral narratives are modified with time, as new words are encrusted into language, at times, symptoms of other colonization processes.

In Autorretrato em branco sobre preto (Self-portrait in White on Black) there is not an orally-narrated story, nor a proposal for the rewriting of History as it is told. The narration lies in lending the body and the representation of a story from the subject, towards the re-elaboration of a current History from within himself. After all, the self-portrait is a witness of the subject in a particular time and place, in it we see beyond his face, but also in the formal and compositional choices, the way the author creates himself to the other (and here I return to Fanon: “to talk is to absolutely exist for the other “).

***

“I spoke of contact.

Between colonizer and colonized, there is only room for forced labor, intimidation, pressure, police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory cultures, disdain, distrust, arrogance, sufficiency, rudeness, the brainless elites, the defiled masses.

No human contact, but relations of domination and submission, which transform the colonized man into a helper, whip and the indigenous men into a production instrument.

It’s my turn to state an equation: colonization = objectification.

I hear the storm. They speak of progress, “achievements”, cured diseases, high standards of living above themselves.

I, I speak of societies emptied from themselves, trampled cultures, mined institutions, confiscated lands, murders religions, annihilated artistic magnificence, and extraordinary possibilities suppressed. “

(CESAIRE, Aimé, Discourse on Colonialism, p. 25)

This exhibition also addresses a question about the ways of elaboration of historical traumas. And here I refer to the many different forms of domination derived from colonial Brazil, which still persist today, only performed by updated agents. How does the cultural apparatus elaborate this trauma? What is the role of museums and cultural institutions within this system? Is it to glorify the various cultures that have landed here as exotic signs of a distant past? Or, is it to investigate, unearth documents, archives, research and dialogues which elaborate a history of domination that goes beyond exposing handcuffs in a showcase, as if they were part of something that no longer exists? How does the meritocratic discourse feeds itself back from the discourse of mestizaje, and vice versa? How is history performed and updated upon myths and rituals? How does the logic of private property and the desubjectivation of bodies intersect?

In the work Vocês nunca terão direitos sobre seus corpos, (You Will Never Have Rights Upon Your Bodies), phrases engraved on wooden boards (those which once signaled sugar mills, today on farms entries in the outskirts of the city) are spoken by the new captains of the countryside, the military police. These phrases also remind us of the indignation of the farmers who owned slaves, which declared that signing the Lei Áurea (Golden Law) hurt the “right of man over man.”

In turn, in the work Tratado #2 (Treaty #2) a hardwood log rests passively on a broken mirror, shattered into several pieces, in reference to the Treaty of Tordesillas, which came to regulate the dispute over the ownership of the lands of the New World. In these fragments, we see our dismembered image without a possibility of repair. The log lies over the broken reflections as if it was saying “don’t move here, it is my domain”, protecting a territory of forcibly separated pieces. In Nessa Terra, Em Se Plantando, Tudo Dá,  (In This Soil, If You Plant, Everything Grows), (sentence from the letter of Pero Vaz de Caminha, reporting the profitable fertility of Santa Cruz Island), a small specimen of Pau-Brazil grows in a vivarium. Exposed as a museum object – a place that encompasses death par excellence – this symbolic plant grows with a promise to destroy the structures that traps it. This time around, it is science that serves as an instrument of domination: unraveling to understand, to trap in order to observe, used to produce profit and absolute truths (we cannot forget the eugenics discourses).

The ways in which today we review and present certain aspects of our history are reviewed in Suplício (Torment): arranged on a museum showcase furniture, elements of torture and seizure of the black youth, carried out by military police or by “justiceiros” (‘justice makers’), replace the heavy shackles, on a disturbing update of colonization. Unrevised traumas are institutionalized, transformed in relics, and taken as being in the past, as “a necessary step for development” (as referred by Cesaire), but remain as open wounds in which often a handful of brine and lemon is played.

Bibliography:

FANON, Frantz. Pele Negra, Máscaras Brancas. (1952) Tradução de Renato da Silveira. Salvador: EDUFBA, 2008.

VAINFAS, Ronaldo. Rituais indígenas que não se apagam: a catequisação frustrada. Available at: http://diversitas.fflch.usp.br/node/2202 acessed in 17/12/2014, 12:12.

CÉSAIRE, Aimé,. Discurso sobre o colonialismo. (1978) Tradução de Anísio Garcez Homem. Florianópolis: Editora Letras Contemporâneas, 2010