I visited À Nordeste at Sesc 24 de Maio and recommend it. Curated by Bitu Cassindé, Clarissa Diniz, and Marcelo Campos, the exhibition carries an ambiguity in its very title. Written with a grave accent, À Nordeste can be read as “in the northeastern manner.” Spoken aloud, it can suggest a feminine Northeast, pointing to questions of diversity, and, more obviously, that which lies to the northeast. This ambiguity is deliberate.
The exhibition takes a provocation by Ceará-born artist Yuri Firmeza—“Northeast of what?”—as its starting point for discussing the relations between centers and peripheries in Brazil and the world.
One motivation for the curators’ project was the 2018 election, which intensified debate about the region because of the political opposition it expressed, clearly establishing itself as a focus of resistance to then-candidate Bolsonaro’s platforms.
Prejudices and clichés flooded social networks at the time, associating the Northeast and its people with atavistic cultural backwardness and a land cursed by drought for being a territory of sin and insurrection.
Another history of art
It is a political exhibition, but not a partisan one. Political in the sense of making us think about Brazil, other cultural matrices, and the violence of the social production of our history.
Beyond the trigger of the last election, the exhibition reveals the richness of the Northeast as a center radiating artistic languages and a space of symbolic and critical production, expressed in the work of master craftspeople and artists operating in the market circuit, whether in visual art, music, or cinema.
For me, highlights include the connections made between works from the most varied repertoires, such as extraordinary wooden carrancas and Tadeu dos Bonecos’s reinterpretations of them in fiberglass as helmets and motorcycle ornaments.
Alongside works by artists such as Ayrson Heráclito, Tiago Sant’ana (featured above) and Caetano Dias, and to the sound of Recife’s Mangue Beat, this makes us realize how urgently we need another history of art: one capable of accounting for this cultural diversity, overcoming traditional oppositions between craft/artifact and art, popular and erudite culture, high and low culture, and reworking the aesthetic constellations that constitute Brazilian art in its intersections and particularities in relation to the world.
I will stop here and leave you with Jorge Mautner and Nelson Jacobina’s Maracatu Atômico, in Chico Science and Nação Zumbi’s version.
The exhibition runs until August 25 at Sesc 24, Tuesday through Sunday.
Transcript of Giselle Beiguelman’s Ouvir Imagens column, broadcast every Monday at 8 a.m. on Rádio USP (93.7).
Access the playlist with all audio episodes of the Ouvir Imagens column on Rádio USP | Read all the transcripts and posts.
This column has a playlist on YouTube! Visit and share it.