Ocupação Vladimir Herzog opens on August 14 at Itaú Cultural, devoted to the life and work of the journalist murdered under torture by the dictatorship at DOI-Codi in 1975.
Curated by Luis Ludmer, a talented film and television director who recently completed his master’s degree at FAUUSP and is also a member of the Vladimir Herzog Institute, the exhibition features photographs from the Herzog family collection and studies for documentary films he never managed to realize. It also includes facsimiles of his articles, personal objects, and previously unpublished correspondence.
Vlado, his real name and the name his friends used, was born in Yugoslavia, from which his Jewish parents fled the Nazi rise in the early 1940s, traveling through Italy before arriving in Brazil in 1947. In his book As duas guerras de Vlado Herzog (Civilização Brasileira, 2012), journalist Audálio Dantas describes the Herzog family’s desperate flight from Yugoslavia, away from the horrors of a war tearing Europe apart and cruelly persecuting Jews.
As the curator told me: “Young Vlado experienced his first war in Europe and learned painful lessons there. His second war was fought in Brazil, the country where his family sought refuge and peace. Yet it was here that his life was brutally taken, in the darkness of a torture chamber—an episode that forever marked this family’s history and the history of political struggle in Brazil.”
The violence of dictatorship
The exhibition invites reflection on the violence of a dictatorial regime and the obscurantism to which a system that curtails freedom can lead us. Revisiting and rethinking this moment is essential, especially when a perverse historical revisionism seeks to legitimize torture or minimize its occurrence.
The exhibition even includes one of the most famous works from artist Cildo Meireles’s series Inserções em circuitos ideológicos, which, at the time of Herzog’s murder, stamped one-cruzeiro banknotes with the question: Who killed Herzog? (featured in this post)
It also shows photographs of the ecumenical ceremony held before the burial at Sé Cathedral with Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns, then archbishop, and Rabbi Henry Sobel, newly arrived in Brazil, who refused to allow Herzog to be buried in the suicide section of the Jewish cemetery.
As curator Luis Ludmer told me: “At a time when we are witnessing the rise of democratically elected conservative governments defending antidemocratic values and growing intolerance in societies polarized and steeped in racial prejudice, spreading and remembering, through his intellectual production, the values Vladimir Herzog practiced in life is a strategy to ensure that the ‘two wars’ that befell Vlado—antisemitism and his death through the suppression of freedom of expression—never return.”
I agree, and I conclude with a statement by Vlado:
“When we lose the capacity to feel outrage at atrocities committed against others, we also lose the right to consider ourselves civilized human beings.” Vladimir Herzog.
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