ATLÂNTICA MODERNA: Purus e Negros From Eugenics to Post-Humanism (original) (raw)

Arte de São Paulo).1 Tavares' Vitrines, made of glass, stainless steel and marble, are physically empty, except for the transparent photographic images of virgin nature, printed to their glass surfaces. In her vitrines, the artist seems to capture the tropical jungle, its mountains and waterfalls and with them, nature itself–the very threat to modernity. At that time, I was writing about the dramatic demolition of the Morro do Castelo in Rio de Janeiro, a populated mountain at the center of the city that, when totally razed in the early 1920's, displaced hundreds of " undesirable " inhabitants, ostensibly for medical but also aesthetic reasons. Tavares's Vitrines, like clinical devices —like architecture as I began to understand it at the time—were instruments of anaesthetizing nature. I realized I was in front of an artwork capable of being both a synthesis and an activation of the dichotomies of purity and contamination, nature and artifice, heredity and environment that were at the center of the eugenics movement in Latin America. And so our story begins... Fabiola López-Durán Oppositions 1: Nature-Nurture 1 Reinventing the space and display elements of gallery installations in 1968, following the completion of her architectural vision for the MASP, Lina Bo Bardi mounted paintings from the museum's predominantly western art collection on large vertical panes, that were, like Tavares' Vitrine Series which they inspired, fixed to concrete, rectilinear bases. Giving each work an almost suspended quality, these museographical elements and their location in the space offered the museum visitor the opportunity to create a self-guided tour of the amassed collection, as one piece could be seen through the glass of another, without official pathways to narrate each new encounter. The formal and political bravery of Bo Bardi's vision is one to which contemporary artists are still aspiring.