The riverbank needs no logic to be coherent
J. J. Paes Loureiro
I.
When, in the 1920s, Oswald de Andrade’s Manifesto antropófago [Anthropophagic Manifesto] and Mário de Andrade’s novel Macunaíma, o herói sem nenhum caráter [Macunaíma, the hero with no character] were published, the whole romantic concept of “Indianism”1 imploded. The sentimental descriptions of the native peoples, so frequent in literature up to that point, gave way to a “revolutionary” Indian, ready to lead Brazil on a new, optimistic and modern path. As anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castro would later put it, while re-reading the work of these two Modernist writers: “in his language devoid of Fs, Ls and Rs, the Indian tells God, the hoe and clothing to go to Hell, and joyfully returns to the jungle”2.
The trigger for this Modernist-led change in perspective came from the concept of “anthropophagy”, which Oswald de Andrade and Raul Bopp derived from Tarsila do Amaral’s painting “Abaporu” (a combination of the Tupi words aba [man], porá [people] and ú [eat]). The painting conveys an idea that defines a coming culture: Brazil – deglutition of the Other, the utmost expression of otherness regarding the Old World. In this context, anthropophagy stops being the expression of a primitive lifestyle and becomes a metaphor for the positive, devouring and compounding force of happiness: taboo turns into totem. A process that inexorably set the Indians on a path to the future. The Indians and, with them, (supposedly) the Brazilian people as a whole… “We must listen to the naked man”, wrote Oswald, reacting “against the clothed man”. Such was the Utopian vision of Brazilian Modernists.
But, if “joy is the litmus test”, in the words of Oswald de Andrade, the issue of sadness was clearly a part of the “national agenda”. “If joy is a test we must undergo, then sadness is our problem”3, critic Pedro Duarte observes. And many found an explanation for that sadness in the European coloniser, whose physical and spiritual ailments Brazil had inherited and quickly turned into greed, violence and depredation. Would Modernist intellectuals be able to overcome that sadness?
Today, we know that this “modern” attempt at creating a yet non-existent country, in opposition to the official nation, was no easy task. That it was impossible to bring everything together under the same edifying flag. Brazilian critic Eduardo Sterzi masterfully summarises the contradictions in that project. According to him, something was absent from the “fable” of cultural independence: “the people – or, more precisely, all those peoples that are only implicit, due to being marginalised, in that great fiction of unity that is the ‘Brazilian people’”4.
As can be seen, the joy of the anthropophagi crashed against the contradictions of modernity itself, manifesting its melancholic reverse. Between idealism and reality, an unsurmountable wall stands: the actual living conditions of that people (Brazilian or otherwise), whom no representation can turn into the emblem or symbol the Modernists had conceived. That absence becomes probably even more symptomatic when confronted with the intense production of images anthropophagy generated throughout the 20th and 21st centuries5. Behind it, however, hangs the question: how did the indigenous peoples themselves imagine their place in the Brazil to come? We may perhaps attempt to answer it, by looking at what develops here. First: finding themselves reduced to nothing more than the Amerindian people “shot through” with the Western civilisational model, these peoples, “absent” from the Modernist project, could hardly “imagine” themselves. Their confined condition of a people without an actual self-image made increasingly more visible the process of de-characterisation of Brazilian Indians, doubly removed from Modern Brazil: separated from their ancestral roots and immersed in images that were actually not their own but imposed from outside.
Brazil’s impasse reached its breaking point during the Military Dictatorship, with the megalomaniac plan to turn the Amazonian region into an endlessly exploited resource. “Iracema” (1974), a film directed by Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, offers an unforgiving portrayal of that reality, an environmental, human, social and economic landscape that should be present in our minds while looking at Cristina Lamas’ exhibition. It was that “broken” Amazonia that the artist saw, not its exotic idealised version. The film develops through the point of view of a young girl who erringly wanders (quite different from the errancy the Modernists had imagined for the indigenous peoples of the Americas, which can be observed in Sousândrade’s O Guesa), and shows to us the degradation of Amazonia through the construction of the famous Trans-Amazonian Highway. Iracema, the character who comes by boat from deep in the jungle and disembarks in Belém, the capital city of the state of Pará, sees her existence become tangled in the inexorable force of degradation (“Iracema” is an acronym of “America”).
Considering Iracema’s fate as a mirror of past and present Brazil, we confront the present Amazonian landscape. A heteroclite and complex landscape, inhabited by the monuments of environmental crisis – large hydroelectric complexes, deforestation, agribusiness, forest devastation – side by side with riverside dwellers, quilombolas and caboclos, all with their own habits and everyday lives, mythologies, fishing nets, large mythical snake, the roar of the pororoca. In sum, all that is most ancestral alongside the components of modernity’s collapse. This contradictory composite, as filmed by Jorge Bodanzky and Orlando Senna, provides the realistic backdrop for Cristina Lamas’ exhibition. It does not stand for the future that the indigenous peoples imagined for themselves in Brazil. It should not be seen as any sort of future, either. It is, first and foremost, a fragmented mirror of ourselves and of the inherent contradiction of our civilisational process.
II.
When Cristina Lamas told me about her travels through the Amazonian region of Brazil and the Peruvian-Brazilian border6, it reminded me of some travellers’ accounts concerning far-off and strange things. Mário de Andrade wrote in his diary: “7 May 1927: Departure from São Paulo. [...] I’m not cut for travelling, dammit! I enter the cabin, now it’s too late, I’ve already left, I cannot even feel regret. There’s a compact void inside me. I sit on myself”7. Lévi-Strauss formulated that anguish as follows: “The tropics are less exotic than out of date”8.
But, unlike these accounts, Cristina Lamas conveyed to me no despondence concerning a world that, though still pulsating, appeared to be wasting away. To the artist, the journey means the flow of the waters, their liquid indefinition. That concept of a flowing destination contains a desire to leave one’s original location, and the far-off is synonymous with destination and transformation. How can we experience ourselves as others without reiterating the Other in us? How can we make our identity markers lighter and more moveable? How can we recover the origin? These questions put me in mind of a quote from Werner Herzog, the director of the magnificent Fitzcarraldo (1982), among other films: “We must distance ourselves from the visual pollution of the cities in order to rediscover pure and new images”. I find no escapism in these words, even though they may seem to suggest it; instead, I find the notion that the extensions of solitude create a world that will be peopled by the imagination, that a new mythical home must be built for the imagination.
The liquid, undefined space that Cristina Lamas invites us to visit finds meaning in riverbanks. A central feature in Brazilian literature, if we think of their greatest exponent, Guimarães Rosa, riverbanks are a speculative place par excellence. Neither terra firma nor the riverbed, they are an inconsistent space that stems from an interruption (of both land and the waters). While the river is the metaphor of duration and life, the riverbanks, on the contrary, stand for finitude. For discontinuity, rather than continuity. The banks interrupt the violence of the rivers and transform themselves. The banks of the Amazon contain the most precious cultural archives of Amazonia: the mangroves, so symbolic of Brazilian culture. But to them also come the waste materials hailing from Manaus and other megalopolises, the excreta of progress. We find ourselves forced to live with that “problematic” meaning; “staying with the trouble” (Donna Haraway).
The provocation of thought can also be a pororoca, the title that groups together the various meanings that converge into Cristina Lamas’ exhibition. Derived from the Tupi language, the word pororoca (poro'roka) is an onomatopoeia that means “roar” or “burst”. It describes the thunder of clashing, bursting waters, the occurrence of colossal waves that run up rivers, sinking boats and widening the banks. The process takes place when the levels of oceanic waters rise, causing them to flood the river’s mouth, leaving behind a trail of destruction. The pororoca combines the sublimity and beauty of violence, life and death. It is like a curse that hangs over a whole landscape.
III.
Fragments and Geometries. In the “Pororoca” exhibition, these two directions (or meanings) are condensed into sets of pieces that testify to the journey, while transfiguring it into a fictional space at the same time. The artist, aware that her narrative is an imperfect translation, stays true to the legitimate task of retelling it. Natxo Checa’s curation work emphasises duality and contact zones to generate an effect of time out of time, defined as an ouroboros.
Regarding Cristina Lamas’ works on the subject of the “fragment”, it is now important to remember Pascal Quignard’s description of the meaning of that word. The writer tells us that “in Greek, the fragment is klasma, apoklasma or apospasma, a piece that is broken off, an extract, something that has been torn, violently pulled out. From that comes the spasmos: a convulsion, a nervous disorder that pulls, tears, dislocates”9. Out of this summation emerges the feeling that “Pororoca” brings to us a number of “debris” that are not the reality of an experience, but rather the reality of its memory. On the other hand, the “convulsion” of the fragments seems like the consequence of a Grande Bouffe, a feast of observing, incorporating and feeling. Rather than the moderns’ “anthropophagy”, let us think of “anthropoemia”, from the Greek word “emein”, which means vomit-inducing, fetid, obscene and rotten. We live in anthropoemic times.
That excess of images, which flow into several of the pieces here, is perhaps the reason behind Cristina Lamas’ preference for elements that “conceal-reveal” by means of layers and superimpositions, geometric palimpsests and unusual objects, seemingly displaced from their contexts. The fragment is a surreal-like enigma that frustrates any reproduction of the similar and thus any attempt at “decipherment”. It does not seek to become part of an explanation; rather, it is an indicator of the journey’s vocabulary, of the “roar” it generates.
The drawings, most of them mixed media on paper, are the set of works that best expresses the concept of “broken-off pieces”. They occupy the main exhibition rooms in countless variations; the line’s exactness plays a decisive role in them. At first sight, they seem like collages, made up of elements extracted from various universes: “high” and “low” culture, different types of inscriptions on the paper. The use of spray paint and washes, bridging gaps in the figuration, increases the “mobile” feeling of the sheet of paper, like a mangrove out of which debris emerge. The drawn (sometimes printed) elements mix universal canons with everyday clichés, pop frivolities and ancestral traditions, enhancing the transition from the banal to the poetic. Crossword puzzle cut-outs, newspaper articles about women who swallow snakes, reproductions of Marajoara ceramic pieces, specimens of Amazonian flora, such as the ayahuasca, tattoo anamorphoses, an Abaporu, the Amazon company logo: a variety of elements that combine into a Babelian impression. Many of these drawings could be seen as storytelling elements (something that could also be said of Cristina Lamas’ work as a whole). However, the artist’s approach to storytelling is not linear, with the traditional “beginning, middle and end” structure. These stories are made up of fragmented times, superimpositions, repetitions. In her own words: “they are amalgams of images that come from the past and accompany me”.
As it is well known, several Amerindian peoples use geometry in terms that have little to do with Western visualism or ocularcentrism. It is not a matter of “depiction” but of “agency”, i.e. intent, causal meaning, result and transformation. Within the context of the life experience of most Amerindian peoples, the making of geometric designs acts upon visible and invisible life, going beyond the restricted meaning of body or object “decoration”. Instead, it is a “spell technology”, which is used to open the ways of the shamanic ritual. By acting upon people, animals, the invisible, the dead, everyday life, relationships…, geometry constructs the world of the indigenous peoples.
The influence of indigenous geometries on Lamas’ work can and should transcend the pessimistic stance that separates “us” from “others” and dictates that dialogue is impossible, proposing instead the barrier of “appropriation”. Inspired by the idea of “translational invention”, defined by Brazilian anthropologist Pedro Cesarino, I suggest that Cristina Lamas’ pieces should be considered in the light of a conceptual mediation between our concepts and the concepts of the forest peoples. Here, to “translate” is to “transcreate”, to generate a third riverbank that will help us overcome our (incommunicable) worlds. A “translational invention” is, so to speak, a cosmopolitics, the composition of a common world (a fragmented cosmos) that may face the catastrophic future that is already our present. In this sense, Cristina Lamas’ work expresses a translational intent that places very distant universes on the same plane.
Another aspect highlighted by the “Pororoca” exhibition, regardless of the fact that it originated in an experience that occurred in the Amazonian landscape, is that nowadays the most important qualities of space can no longer be defined in terms of territorial categories and foundations with fixed limits and identities. Now, these qualities are defined by constant currents and flows (of capital, people, information, signs, images) in global landscapes (A. Appadurai tells us of “ethnoscapes”, “technoscapes” and “ideoscapes”, among others) with uncertain origins and interconnected, unknown destinations that direct the world, structure it and constantly alter its spatial coordinates.
Fragments and Geometries are thus two guiding principles of “Pororoca”. While the drawings I have called Fragments convey the feeling of looking at a personal diary, the affect of the journey’s fragmented writing, in the set of works that make up Geometries the creative process seeks an almost impersonal expression, one that is separated from the expressive individual. Complementary, antithetical principles that cross-pollinate throughout the exhibition. They manifest as hybrid zones, rather than rigid blocks.
Consequently, Cristina Lamas’ work inscribes itself in the sphere of fluxes, of networks devoid of stable hierarchy, evoking a certain ambivalence of signs that is also present in the creations of two Brazilian artists from the same generation as Lamas: Leonilson and Leda Catunda. This generational affinity (1980s-1990s) is of some consequence, given that it anticipates the (present) prevalence of the digital; ever since then, objects have been expanded ad infinitum, losing all their stability and sense of place, across the real world, the virtual sphere and memory.
I return to the concept of ouroboros, as I bring this text to a close by looking at the drawing that Cristina Lamas and curator Natxo Checa have chosen to open the exhibition. In it, we see a woman (the artist?) lying in a bowl made from a gourd, seemingly asleep in a reverie soup. It is a disconcerting image, which offers itself as an enigma. We may see it as a subtle self-portrait, a self-invention dislocated from its source. Or the desire for a deep, transformative plunge. That reverie soup is made with “jambu”, a native herb that causes a tingling in the tongue. Is there a possibility of reinventing language in order to reinvent ourselves? The propagated roar of the “pororoca”, which floods the riverbanks, echoes back to us the notion that we will live and die together in a devastated land until the extinction of our species.
Marta Mestre
The land without evil
An ethnologist claims to have found
Amongst jungles and rivers after a long search
A tribe of wandering Indians
Weary exhausted half-dead
Many years ago they had departed
Wandering through forests deserts and fields
Up and down mountains and hills
Crossing rivers
In search of the land without evil –
Like the revolutionaries of my time
They found nothing.
Sophia de Mello Breyner Andresen, Ilhas, 1989
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1 “Indianism” is a Brazilian literary-artistic current that became prominent during the early 1800s, especially after the Proclamation of the Republic (1822). It is considered a Romantic trend in Brazilian literature, particularly linked to the writers of the First Romantic Generation, such as José de Alencar, Gonçalves Dias, and others.
2 p. 218. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, A Inconstância da Alma Selvagem e Outros Ensaios de Antropologia, São Paulo: Cosac & Naify, 2002.
3 Pedro Duarte, “A alegria da influência: o Brasil modernista de 1928”, Revista Serrote: https://www.revistaserrote.com.br/2013/05/a-alegria-da-influencia-o-brasil-modernista-de-1928-por-pedro-duarte/
4 Eduardo Sterzi (with Marta Mestre and Veronica Stigger), “Introdução”, Desvairar 22, SESC Pinheiros, São Paulo, 2022.
5 V. the influence exerted by Oswald de Andrade and the “Anthropophagy” concept on “Tropicália”, a cultural movement of the late 1960s.
6 Cristina Lamas travelled across the Amazonian region in 2016 and in 2018/19.
7 p. 51. Mário de Andrade, O Turista Aprendiz. Belo Horizonte: Itatiaia. 2002.
8 p. 106. Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976.
9 Pascal Quignard, Um Incómodo Técnico em Relação aos Fragmentos, Deriva Editores, Porto: 2009.