meeting with the diaspora and the production of the synthesis of an oppressive body that wrote a historical horizon of Brazil despite the absence of primary sources in Delírios de Catarina [Deliriums of Catarina] (2014) and Bicho Geográfico [Geographic Animal] (2012-2014), which cover centuries of hidden narratives. All of the works presented by Caetanos Dias, either videoinstallation, sculpture or objects, turn Catarina Paraguaçu’s delusions and oneiric mysticism into a blindness that potentializes religious syncretism and the power of voice, mixing hearts devoured at the table by the nymph and fights against the arrogance of the owner of the identities of others. Sad memories in which power and wealth (the Indigenous woman Paraguaçu serves as allegory), in continuous disagreement, cross spaces of nobility to reach quilombos and Indigenous peoples in a vast unoccupied land, leaps in time that order narratives nowadays. By the foot of a colonial table covered with blood, there are two heads made out of sugar – the sweet pleasure produced in the slave colony –, deprived of contact with alterity, they remain workers with no destiny or origin defined by history. In Carlos Castro’s video, the head of Bolívar is devoured first; in Caetano Dias’ work, head sculptures made out of sugar, the heads of black people, Indigenous people, and mestizos, roll on the floor. A community of Bolivian immigrants, the “recurring ghosts of the modern biopolitical discourse,25” appears in Regina Parra’s work as bodiless heads. In art, it is urgent to remove nationalist distinction from the post-colonial space on behalf of a transnational discussion that is one of the fundamentals of contemporary art.26 In this framework, Daniel Santiago’s process work Verzuimd Braziel addresses the immaturity and the challenge of being human. It appropriates an event from Colonial Brazil whose contemporaneity lies in the fact that it adopts another transnational trend, in which sugar and colonialist sovereignty are at stake. It creates parallels with conflicting territories where exploitation determines permanence and their abandonment. The work addresses the moment when the Iberian Union lost its domain over Portugal, in 1640. After that, Portugal sought to recover the Colony that became controlled by the Dutch, who exploited the production and sale of sugar in Europe. A verse written in ancient Dutch is left to Maurício de Nassau right after Brazil was given to the Portuguese. It says: Brasil Desamparado [Abandoned Brazil]. Written on the wall, this phrase has been up to now covered with hundreds of clusters of colors that flow like the slave blood from 25 Idem, ibidem, p. 226. 26 Idem, ibidem, p. 227.
Delírios de Catarina. Its visitors sign the work, which is revealing in a context of abandonment maintained by the interests of small privileged groups. In Okwui Enwezor’s reading of the artistic practice focused on deeply destabilizing the “liberal notion of open borders as it encounters conservative ideas about the integrity of the national space.27 ” He proposes a reflection on spaces whose aim is to receive certain types of artistic subjectivity emerged in what he defines as “mauvais endroit.” They are “anomalous, distorted places that enable the exorbitant designation of certain cultural spaces as off-limits to particular paradigms of contemporary practice.”28 Forced displacement, separation of men and women, adults and children, deprivation from being in touch with images and any time-measurement parameter, deserted space and hunger as a weapon, protestation as the image of the enemy: “who said history does not move backward?”29 The very well included footnote in Há mundo por vir? [Is there a future world?] contributes to reading Rithy Panh’s film Image Manquante [The Missing Picture] (2012) and is present in the debate on considering these “deformed places,” both in time and in the ideological field to which they belong. The artist seeks to remain close to the violent gesture that implicitly exists in progressive values that serve as basis for the collapse of which the film narrative is part and he uses his own memory to create scenes with clay figures that introduce cruelty – being the use of clay figures a metaphor to think about a fragile man in the hands of his oppressor. People were transformed in “numbers” or in “corpses” if against the Khmer Rouge, and the subject of the film brings the hidden voice of memory with an autobiographic content, seeking to do so by means of non-transmitted images. In fact, the film questions the restitution of images produced based on the displacement of a child from his hometown to a remote rural area in Cambodia, where he became malnourished, saw some of his friends being murdered, and had to live with images that do not exist in official discourses. How to have these images? How to forget them when they insist on existing? Afonso Tostes’ Contigente [Contigent] (2014) is the exercise of carving different types of missing images on objects that have been found. Hoes that have been left over time are arranged in a small set that occupied the central portion of the exhibition area as individual testimonies of a semiplastic history. This work is aligned with the heads from the work Delírios de Catarina, for the artist 27 Idem, ibidem. 28 Idem, ibidem. 29 DANOWSKI; VIVEIROS DE CASTRO. op. cit., p. 134.
81