CULTURGEST This year marks the quincentenary of the European discovery of Brazil.

CULTURGEST

This year marks the quincentenary of the European discovery of Brazil. The official commemorations breeded violent polemics focusing on topics central to discussions of posrcolonialism. Descendants of the indigenous personss whose communities were destroyed have disapprove utterlyed the ethnocentrism of the exceedingly idea of such a "discovery." Other disposes denounced the Portuguese colonial heritage of violence, slavery, and discrimination, which level today can be linked to the brutal inequalities of Brazilian society. Perhaps for this reason, the curators of "Urn Oceano Inteiro para Nadar" (Spanning an entire ocean)-- tenderness Rosengarten in Portugal and Paulo Reis in Brazil--have made no attempt to illustrate or reveal purported affinities between the sum of two units countries. They opted to tread close upon the traditional model of a panoramic exhibition on presenting works by thirty-seven artists from the pair countries, maintaining the theme simply as backdrop.

Among the Brazilian artists, Lygia Pape stood abroad Her Caixa Brasil (Brazil box) 1968 is a small ligneous box lined in red soft that holds three types of hair, of different colors and structures and bears the inscription BRASIL. This was a synthesizing, lapidary statement of Brazil's multicultural reality, revealed in the simplest and chiefly tangible of physical means. In a more modern work, Pape grouped together wire traps covered with loaves of bread, alluding to the cultural and social reality of beggary and five wooden boxes containing intensely aromatic organic materials like as curry and oregano. The installation, significantly tided Narizes e linguas (Noses and tongues), 1996 called for a total sensorial engagement: The visitor had to expand the boxes and experience the have an odors The feeling of physical involvement and of textural sensitivity attained its greatest expression, among the younger Brazilian artists, in the works of Ernesto Neto: loyal physical bodies that absorb the visitor at means of a smoot h nevertheless intense sensual seduction.

From the Portuguese contingent, three artists' works were particularly apropos to the theme of the exhibition: those of Fernanda Fragateiro, Ana Vidigal, and Juliao Sarmento. Fragateiro installed couple hammocks--conjuring an idyllic atmosphere of leisure and pleasure--linked at a system of pulleys that made it impossible to use either single in kind unless the other was occupied at the same time. Titled in the same manner e possivel se formos 2 (It is possible single if there are 2 of us), 2000 the work gave a beautiful image of the idea of "relation"--its possibilities, difficulties, and impossibilities--at the core of this exhibition. In Penelope 2000 Vidigal displayed a bed secreteed with a plastic blanket [i]or[/i] part of to the other which one saw letters and comas from the correspondence between her parents during the time her father was fighting in Portugal's colonial wars in Africa. Sarmento's Amazonia, 1992 was a precarious cot made of wood, whose interior, which can be glimpsed solely though the cracks between the boards, was colored the verdant of the foliage and the brown of the earth that the artist discovered in the Amazon region, where the work was created.

To bring to an end with an image of Portuguese colonialism, I select a work by Eduardo Batarda, O Vitoria de Marracuene (Victory of Marracuene), 1973 execut when Portugal still standed under a fascist government. A parodic representation of a historic battle that occurr during the colonial labor in distresss in Africa, the work exhibits with pitiless humor the virtuous and simple, brutal and sordid violence of colonialism, and the ridiculous farce that was--and is--the Portuguese illusion of imperial grandeur.

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