OITICICA Y EL ARTE EN BRAZIL

 

“Hélio Oiticica (1937-1980) is the main figure here, an artist whose work persistently referenced architecture and was itself built on an architectural scale, but stood in critical relation to it; his extensive published writings also make clear his long-standing interest in both the favela and broader theories of liberation.In a diary entry from 7 june 1969, […] he describes his first visit to Mangueira, a favela 6 kilometres from Centro on Rio’s poor north side. […]Here, Oiticica makes clear that the favela represents something distinct from the working-class quarters of European cities. […] it does not represent a possible lifestyle option for a young artist. But having gone, Oiticica found an unexpected appeal: everything that was a sin in the bourgeois world he had temporaly abandoned, here was a virtue. […] his association with Mangueire began in 1964 and he had got to know It well , joining its samba bloco and producing an extensive body of work in response to it. The early works include Parangolés, large, cape-like objects halfway between architecture and item clothing. [...] they are more than clothes; this is portable architecture made to frame an idea of bodily and social liberation; the wearer of the parangolé could, temporarily at least, do anything. Oiticica’s crucial work in this context is the iconic installation Tropicália […] it was a large environment that could be entered physically by the spectator. […] Calculatedly informal, temporary and poor, it had a desultory festive air, like the aftermath of a party. Its relationship to favela architecture was clear enough. It was not a representation of, or a reconstruction of, a favela, but it appropriated some of its typical materials and informal qualities.”1

“In Sao Paulo, Arquitetura Nova took the prevailing ideas of liberation as a starting point and looked to apply them in the tougher and more compromised environment of architecture, and popular housing in particular. Even they struggled with the limits of professional architecture practice, however, and, as we shall see, their activities dissolved variously into painting, theatre and terrorism. […] But they were tougher and grimmer, realistic rather than idealistic; There was little of the hippyish idealism found in Oiticica. Their liberation meant freedom from alienated work, wage slavery and social class.[…] To be radical involved direct actions against specific targets – and it is no surprise to find that the explorations of two members of the group, Ferro y Lefévre, led them away from the practica of architecture and towards art (painting and theatre, often politically charged), as well as more direct forms of confrontantion with the military regime.[…] Império abandoned architecture in 1968, and turned to theatre and painting, resigning from his teaching position at FAU-USP in 1977 after being denied space for experimental theatre by the authorities. Like the artistic experiments of the circle around Oiticica in Rio, they point up the contracditions in the official rethoric of modernization and progress, and they argue convincingly that any meaningful process of liberation will necessarily be driven from below. […] the objects they produced, finally, show how an aesthetic of play might be made central to building. […] the artist and architects described wants to empower the beholder. […] these ideas have not persisted long in the architectural imagination. They have, however, proved durable in the other cultural areas. Oiticica’s international reputation as an artist has grown markedly since his death in 1980 […] In London alone it was possible to see a reconstruction of the iconic Tropicália.” 1 

 

1 Richard J. Williams , Brazil, Reaktion Books Ltd London 2009