NEOANTROPOFAGIA

Português · English

This series investigates how power relations permeate Brazilian identity and perpetuate themselves through images and discourse. Taking up the gesture of modernist anthropophagy, the series turns to Brazil’s own cultural repertoire: canonical paintings, symbols, and documents are devoured and reworked in light of the contradictions of the present.

The research combines readings in anthropology and political philosophy with the study of images and documents. Roberto DaMatta and Darcy Ribeiro help interrogate the persistence of Brazilian hierarchies; Michel Foucault, the mechanisms of power that shape conduct and fix social positions. Giorgio Agamben contributes the idea of profanation: freeing images and signs from reverential uses and returning them to experimentation and critical use.

This process takes shape in the friction between painting, text, and digital processes. Shifts in context, superimpositions, and clashes of color unsettle familiar references, while humor disrupts the solemnity of symbols. Between the allure of color and the unease of the scene, the works interrogate the distance between the country we celebrate and the forms of violence we have learned to tolerate.