![]() For this artist, walking barefoot transported him to the universe of these slums, known as favelas (4) it was a way of showing solidarity with these dwellers, to fase up to the dictatorship. The por were being evicted to the margins of the cities, to dwell in precarious houses in crowded slums. When Oiticica created this project, Brasilia was emerging as a Latin American prototype of modernity, while the dictatorship consolidated its power and social disparity was on the rise. Sneak peek Tropicália (1967) Hélio Oiticica, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, March-September 2018. Oddly, at Museo Jumex no invitation is made to walk barefoot along this work of ambient art. The artist seems to suggest that urban conditions numb the senses, reducing their affective and social registers. His aim was to enhance sensory stimulation by walking barefooot on the dry, clear sand, bordered by the dark-green, mushy vegetation, to recover a sense of closeness with the surroundings, contrasting this experience with that of walking insensibly with shoes over the terse and monotonous pavement. Hélio’s original idea was for spectators to take off their shoes and socks. Tropicália is made up of a space whose floor is covered with sand, a pebbled path, several tropical plants in pots, a cage with two parrots, and two small buildings (like shacks) in the shape of rectangular prisms. El giro descolonial en el arte de América Latina, 1960-1985. ![]() It is being exhibited from March 22 to September 9, 2018, at Museo Jumex in Mexico City, as part of the exhibition Memorias del subdesarrollo. The work preserves this gamut of oppositions side by side. This work has been exhibited alongside others, as a search for alternatives for Third World culture, a path between nationalism and internationalism, the coexistence of modernity and tradition. The ambient artwork Tropicália has been recreated several times in different parts of the world, both as a sample of non Western art and to stress the failure of Modernity’s linear concept of progress, generating instead truncated processes perceived as “underdevelopment”. (1)Īrtwork’s sneak peek Tropicália (1967) Hélio Oiticica, Museo Jumex, Mexico City, March-September 2018. Among Helio’s contemporaries, this idea was shared, among others, by Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil, in music Glauber Rocha in cinema Torcuato Neto in poetry and José Celso Martínez Correa, in theater. He put forward a model to transform these inserted parts, through assimilation and deglutition, to turn them into something original and our own, fostering an attitude of creative incorporation of differences. In his Manifiesto antropófago (1928), Oswald de Andrade called for the joining together of the local with the external elements that were coming in the wake of modernity. The Word was associated with Oiticica, but it had a collective origin dating several years back. Tropicália operated then as a cultural movement, reclaiming Latin American art. The scorching and exuberant image of the tropics, as ironic stereotype and as a critique of the ideal of linear progress, was his formula for an alternative path for Brazilian art. In the midst of such restlesness, Oiticica found in the concept of the tropics an apt element to move within the international scene, without dissolving as a mere follower of the innovative trends in Europe and the USA. At that time, a generation around the world felt a yearning for freedom, expressed in rock music, in their clothes, in their critique of traditional ways of life (free love, freedom of speech, drugs, family values, the ecology, etc.) In the arts, this desire was making headway with the Neo-Avant-Gardes. The artistic modality of ambient art was just beginning, and several artists were experimenting with it. In that year, he exhibited at Rio’s Museum of Modern Art, a piece called Tropicália, aiming at the stimulation of the whole sensory dimensión of the spectators. We will reflect uopn this in this article. This was made possible by a particular element he introduced in his creative work. ![]() Is it posible for a work of art, dating back 50 years, to offer a contemporary sensory experience with elements of the future? In 1967, perhaps without this being his main goal, Hélio Oiticica (Río de Janerio, 1937-1980) produced a work exploring the possibility of including variable and random stimuli from eras as removed from his as our own. ![]()
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