Tentativa de aspirar ao grande labirinto, 2013
Video stills.
the video features a virtual tour through Helio Oticica's Metaesquemas transformed into digital architectural projects, while the artist reads, with great difficulty, Oiticica's text Brazil Diarrhea.
According to Hélio Oiticica, the future of Brazilian modernism depends on the creation of an artistic language that can adopt a universal critical approach that is both “permanent and experimental.” His diagnosis of the state of Brazilian culture leads him to identify a tendency toward stagnation and regression, both of which are responsible for diluting radical, revolutionary, and constructive movements that are thus incapable of taking their ideas to their ultimate conclusions; hence his use of the term “diarrhea.” He sees a paternalistic reactionary trend, an “abstract purity,” and what he calls a state of “convi-conivência” (a play on words to describe a hypocritically complicit coexistence in the face of the country’s ethical and socio-political problems), which block any perception of how “Brazil is seen by the world” and “how it really is.” In order to overcome “Brazil’s super-paranoia, repression, and impotence,” Oiticica advocates a permanently nonconformist awareness of our “underdeveloped status.”
