2017
video
6’14’’
The video is created as a double of the catalog of the first exhibition of the Museum of Modern Art in São Paulo, “From Figurativism to Abstractionism”, in 1949. Revisiting the exhibition and its context, the video articulates a bridge between art and the political scenario of the Cold War Period. The exhibition exalted abstract art as the most developed form of art and among its pieces, there were several artworks donated and borrowed by Nelson Rockefeller. The video reviews the pieces through the catalog images, combining excerpts of letters sent by Rockefeller to the founder of the museum in SP, Ciccillo Matarazzo, with excerpts of “The Rockefeller Report on the Americas”, secretly written 1948-1969 to the US President. The composition of a text that simultaneously refers to artworks and warfare, reflects the context that the international language of modern art was applied outside the euro-American axis. The audio is composed by an extract of the first moment in which Ze Carioca, the Brazilian character, appears in the Disney film “Saludos Amigos” – which was also commissioned by Rockefeller, in 1948. The work explores the relationship between art and politics and investigates the role of modern art in Latin America as an infrastructure of political disputation.
[the work is part of the long-term project “Brasil Brazil”]
