It is a place dedicated to art and inventiveness. However, it has no doors, no windows and even fewer walls. This is not a museum or gallery, but rather one of Antonio Dias’ most iconic installations.
On the black asphalt, dozens of white marks demarcate an imaginary space, as if it were the plan of a building. Outside this space, it is possible to read a sentence which is both the title of the installation and an invitation to the public: “Do It Yourself: Freedom Territory”.
“It’s as if the artist was provoking and calling people to use their own bodies to build a libertarian territory,” explains Bernardo Mosqueira, curator of the exhibition “Irradiar: Para Construir Instituições da Gente” alongside Matheus Morani and Camilla Rocha Campos.
Presented at Solar dos Abacaxis, in the center of Rio de Janeiro, the exhibition brings together 40 works on the relationship between people and institutional spaces to mark ten years of existence of the cultural center.
“Instead of creating an exhibition about Solar, which would be a very people-centered project, we decided to create an initiative that would take into account the importance of artistic institutions in defending collective freedoms,” Mosqueira explains.
In addition to echoing this proposition, Dias’ installation which welcomes the public is also a way of referring to the history of Solar energy. According to the curator, the space was born inspired by the ideas of freedom and independence advocated by this work.
“We created Solar based on the feeling that at that time there was no space in the city for experimental practices,” he says. “With this exhibition, we want to inspire other groups to create their own institutions and provoke spaces that already exist to rethink themselves.”
This is what Marcela Cantuária did by proposing a reinterpretation of the painting “Tribuna dos Uffizi”, by Johann Zoffany. The German painter’s work shows the famous Galleria degli Uffizi, in Florence, filled with paintings and sculptures. Canterbury has replicated this space, but with one significant change.
It removed male-dominated works from the stage and replaced them with works by 31 women from developing countries. In doing so, she questions the weak presence of these artists in spaces of power and prestige.
“Canterbury’s practice is very linked to queer feminism and the political struggle of women in South America,” explains Matheus Morani, one of the exhibition’s curators.
In addition to presenting works whose names rethink institutions, the exhibition presents to the public works by artists who have invented their own spaces.
This is the case of Emanoel Araújo, creator of the Afro Brasil Museum. Founded in 2004 in Ibirapuera Park, in São Paulo, the cultural equipment has established itself over the years as one of the most relevant in the country for giving visibility to black artists.
To highlight Araújo’s centrality in Brazilian art, the exhibition highlights a sculpture the artist created to celebrate Oshun, the orixá of fertility and fresh water. “He was well known precisely for uniting the legacy of the country’s geometric constructivist movement with Afro-Brazilian symbolic and spiritual traditions,” Morani explains.
Another artist who created his own space was Maxwell Alexandre. In 2022, he used social networks to protest against the Inhotim Institute, demanding the removal of his work, from the “Novo Poder” series, from the temporary exhibition “Quilombo: Vida, problems and aspirations of the Negro”. In the publication, he criticizes the lack of pavilions dedicated to black artists in the museum.
The year following the imbroglio, he created the Maxwell Alexandre Pavilion, in Rio de Janeiro, to bring together his own works. One of his works is in fact visible in the exhibition. It is a young black man painted on brown paper.
“It’s very emblematic of the way he imagined his own space to engage directly with the public without marketing constraints,” says Morani.
The exhibition not only highlights the creation of institutional spaces, but also the destruction of these environments. This is what we can see in a work in which Anna Bella Geiger returns to the fire at the National Museum in 2018. On a newspaper page reporting the accident, the artist painted blue spots and superimposed a photograph of Rrose Sélavy, the female alter ego of the French artist Marcel Duchamp.
Vik Muniz spoke of the destruction of Brasilia caused by the attacks of January 8. To do this, he constructed a representation of the National Congress from the pieces of that day.
“With this visualization of ruin, he creates a work to reflect on the fragility of democracy,” Morani says. “It’s a political system that requires constant struggle.”
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