Antonio Manuel began his work as an artist
during the 1960s when he became acquainted with key figures of
the Brazilian art scene such as the critic Mário Pedrosa, and
artists Lygia Clark, Hélio Oiticica, Lygia Pape and Ivan Serpa.
Like many of his contemporaries, such as Cildo Meireles, Artur
Barrio, Ana Maria Maiolino, he developed a posture that expanded
the limits of art practice, increasingly focusing on the body as
a vehicle for his propositions.
Covertly political in nature, Antonio
Manuel’s work often arises out of the restrictions imposed by
military rule and censorship in the 1960s and 70s and constitute
a denial of such restriction. Partly as a consequence of the
socio-political environment, partly as a creative strategy, he
has worked in the interstices of cultural dissemination
appropriating imagery and sometimes the actual circuits of
circulation of mass communication. Sensationalist newspaper
headlines, censorship, the displacement of marginalized
populations, crime and police brutality have featured in Antonio
Manuel’s oeuvre, tracing the upheavals of Brazilian history over
the last forty years. Often focusing on the relation between
outside and inside, his work has consistently questioned
consensual notions of art through interventions in museums,
newspapers or in the urban environment.
Antonio Manuel lives and works in Rio de
Janeiro. He is represented by Gabinete de Arte Raquel Arnaud in
São Paulo, Brazil.
Occupations/Discoveries
Antonio Manuel’s installation
Occupations/Discoveries, his short-film A Parade, and
Hot Urn are a group of works composing an exhibition
which deals with a difficult historical period in Brazil.
Occupations/Discoveries was originally shown in Oscar
Niemeyer’s iconic Museum of Contemporary Art in Rio de Janeiro.
The work was commissioned on the occasion of the 500th
anniversary of the discovery and occupation of Brazil by the
Portuguese. It was a brave architectural intervention,
consisting of a series of walls plastered on one side, which
Manuel punctured with holes, redirecting the viewer’s gaze away
from the magnetic power of the landscape. It addressed the issue
of restricted vision and the dichotomies of Brazilian society,
itself polarised by barriers of wealth and poverty.
These walls were reconfigured for the
inaugural exhibition of the Pharos Centre for Contemporary Art
in October/November 2005 and unwittingly came to bear a strong
local resonance in a country where identity and division are
contentious issues. The abandoned houses in the buffer zone that
divides Nicosia, which Antonio Manuel visited during his stay in
Cyprus, are connected to each other by a series of holes –
escape routes and holding positions in case of conflict. A sad
reminder of what happens when we run out of ideas. The walled
circle in the centre of his installation, its floor covered with
straw, may also be a subtle reference to another of his works
entitled Soy Loco Por Ti (I am crazy for you), where a
straw bed lying beneath a red borderless map of Latin America
refers to his love of the place and to the madness of its
leaders. The windows that Antonio Manuel has opened in his walls
offer an element of hope in the breaking of barriers. They allow
us to go through to the “other side”, to see the “other side”.
In a sense they make the invisible visible, which Paul Klee
considered to be one of the purposes of art.
A Parade is a
short black and white film Antonio Manuel shot of World War II
veterans in Brazil. The veterans proudly display their medals
and march in ramshackle order. At the beginning we hear a
fado (a traditional Portuguese lament for men lost at sea),
while the credits are written on the bare thighs of a young
woman and revealed as she slowly lifts her dress – an almost
Homeric reference to the causes of ancient wars. In Cyprus,
where parades are held each year to commemorate different
versions of history across the divide, the film is a poignant
reminder of the folly of human conflict and how we perpetuate
its memory.
The final component of the exhibition, Hot
Urn, consisted of a sealed wooden ballot box into which
Antonio Manuel placed various objects he had collected during
his short stay in Cyprus. The box was smashed open by the artist
on the first night of the exhibition (with assistance from
others), to reveal, among other things, two left foot wooden
shoe moulds from an abandoned factory on the Green Line, the
front covers of Politis Newspaper for 23 and 25 April
2004 (the day before and after the historical referendum on a
UN Cyprus settlement plan), a branch from an olive tree and a
map of Cyprus. These last two objects also appear on the flag of
the Republic of Cyprus. National flags have a special
significance for Manuel. Unauthorised representation of the
Brazilian flag was forbidden during military rule in Brazil and
appears in one of his short experimental films painted across
the entire façade of a slum dwelling. This image is juxtaposed
with mug shots of criminals and victims of political violence.
In Cyprus, the flag of the Republic competes with the Greek and
Turkish flags in a clear indication of the island’s problem with
identity. Antonio Manuel’s ballot box is a reminder of the
luxury and denial of democracy, but also of the difficult
personal choices we have to make, which often have long-term
political consequences and determine our future and the kind of
society we choose to live in.
Created on a different continent and in a
different context, Antonio Manuel’s works have been powerfully
recontextualized in Cyprus. As an artist, he also engages in
performances/happenings that open up new possibilities of seeing
and remaking the world. We were very pleased that Antonio
Manuel’s installation was a source of inspiration for local
Cypriot artists. On the closing night of the exhibition, Machi
Demetriadou Lindahl, Evi Demetriou and Elena Antoniou presented
Dance with the Walls, a body-movement piece inspired by
the space and the installation that explored how the body
transcends barriers.
The exhibition was curated by Michael Asbury,
Research Fellow at the Centre for Transnational Art Identity and
Nation, University of the Arts London.
Links:
“Antonio Manuel: Occupations/Discoveries”
Essay by Michael Asbury (2005)
Interview with Antonio Manuel
Antonio Manuel (Pharos Publications)
