In the “land of the Great Snake”, [2] the bibliography on the characterization of national identity includes two canonical texts: Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil [Pau-Brasil Poetry Manifesto] (1924) and Manifesto Antropófago [Anthropophagic Manifesto] (1928), both written by Oswald de Andrade. These works, which are meant to exalt the diversity of Brazilian ethnic formations, are backed by “aesthetic facts.” Their style roams between the loose and the openly hectic, as seen in the sentence: “Carnival in Rio is the religious event of our race.”

More than just understanding the landscape of a country, the texts reveal the wish to capture a moral visage through the activities of its people: “The ore. The kitchen. Vatapá, gold and dance. The forest and the school. The National Museum. The vegetation.” From the sequence of aphorisms, a predictable rulebook emerges: how to sing of the thousand and one riches of a foreign land while managing to escape the shock of civilization. A self-declared anti-clericalist, Oswald de Andrade wrote as if he walked in the nude, read no newspapers and did not belong to the elite; in short, he allowed himself to scorn “the cultured practice of life” as if he were not a white man. This did not prevent him from exporting the aesthetics of Pau Brasil — a project which, incidentally, he did not disguise.

And indeed, in tune with the movements of Old Europe, the intellectual roadmap of this nascent modernity conquered the world. Nearly a hundred years were spent compiling both ethnographic and popular references and writing prefaces, theses and polemics based on exploratory trips. Considering that research is a tool that can lead to looting, some explain away the appropriation with the argument that contradictions were inherent to that historical era. In brief, how could any cartography be conceived without appropriating the principles of someone else’s cultural material?

Since then, however, the debate has veered towards important self-critical nuances and the erudition in the Manifestos is now evidence of their interrelationship with the “coloniality of knowledge.”[3]

While identity terms define a country's cultural awareness, this brief digression in time suggests that the modernist legacy is unable to support the production of artists committed to their ancestors’ worldview. Therefore, one must invent the key to learning how to see that which radically eludes Western teleologies. There are no exclusive standards to achieve that. The idea of a “multiplicity of rationalities” defended by Senegalese thinker and musician Felwine Sarr corresponds to an articulation of critical forces and reflections that involve previously overlooked dimensions such as intuition and sensitivity.[4]

Aislan Pankararu's work echoes this ongoing paradigm shift. Born in 1990 in Petrolândia (Pernambuco state), he graduated from the University of Brasília with a degree in medicine and began his artistic practice combining the study of cellular molecular structures with his people’s cosmological motifs and reverence for the Caatinga, the biome where he was born and raised. Given his attraction to the basic unity of life, it didn't take long to intertwine these seemingly distinct elements. When asked about his aesthetic program, the artist only invokes the expressiveness of his vital energy. By proposing an intuitive method, Aislan brings up his affection for and memory of his territory, a sanctuary of a thousand secrets, while manifesting, at the same time, the hard core of his resistance through his refusal to deliver any sacred content. We are sensitive to the vibration of the spiral lines without grasping their hidden message. In the same vein, one is reminded of a common practice among aboriginal groups in the Australian desert, who, equally tired of entrusting their myths and dreams to reckless explorers, transfer their ancient knowledge onto dazzling canvases speckled with white dots. Except for the initiated, their compositions do not propose a narrative plot or even the slightest figuration. There is nothing more appropriate when the struggles for land and self-determination (including subjectivity) are weighed on the same scale.

Now, which aesthetic regimes are authorized to legitimize indigenous production? Isn’t artistic perception intrinsically linked to ethnocentric discourse? Since Magiciens de la Terre [Magicians of the Earth] was curated in 1989 by a team led by art historian Jean-Hubert Martin [5], countless academic articles have been published which analyze the insertion of the so-called “other” into international exhibitions. I do not mean to follow in those footsteps, but I bring this landmark here to highlight the fascination exerted by the “primitive” aura in modernist rhetoric. Despite its loaded and unequivocally offensive meanings, this concept was widespread until the first half of the 20th century, a scenario that would only change in the late 1980s. With the impact of globalization, cultural diversity had its priority supposedly raised, while the formulation of inclusion criteria remained reserved for the same protagonists. Needless to say, the violence following institutional insertion is never mentioned, as if it were a fair price to pay for dancing with white people.

Therefore, the word “magician” in the title of that exhibition did not represent a true philosophy of otherness but the continuing practice of the cabinets of curiosities. In this line of reasoning, the dimension of magic, a founding concept for original peoples, was hijacked. A state of “wonderment” was engendered through highly fetishistic content. The most immediate effect was felt in the domestication of the sacred character of life, transforming the spiritual dimension celebrated in festivals, rituals and ceremonies into an exotic prerogative.

A profanation of the sacred or a consecration of the profane? To answer a range of questions, the prestigious magazine Third Text dedicated a special edition to issue no. 28 of Les Cahiers du Musée d’Art Moderne. [6] With great insight, Rasheed Araeen's article, “Our Bauhaus Others' Mudhouse”, drew an interesting parallel between traditional peoples and “merchandise peoples” (using Davi Kopenawa Yanomami’s terminology) in which he sought to highlight the dynamics behind the globalization strategy: while the artistic expression of the non-Western world has always been attentive to the appreciation of its own roots, the practice of European artists is characterized by the observation of remote civilizations. There could be no sharper description of colonial plunder.

The author continues his analysis with a series of considerations that in effect alert us to the absence of a theoretical perspective that might justify gathering works from different historical formations. With no profound reversal of behavioral patterns based on (mostly racial) privileges, the paternalistic tone will prevail even when praising, for example, the rustic aspect of manual techniques. The relationship with handicraft does not conceal a certain haughtiness. Behind the compliments paid to manufacturing production lies the (prejudiced) split of the subject, who is seen as either possessing an inexplicable “gift” or the cognitive ability to create images, but never able to combine both. Through luck or fate, but thanks to his scientific studies focused on the fields of biology and genetics, Aislan glimpsed in cells the ancestral intelligence that we see on his canvases. Thinking in these terms, the notion of repetition is perhaps inappropriate to qualify his brushstrokes. The exercise of propagating dots, hatches and ducts reveals the harsh concreteness of the mystery of the future.

It is true that none of the indigenous Pankararu people need to have read Bergson to convey an inseparable perception of matter and duration, and this is what the painting Mitocôndria Ancestral [Ancestral Mitochondria] (2023) masterfully condenses. With no time wasted on useless biological or evolutionary drifts, both present a vital and creative drive which feeds them with cosmic meaning. The idea that energy exists beyond raw matter provides a sort of conscious intuition, one of the most beautiful paradoxes of Bergsonian thought. To Western eyes, such a demonstration implies an anti-Cartesian turn, but not for an artist integrated into his community, whose teachings are continually processed in the feedback between the body and the spirit.

**

Before concluding this introduction to Aislan Pankararu's creative process, I would like to offer a perspective related to looting, in an effort to identify a different, non-predatory dance between singular figures who have never met but coexist on the blissful virtual plane.

The path of Western art has been crossed several times by epiphanic tears and the suspension of Reason, especially during periods of intense wars (not that the world has ever known peace). What is conventionally called “artistic avant-gardes of the early 20th century” would not exist without the persistence of philosophical interest in the spiritual. In this context, Paul Klee's famous 1921 phrase “making the invisible visible” gleams like a beacon to remind us of the Bauhaus master's “expanded naturalism.” It is important to perceive a vital energy, a sort of libido, which was so questioned in his conceptual circuit that the artist had to refute comparisons with “primitive art.” As Otília Arantes summarized: “What matters, then, is the compositions of the lines, their dance, the line as energy, as action and movement.”[7]

In his work, by investing an intuitive more than an illustrative load, Aislan also “makes the invisible visible.” The movement of his “germinating waves” expands the graphic line into zigzagging beams. One could say that the artist does not reproduce vital energy — he receives it. A similar statement was recorded by photographer Claudia Andujar, who explained that when Claudio Yanomami was invited to “just draw, with no theme at all,” he outlined a pattern and said that it represented the life of his fingers, the vital force emitted by his fingers, a pure manifestation of energy.[8]

In this sense, the energetic component of the creative act reaches another mental stage, the healing weave, which runs through several of Aislan Pankararu's works, with no need to enunciate the world's pains engulfed by the degenerative course of the planet and the imminence of collapse. Silence filled with white paint. Nor did a figure like Klee reproduce the visible to, in some way, force a more active perception.

By way of a temporary conclusion, one may admit that the liturgy of contemporary criticism has substantially changed in recent decades, even though relations between central and peripheral countries are still based on inequality. It is interesting to name the factors that managed to divert the paradigm of the Eurocentric avant-gardes from its boring narcissistic path. It is no coincidence that natural history and anthropology exhibition halls were the first to require the review of datasheets that categorize ethnographic artifacts as inert objects. It is a sad irony that it has now been five years since the tragic fire that took 80% of the National Museum collection, which Oswald de Andrade's Manifesto places alongside the Forest, while we know that the Amazon deforestation, an imminent catastrophe, is approaching the point of no return. It is then Aislan's turn to question Andrade’s precept of “seeing with free eyes”: who can afford such a luxury? 

Notes

 

[1] Final verses of the “Aislan Canticle”, written by the author for the artist’s first solo exhibition at Galeria Galatea in São Paulo.

[2] An allusion to world creation myths in indigenous Amazonian cosmogony. All further unreferenced quotes are taken from Oswald de Andrade’s Manifestos.

[3] “Coloniality of knowledge: the epistemic dimension of colonization.” Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano (2005) developed this concept to refer to the imposition of the Eurocentric humanistic model.

[4] Felwine Sarr, “Africa must invent its metaphor of the future.” Interview with journalist Carolina Keeve, published by Clarín-Revista, June 2019. Available at <https://www.ihu.unisinos.br/categorias/590248-a-africa-precisa-inventar-sua-metafora-de-futuro-entrevista-com-felwine-sarr>

[5] The exhibition was held in 1989 at Centre Georges Pompidou and Grande Halle de La Villette in Paris.

[6] Texts written by Yves Michaud, Benjamin Buchloch & Jean-Hubert Martin, Fumio Nanjo, Djon Mundine, Jyotindra Jain, Louis Perrois, Carlo Severi, Sally Price, James Clifford, Jean Fischer and Guy Brett. Available at <https://monoskop.org/images/4/44/Third_Text_6_Magiciens_de_la_Terre_1989.pdf> [last accessed on 12/04/2023]

[7] Cf. Otília Beatriz Fiori Arantes, “Klee. A utopia do movimento” [Klee. The utopia of movement]. Discurso, v. 7, n. 7, pp. 87-109, 1976. Available at <https://revistafilosofica.saoboaventura.edu.br/filosofia/article/view/62>

[8] Claudia Andujar, “Os desenhos Yanomami” [Yanomami drawings]. Arte em São Paulo, n. 5, March 1982.