Before and now, far and here within

This exhibition and three seminar cycles are part of the 'Mvúka' project – an experimental research process carried out with the MON collection, in partnership with the museum's Educational, Design, Architecture, Communication, Collection, and Production teams. 'Mvúka,' in Bantu, a linguistic branch giving rise to over 400 African languages, means a noisy gathering of people in celebration. In Brazil, for indigenous peoples, 'muvuca' is an ancestral planting technique that involves mixing seeds from various species The differences between the seed cycles restore the forests, create a cooperative environment, and ensure the biodiversity of the place.

This artistic proposal draws on 'mvúka/muvuca' as its foundation. We seek to engage with the contexts in which the word circulates to articulate ways to approach and share works by artists, production times, languages, creative processes, layers of interpretation from other fields of knowledge, privileging a coexistence between works of art and ways of thinking and being in the world. In this way, similar to 'mvúka/muvuca,' we create an exhibition atmosphere that celebrates being together in diversity, in polyphony, in the encounter of singularities.

Titled 'Antes e agora, Longe e aqui dentro,’ [Before and Now, Far and Here Within], the exhibition presents works that discuss the inseparable relationships between body and territory and the many ways of inhabiting, being, and recording landscapes, proposing landscapes: what we see in the distance, defined as a cutout of a place, what is too close (like the palm of the hand), or the distance between two people, a construction of sharing with time and place.

The exhibition is organized based on the works and production contexts of six artists, with works from the MON's permanent collection: Gustavo Caboco, Rosana Paulino, Efigênia Rolim, Miguel Bakun, Cícero Dias, and Amélia Toledo.  Their works generated conceptual constellations with 40 other artists. Thus, like in a 'mvúka,' they gather and ask us: how do we practice our actions in the landscapes and places we see? Are landscapes in flux and can they define our ways of existing? Faced with these questions, we can think together with the many indigenous peoples who inhabit Brazil: body and place know no hierarchies, as they merge and, therefore, coexist, one being a part of the other. Or, as the poet, professor, and quilombola leader Nêgo Bispo (1959-2023, Piauí) would say:  'The human being cannot be understood as a creator but as a creature of nature, of the place where one is and inhabits.  When we are aware that we live thanks to the 'biointeractions' between species and the earth, we have the conditions to connect ourselves to territories and landscapes, inhabiting and respecting them with the same intensity that we see ourselves as part of them.' Thus, landscapes are not just abstractions of places but active instances that constitute us as beings and shape our ways of existing.

Galciani Neves
Curatorship

The Oscar Niemeyer Museum is a living space for dialogue, research, and constant exchange between professionals in the artistic and educational sectors with the public. 

Our proposal with the project "Before and Now, Far and Here Within," which culminated in this unprecedented exhibition, is to generate educational content for MON (Oscar Niemeyer Museum), based on a deep dive into its rich and diverse archives, aiming to establish dialogues between the Museum and Brazilian contemporary art.

We understand that the permanent collection of a museum is its heart. It is important to highlight that MON's collection currently comprises 14,000 artworks, having quintupled in size in recent years and being increasingly valued. Proof of this is that about half of the exhibitions held by the institution, such as this one, aim to present it to the public.

The "Before and Now" project, more than that, is part of the Museum's broad educational proposal. It stemmed from research coordinated by Professor and Art Curator Galciani Neves, along with the MON team, which began in 2023.

Through studies and the realization of a seminar, a hundred works produced by dozens of artists that make up our collection were chosen. These are works considered relevant both to the artistic production context of the city of Curitiba and to the history of art in the state of Paraná and Brazil, thus celebrating the diversity and importance found in the Museum.

By bringing together such works — created by artists, times, and languages ​​so distinct — we suggest a diverse coexistence. It is an intriguing way to invite the visitor to immerse themselves in the institution's permanent collection.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika 

Chief Executive Officer | Oscar Niemeyer Museum

"To arrive here, you have traversed paths – spontaneous ones, with a predetermined route, with pauses, with surprises along the journey... Walking through the city or within buildings like this one are movements that change us at the same time we alter each place we pass through. This is the dynamic of landscapes; individuals shape them, and they interact with individuals. Walking is a sharing of time with space. The unique connections we create during journeys from one place to another become part of who we are and locate themselves as small flashes of memory in these places. It's a movement of many flows: our body moves simultaneously as we mobilize places.
 

In this exhibition, we propose that the experience of being with the works also includes gestures of creating routes, as the exhibition spreads across 11 spaces in the Museum. There is no specific route. There are small observations wherever it continues, which you can follow whenever you want and if curiosity arises.

The paths you create to view the works also integrate the experiences of visiting the exhibition. These ways of circulating through the Museum can intertwine the works and provoke unforeseen relationships, leaving traces of this experience. Furthermore, the Museum itself, its physical space, the artworks, as well as the people circulating here, including yourself, are part of these routes. Routes that transform into small temporary landscapes that you will glimpse as you drift around.

The works I develop addresses the violence against trans community dissident feminine bodies. The project "The Nature of Life" started in the year 2000, with actions and performances carried out in public places where I pose, often naked, for photos and videos taken by different photographers participating in the actions, and their multiple perspectives construct the work. Body matters through a political stance, discussing standards, aesthetics, and diversities are part of the work. 

It was during a trip that I followed news on social media about the cutting down of trees in Londrina's Central Forest to make way for a road. The resistance of journalists and artists in the city gave rise to the Ocupa Londrina Group, which allied with the NGO MAE to preserve the remnants of the original forest surviving in the heart of the city. Contributing to this collective activism, I proposed a photo clothesline so that everyone could participate and stand themselves. Upon my return, amidst numerous protests, I performed among the fallen trunks and the ground disturbed by the heavy machinery. This action was crucial for the work. The images, created as a form of protest, were exhibited alongside poems, drawings, cartoons, and other photos produced by various artists in the city. Myself, as the fat feminine body you now see, extend beyond discourse itself to merge with a social body which publicly manifests for a collective cause in servitude of everyone, rendering itself naked in front of violence 

After a long struggle, the construction work was embargoed, and the place was transformed into a permanent preservation area (APA). Unfortunately, ten years later, during the pandemic, the public authorities revoked the APA, turned the forest into a square, and "urbanized" it. Despite this, for now, the reopening of the road has not been reconsidered.

Here, we present other photographs that involve this performance, moments that resulted in the work and are its creative force. Journalist Guto Rocha faces the bulldozer and calls on artists to defend the forest. Foto by Gina Mardones; Graziela Diez and Luciano Pascoal immortalizing the performance; Foto by Camila Fujita; Photo Clothesline during Ocupa Londrina; Fotos by Graziela Diez and Fernanda Magalhães.

SUBTITLE

"Fábrica (Campo de Batalha)" presents a crossing of stories, people, and landscapes whose distances correspond to more than 200 years: the extermination of a Kaingáng community (1796) and of a working class (from the 1940s) in a territory occupied and controlled by a large paper factory in the city of Telêmaco Borba/PR. "Campo de Batalha (Battlefield)" is a military expression that designates a territory chosen in advance and prepared as a trap into which the enemy is led through persuasion or other subliminal means.

 "Official" history records the transmission and maintenance of economic power as the names of the region's landowners since before the Kaingáng extermination. It allows us to consider the factory owners as successors to the 18th-century grantees. On the other side of the story, that of the indigenous people and the workers, reports and images are practically non-existent. Would there be any relationship between the population of the region, the factory workers, and the Kaingáng? Were these loose threads ever part of the same weave? 

Text 01

On the Tibagi River's right bank is Fazenda Monte Alegre's headquarters, which belongs to the families that own the paper mill. The site where they built the industry, its administrative headquarters, and the workers' village was called Vila Harmonia, although, for more than 150 years, it was called Mortandade. The name change was an attempt to erase the history of the extermination of a Kaingáng community.

Around 1796, at the behest of the landowner José Félix, owner of the largest estate in Campos Gerais, a group of Kaingáng, the original inhabitants of the region, were surrounded and murdered. They said there was so much blood that it ran in streams into a tributary river of the Tibagi. The bodies of the men, women, and children were piled up, and for many days, crows flew over them. In return for his extermination, José Felix received a large tract of land, which he called Fazenda Monte Alegre. The river and the location of the massacre became known as Mortandade until, in 1941, at the suggestion of the factory owners, it was renamed Harmonia.

Text 02

"Let'savoidaccidents". The spacing between the letters doesn't make the message clear. That we, the factory + workers, "Avoid accidents"; or that you, the workers, "Avoid the accidents". This fog that covers the text is also present in the relationship between the factory and the workers—a mist of promises and threats. The factory's discourse has always been one of development, technology, progress, and opportunities. Its construction in the middle of "nowhere" - after all, those who once lived there were murdered, expelled, or erased from history by the latifundium - also projected an image of transformation to the workers. 

Between 1942 and 78, more than 60% of the factory's workers were from the region itself - the vast majority of them rural laborers, illiterate or with incomplete primary education, whose lives were isolated and abandoned. The ever-latent desire to be in a community, to share the world, and to improve material living conditions got mixed up with the factory discourse. This confusion was gradually undone by creating a union to represent the interests of the workers against those of the factory owners. 

Through the sabotage and military-patronage intervention in union organization after March 31, 1964, as well as the difficulties imposed in collective bargaining, the promises turned out to be threats. The steam from the boiler, the toxic fumes, the machines' noise, and the machines' danger permeated the workers' bodies. An experience that taught them to read the text and see an exclamation at the end, "Avoid the accidents!".