Sao Paulo's arts biennial gives a platform to Brazil's powerless minorities
Sao Paulo's biennial takes a radical stand for voiceless and invisible minorities in Brazil and beyond, writes Jonathan Watts
Silence. Darkness. Then the eyes adjust and a figure becomes apparent, his face faintly illuminated by a dark blue light.
It's a man with indigenous features who starts to speak in a quiet matter-of-fact voice that belies the despair in his words: "Our people have always been invisible to the world … They say we live in a country of democratic rights, but for indigenous people the state doesn't exist."
He pauses for what feels like an eternity as he wrestles with how to describe the loss experienced by his people, the Guarani, the largest surviving indigenous group in Brazil. Only 51,000 of them are left, but having been robbed of much of their land, they have one of the highest suicide rates in the world, as well as high levels of crime and alcoholism.
Inequality in Brazil is gross. We need to use the elite biennial to give a platform for those communities.
Unscripted, unrehearsed and largely unedited, the monologue continues for several minutes with only one shift, when the camera pans back to reveal the Indian, named Almires Martins, dipping his hands in thick black warpaint. But he is not preparing for battle. Instead, he smears his face slowly, repeatedly, until he becomes one with the darkness.
The testimony and disappearance of the Guarani is the essence of an eight-minute video Yma Nhadehetema (which in Guarani means "In the Past We Were Many") that was shown at the recently opened 31st Bienal de Sao Paulo. Filmed in 2009 by Armando Queiroz and Marcelo Rodrigues, it is a piece of oral history and a message of protest, as well as a work of art and a reminder of the perils facing indigenous groups that come into contact with industrialised society.
A month ago, one isolated tribe came out of the Amazon to seek weapons and allies after an apparent attack by drug traffickers or loggers.
Perhaps because of this context, Yma Nhadehetema is among the most poignant of the roughly 100 works on display, even though its mood of quiet despair is, at first, a striking contrast to the energy of an unswervingly polemical exhibition.
The Sao Paulo biennial, at Oscar Niemeyer's modernist Ciccillo Matarazzo Pavilion, has long been the premier art event in Latin America. But the current edition is not the usual showcase of major names in the art market. Instead, it is more of a soapbox from which the predominantly young artists have been commissioned to shout out about injustice, inequality, prejudice, ignorance and the possibility of change.