PABLO LEON DE LA BARRA

From : http://hildamagazine.net/pablo_leon_de_la_barra/

exhibition

os barbicanistas, an exhibition that never happened
a proposal by francesco manacorda and pablo león de la barra

'I am only interested in what's not mine.
The law of men. The law of the cannibal.'

1. Manifesto de Anthropophagia Invertida
Os Barbicanistas aims to explore the possibility to complement, via a geographical and theoretical inversion, the crucial notion of Anthropophagia as a possible synonymous of the Brasilian interpretation of Modernism. Such a response to modernity constituted a kind of rebellion to the pristine language of the avant-garde meant to be international and universal. Such tendency entails a move towards a pop vernacular meant to assert, yet more forcefully, one's own identity. In his Manifesto de Anthropophagia Oswaldo de Andrade encouraged assimilation and cultural digestion as the key Brasilian modernist strategy in order to fight cultural submission implied in internationalism.

This intellectual tactic greatly informed the movement of Tropicalismo in the sixties and still represents one of the crucial aspects of the work of many Brasilian artists operating today. In cannibalism only the most distant enemy - the most resistant to assimilation- gets eaten, as if anthropophagy involved a fascination with radical otherness in a simultaneous gesture of homage and distance, of assimilation and subjective assertion. In this sense Brasilian modernism and Tropicalismo in their apparent opposition both represented a tendency towards the 'Brasilification' of modern and popular culture. Such a tendency pursues the inversion of the historical avant-garde ambition to rediscovering brutal primitivism (shared by cubism and abstract expressionism) inasmuch as 'Brasilwood' represented the point of departure for a 'cannibalistic' dialogue with the international standards. 
In a double reversal, the movement of Barbicanismo is constructed as a direct mirrored inversion of the cannibalistic tendency. Instead of exploring aesthetic, political and cultural strategies of ingestion and 'digestion' of the west we would like to focus on the calculated attempt to make the enemy incorporate tropicality. Such a programme includes any 'insertion into an ideological circuit' that would encourage the tropicalisation of western models as the reversal to the filtered incorporation promoted by Anthropophagia. The imperative is to cultivate and grow pockets of brutal tropicalism in the core of globalised culture including from climate to social atmospheres and conditions. 
Due to its perfect location, Os Barbicanistas will take place in the Barbican's Conservatory in the Barbican Centre, a tropical nucleus in the heart of the epitome of brutalist architecture. This ideal location combines an enclosed organic space within an advanced modernist concrete landscape, representing an island of condensed natural exuberance. Such a scenario will host a series of artistic interventions including artists from tropical origin living in London and artists living in London with an inclination to be tropicalised. In the spirit of reversed anthropophagia Os Barbicanistas aims to infiltrate tropicality into the visitor, who will emerge from the experience tropicalised. Os Barbicanistas will last for a day only, constructed by a succession of explosive moments and events, and disappear afterwards.

2. Make your enemy eat you
Starting from the same nucleus, this exhibition project is constructed as a direct mirrored inversion of this tendency. Instead of exploring aesthetic, political and cultural strategies of ingestion and 'digestion', in the name of a global 'Pantagruel Syndrome', we would like focus on the calculated attempt to make the enemy eat us instead of eating the enemy, aiming to get aspects of Tropicalia assimilated by a different social context. This hypothesis implies the assumption that 'Tropical truth' could arguably be considered as much a universal language as modernism pretended to be; neither of those is more international, both of them are languages, mainly tools to articulate desires and concerns. While Modernism assumed different declinations, translations and adaptations according to the country that made it its, Tropicalia infiltrates a melancholy within every social and cultural industry, vernacularising the concerns of Brasilian modernism from Andrade to Oiticica, from Lina Bo Bardi to Glauber Rocha. Such a model seems more appropriate as a strategy of resistance today as - differently from the sixties in which US and Eurocentric model were opposed to national ones - today reverse anthropophagia represents a more adequate model to oppose globalisation within the culture industry.

3. This is not modernism
The process of universal diffusion of modernism was put into question as soon as modernity expanded towards the periphery as its 'International Language' got distorted into a series of dialects (e.g. Barragan in Mexico, Bo Bardi and Niemayer in Brasil, Le Corbusier in Chandigarh, etc). Reversing Anthropophagia does not aim to employ the same military spirit of conquest in reverse (this would simply be an upside-down mirrored modernism); it rather acts as a virus in order to undermine any system of universality as such. As Dominique Gonzalez Foerster identified in her exhibition Tropicale Modernité at Mies van der Rohe's Pavilion in Barcelona, 'talking about tropicality could be a way to identify a combination of landscape, abstract desires, and organic intentions, a very sensorial but also complex situation mixing the modernist will with an immature drift into the rain forest'...'Certain moments of Brasilia, Chandigarh or Hong Kong- and I am talking about moments, not only places; a combination of people, buildings, light, sound, plants, events that seem to display, citysize, a very inner state of things, what I sometimes call emotional traffic or emotional black market: the way we deal/negotiate internally to keep desire and beauty alive against all forms of control and authority. Tropical conditions seem able to reveal the beautiful, immature mess that generates modernity. The powerful, unconscious side of modernity seems to need a special light and context to be more active. Sometimes modernity by itself, especially when it comes to architecture, gets too dry in its abstract intentions; but balanced with immature desires, lots of water and plants, it becomes something more complex and more beautiful at the same time'.
4. London: an unaware Brasilian colony
London represents not only one of the possible antithesis to the Tropics - climatically, socially as well as architecturally. It nonetheless was a crucial city for some of the protagonists of the Topicalia movement who spent time in exile in this city, where they could perform cultural Anthropophagia. For both Helio Oiticica and Caetano Veloso, London represented a point of reference on a geographical but also on cultural terms. Conversely, this show aims to include artists living in London, based as unwilling ambassadors of tropicalismo as a mental construct and an ideological notion. The project aims to evoke in London's inhabitant saudade for Tropicalia as a state of mind not only related to geographical origins, but an intellectual and emotional exile shared by people of different origin and background.

5. The Exhibition as Penetrable
The curatorial concept and the installation of the show will take the shape of an organic informal structure to tropicalise the viewer. Works will be assembled within the domesticated jungle and made resonate to each other in order to constitute a succession of filtering devices. The exhibition would import Helio Oiticica's strategy - as developed in Tropicalia 1967; Eden 1969; Nests 1969 - within the curatorial domain and turn the group exhibition and the Barbican's Conservatory into a single Penetrable. Conceived as a filter and a mental and experiential organic structure, the installation will have an entrance and a separate exit form where visitors would get back in to the world tropicalised. Individual artworks will be activated as a succession of stimuli allowing the viewer to reach for Oiticica's notion of Supra-sensorial. The exhibition and events happening within it will be organised around a series of symbolical anonymous elements: an entrance demarcating the visitor's stepping into the tropics; a series of hammocks where to have tropical intellectual conversations; a soundscape imported from the tropics; fruit, juices and cachasa. Works of art would be disseminated in the domesticated jungle, with the visitor encountering them within the giant jungle penetrable. To explore the tropics and to become a Barbicanista, visitors will have to create and wear their own parangoles. The domesticated jungle will devour the viewer in order to implant in him/her tropical desires via a forced assimilation and incorporation: devouring Tropicalia, towards a reversed Anthropophagia.