“Third Half” is the first edition of a project by the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro dedicated to promoting a reflection about the South Atlantic space, particularly within the triangulation formed by Brazil, the African countries, and Portugal.
And what does it mean to represent this space? It means pondering the cultural models and the systems that infuse the visible with structure, circulation, significance, and meaning.
While keeping in mind the post-colonial debate, the past transnational relationships in the Atlantic, or the present state of ordinary cultural policies, “Third Half” sets out from an artistic starting point. The main goals of this project are to promote a careful consideration of the singularity of the images that circulate within this space and what makes them distinguishable from the heterogeneous multiplicity of the existent.
About this multiplicity, the South Atlantic has been many different things to many different people. From Vieira to Gilberto Freyre, from Amílcar Cabral to Luiz Felipe de Alencastro, from Pierre Verger to Caetano Veloso, to Agostinho da Silva, Pedro Costa, or Ruy Duarte de Carvalho – to whose memory this program is dedicated –, this place has projected different historical times, muses, idiosyncrasies, palm trees, comings and goings, or simply wanderings. Our father did not return. He had not gone anywhere. He had simply carried out the invention of remaining in those spaces in the river, half way here, half way there.
In spite of the geographical focus, this place unfolds well beyond itself, incorporating thought and action spaces that have the diaspora and transit as constitutive aspects. In this sense, which thought model allows us to operate in the ample specter of its differences? What are the characteristics of this multiculturalism? Or syncretism?
Between February and April 2011,these and many other questions were debated at MAM-RJ by artists, curators, economists, anthropologists, architects, and writers, among others, as they discussed the state of the arts and the culture produced and circulated between Brazil, the African countries, and Portugal.
The multiplicity of the speakers’ accents, of their beginning statements, the difference between the geographical places where they move – these were certainly a mirror of the multipolar space that is the South Atlantic, a land that is more moveable than firm, that is being constantly defined.
The transversality produced during the meetings is actually characteristic of a rewriting that is decentered, diasporal, or global, different from the previous, nation-centered narratives that had been produced since post-colonial studies. Kwame A. Appiah has incisive words on the subject: “Now more than ever we have the possibility of building intellectual, aesthetical, political, and economic postures that are independent from the authority, power, and meanings produced by Western models.”
“Celebrations/Negotiations: African photography in the Gilberto Chateaubriand Collection” and “Third Half: Tatiana Blass, Manuel Caeiro, Yonamine” were this program’s visual arts propositions.
The first is part of the G. Chateaubriand Collection on loan at MAM, and includes 26 of the approximately 45 photographs that comprise the Malick Sidibé, Jean Depara, Seydou Keïta, Ambroise Ngaimoko, and J. D. Okhai Ojeikere archives. Acquired in Paris in the 1990s, they form an atypical core in relation to the collection’s mostly Brazilian artworks. In the words of curators Cezar Bartholomeu and Marta Mestre, “These images unveil the celebration of lifestyles in the African metropolises, the post-colonial day-to-day, the social structure that becomes visible in the studio portraits of anonymous people,” in summary, images that “evade the cliché that usually labels Africa as a homogeneous and primitive continent awaiting the colonizer’s eye.” An independent catalogue specially dedicated to this exhibition was edited by the MAM.
The second one is an exhibition that includes three contemporary artists from Brazil, Portugal, and Angola, with international trajectories, and whose careers are being consolidated. Quoting from the exhibition’s opening text, “They live in a globalized, post-colonial world, a world in which symbolic exchanges circulate among a variety of spaces and cultures that are not attached to identitary discourses.” In fact, what unites Tatiana Blass, Manuel Caeiro, and Yonamine ends up being very little, or wouldn’t this also be the final goal of this curatorship: to reveal that, behind a common language, the way poetical structures are assembled and dismantled is individual, subjective, and differentiated.
A movie festival curated by Michelle Sales was shown at the MAM Cinematheque, exploring the “borders and tensions within this outlined triangle.” Sessions were followed by debates, with the participation of a few moviemakers. Eighteen speakers with articles displayed on six thematic tables were invited to the seminary, which was followed by debates with the public’s participation. During three intense days, the Third Half Seminary worked as a discussion forum, encouraging a reflection upon the globalized contemporary world, representing one of this program’s vital moments.
From the very first hour, a dialogue was established with the museum’s Núcleo Experimental de Educação e Arte [Education and Art Experimental Nucleus], based on a strong belief in the commitment that must exist between the people involved in curatorship and those working with mediation, a commitment that is actually shared by every museum. The result was a series of activities and workshops that were dynamized by monitors, and establishing a network of trajectories that go from seeing to doing, from words to music, from de-codification to the creation of new senses, and thus connecting our memories to the way we experience the world.
Luiz Camillo Osorio
Marta Mestre
