TEASER / work in progress with EMILIO AZEVEDO ET Alasdair Asmussen Doyle

Co-réalisation et image: Joana Luz Color grading et finalisation: Samanta do Amaral Musique: João Camarero Crane opérateur: Bashkam Gaffer: Fréderic Borja  Montage: Juliana Munhoz

Some artists revisit these images in order to alter the visual discomfort that images from the past generate in the present. Yet the past never ceases to pass. Its future lies in the continuation of this journey through images—that is, through images endowed with a form of untimeliness that is continually actualized within an aesthetic and political context, as artists, critics, and writers strip them of any and all claims to innocence.

These reproductions of the colonial past—monstrous, bestial, cannibalistic, slaveholding, and racialized—become a new source of material for artists, critics, and writers. It is they who formulate a critique of the scopic regime of colonial powers.

One example is the artist Livia Melzi, who, in 2021, presented the installation Qu’il était bon mon petit français, in which she reproduces an image by Théodore de Bry in an Aubusson tapestry. The tapestry hangs suspended like a painting. Closer to the floor, Melzi arranged an elaborate dining ensemble drawn from the tradition of French table culture (art de la table). Placed on the floor, it invites visitors to revisit an unavoidable pictorial topos in the history of modern art: Édouard Manet’s Le Déjeuner sur l’herbe (1863). The objects occupy the empty space left by the figures, while the grass becomes an absent space to be imagined.

On the opposite wall of the installation, Melzi reproduces one of her own photographs: a Tupinambá feather mantle belonging to the collection of the Musée Art et Histoire in Brussels.

The installation reveals the complexity of the circulation of objects and images in the construction of an imaginary world through the ritualization of the act of eating. One civilization projects its ghosts onto another. In Melzi’s installation, one might even dispense with distinctions such as the raw and the cooked, the savage and the civilized, in order to observe a material assemblage of ritual elements that, until then, had appeared disparate within the same imaginary universe: the meal at the dining table and the anthropophagic feast.

The artist engages with different inflections of the «part maudite»—the accursed share—of both sides. In the former, she transforms the negative construction of the savage and its subordinate status in relation to the colonizer. In the latter, Melzi repositions the presumed claim to occupy the summit of a civilizational hierarchy. The installation also reveals that the two are connected through the differences between their highly refined eating rituals.

The factory of the savage and the clash of imaginations. A post-ethnographic reading of Denilson Baniwa’s work

Eduardo Jorge de Oliveira