Jungle People and Exhibitions

Lunch yes­ter­day with Livia and her friends, Andreana, Lisha, Joana, and Mar­ian was very up beat. Livia and Lisha were excited to intro­duce me to Joana because Joana was a riot grrl in her teen years, so we’ve got some­thing in com­mon. Riot grrl is a sub-genera of punk that fero­ciously incor­po­rates fem­i­nist val­ues into an often macho music scene. In Por­tuguese, punk rock is pro­nounced with the epenthetic vow­els at the end of each word, so it comes out more like punky hockey (the first r in rock being pro­nounced like an Eng­lish h). I said I couldn’t do it, just couldn’t say it like that. They egged me on, and I said it sar­cas­ti­cally, and they all were ter­ri­bly amused. Lisha said I had some­thing of a Bahian accent, and asked if I knew what Bahia was. I said that of course I did, since for­eign­ers who know noth­ing about Brazil will only think of the street fes­ti­vals in Bahia and the beaches in Rio, and maybe the Ama­zon. (Though I have a few other rea­sons to know about Bahia.) This started some joke about Brazil­ians being wild jun­gle peo­ple, and Joana asked tongue-in-cheek if I had got­ten my malaria shot. Livia said she had even been asked once when she was out of the coun­try if peo­ple wear cloths in Brazil. It’s like the rest of the world hasn’t both­ered to update their vision of Brazil since the con­quis­ta­dors wrote their descrip­tions of indige­nous life as if it were cen­tered around loose, clean shaven women and can­ni­bal­ism. The inter­est­ing thing is how keenly aware of this these edu­cated young women are.

I met up with Peter after lunch to go check out some exhibits that he might want to take the class to. Going to Museu do Índio was an ironic fol­low up to the lunch time con­ver­sa­tion. Their cur­rent exhibit is an amaz­ing look at an indige­nous ama­zon­ian group’s process of doc­u­ment­ing their own cul­tural prac­tices. The show is called Tisak­isu: Tradição e Novas Tec­nolo­gias da Memória. The exhibit uses both cur­rent and archival mate­ri­als of cer­tain cer­e­monies to explain how these prac­tices fig­ure into the lives of this group, and then shows the process of mak­ing the mate­ri­als, how the peo­ple engaged with and thought of the process as an impor­tant way to pre­serve their own cul­ture. The con­tent of the exhibit was impres­sive and thor­ough. The cura­tion of the show is what put it over the top. The dark rooms had hang­ing light boxes with black and white pho­tographs, text pan­els under black lights inter­spersed with more pho­tographs and video installations.

From there we went to Cen­tro and grabbed a snack. The whole time we went to shows, Peter would be on and off the phone with Daniela, his assis­tant here in Brazil who helps plan and exe­cute the course. The logis­ti­cal part of plan­ning this course seems dif­fi­cult as it is depen­dent on speak­ers and trips to NGOs around Rio.

We went to Cen­tro Cul­tural Cor­reios to see some of the work up for Foto­Rio, the bian­nual pho­tog­ra­phy fes­ti­val that is cur­rently hap­pen­ing in Rio de Janeiro. Peter said there were a lot of jokes going around at some of the open­ing par­ties that Foto­Rio is the largest pho­tog­ra­phy fes­ti­val with no money. This was evi­dent from the rather under­whelm­ing show at CCC. Some of the work included was quite impres­sive, espe­cially that of Luiz Braga, who is from and works in the north of Brazil.

Peter was tot­ing around an 8mm cam­era and we stopped at one point for him to take a 10-second pho­to­graph of an old façade. In one of the old build­ings, he pointed out a terma, which is a com­bi­na­tion bar/bath house/brothel. I asked how he could tell, because it just looked like a bar to me. One indi­ca­tion is that the place was called a whiskey bar, but Peter said it was obvi­ous to him, though he didn’t expect to see such a place in the museum dis­trict. We went to a few book stores and by 6pm I was exhausted from being on my feet. I enjoyed hang­ing out with Peter as he is always over­flow­ing with sto­ries and is so engaged with cul­tural hap­pen­ings. I already feel moti­vated to see more of the city, take pic­tures, and get started with the class.