Sounds

By holding the exhibition “Sonoridades de Bispo do Rosário” (“Sounds of Bispo do Rosário”), the Oscar Niemeyer Museum proposes to the spectator a deep reflection on what art is and its transformative role.

Posthumously celebrated and recognized in Brazil and abroad, in an unusual process, absent from academic training, Bispo do Rosário produced from unusual materials, transforming his genius into surprising installations, comparable to the works of Marcel Duchamp in showing that art is possible also from the simplicity of everyday objects.

His creations, so relevant and up to date in this 21st century, were not made in a studio, but inside a psychiatric institution. Driven by inner strength and by his intense creativity and originality, he broke paradigms and presented great semantic power.

Hundreds of national and international exhibitions made over the last decades around his work show the incredible scope of his work. Bispo do Rosário has been the subject of books, films, and theater plays.

Evoking the sound and poetic aspects of the artist's work, the various objects, installations, collages, assemblages, and banners present here dialogue with the visual, performance, and poetic work of other artists that are part of the exhibition, making the impact of their legacy on the contemporary art scene clear.

Bispo do Rosário's unique artistic work has allowed him to transcend barriers and offer a new perspective on reality, exactly what we believe to be one of the most important roles of art.

Juliana Vellozo Almeida Vosnika
Chief Executive Officer
Oscar Niemeyer Museum

A chair. A chair like any other chair in any other Brazilian public institution. A chair like public school chairs, like public jail chairs. A chair like the chairs at Colônia Juliano Moreira, whose gates Arthur Bispo do Rosário crossed, on January 25, 1939, to live in the hospital for most of his life. A chair embodied in the creative universe of one of the most expressive Brazilian artists of the 20th century, in the most poignant response to the madness committed by Brazilian society in all asylum spaces in the country. 

Throughout his life, this former sailor, former boxer, former "Light" employee, and user of the mental health system diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic presented us, through objects, installations, assemblages, embroidery, and writing, an extremely organized and hierarchical dreamlike world. His cell at Núcleo Ulisses Vianna became a studio and research space, where he stubbornly defended his work, as he saw it as his mission to catalog “all the material existing in the Land of Men” to save it on Judgment Day. Through a simple blue thread, torn for years in an act of subversion and lucidity against the asylum prison, he started a work whose only time frame seems to have been his vision, a few days before Christmas 1938. “Time is an empty space”, says Stella do Patrocínio, who also lived for years incarcerated in Colônia Juliano Moreira, in her chatter. However, it is in this time/space that Arthur Bispo do Rosário left us when he died on July 5, 1989, a work that the more time passes, the more timeless is.

At the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, the impact of this work is also reflected in the embroidery, poems, photographs, installations, and videoperformances of the contemporary artists invited to take part in this exhibition, creating a dialogue with the work of Arthur Bispo do Rosário and with the territory of the former psychiatric hospital. 

And we can't forget to ask: How to face and explain the genius work of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, created in a mental hospital system that saw, as a rule, the exclusion of the individual, given our fragile capacity to understand and respect the slightest difference?

The answer to this question is perhaps lost among the extremes to which human rationality itself took us in the 20th century, at a point between the great scientific, technological, and medical revolutions and the most frightening brutalities we have been able to reach: the sensitivity of a gaze that simply lifted a chair a few inches off the ground.

Luiz Gustavo Carvalho
curator

o que eu guardo me guardo aqui

me bordo aqui guardo o que bordo

em mim borda o que porto aqui

borda de mim porto de mim porta

daqui diz perto diz guarda diz

brado que brado diz prato que

brado em mim porto o que bordo

quebrado no bordo na borda na

porta o que parto que parto que

raio que os parta em mim guardo

me parto re parto o que guardo

o que bordo o que quebro o que 

porto e reporto o que quebra

___

Guilherme Gontijo Flores 
O que eu guardo me guardo aqui
2023

o que se empilha aqui é só um mapa
que vai ficar ligeiramente bem 

maior que o mundo um mapa-mundi não
um mapa-mundo pra fazer um mundo-

mapi e aqui fazer cruzar aqui
votos destroyers misses mais a miss

universo e mais aquela carrada 
de bois e bois mais ruas e cidades

países e pessoas e pedaços
de ruas e cidades e países

e pedaços de coisas nomes coisas
como países e pessoas dias

dias e dias neste mapa um mapa
guarda dias um mapa de pessoas

uma faixa de fichas arquivadas
manto de escombros pelo mato adentro

um mapa-lista mapa-lastro mapa-
colônia-engenho-jacarepaguá

empregos números e tempos mapa
de tempo vivo rastro dessas formas

mapa de cola forte quase mala 
de mão universal dúvida e deus

coisas e bois onde aportar depois 
ruas misses pedaços e países

com ilhas ilhas e ilhas bois e dias 
aqui se empilha e vai caber o mundo

___

Guilherme Gontijo Flores 
O que se empilha aqui é só um mapa
2023

“The mentally ill are like hummingbirds, as they never land and remain two meters from the ground.”

Arthur Bispo do Rosário

All my dead were standing around in a circle

I was in the center.

None of them had a face. They were recognizable 

by their body language and by what they said

in the silence of their clothes, beyond fashion 

and fabrics; clothing not advertised 

or sold.

None of them had a face. What they were saying 

required no response, 

it remained, stopped, suspended in the hall, a dense, 

peaceful object.

I noticed an empty spot in the circle.

Slowly I went to take it.

All faces appeared, lit up.

Carlos Drummond de Andrade

In dialogue with the “Caixa dos Escolhidos” (“Box of the Chosen”)and the countless file cabinets created by Arthur Bispo do Rosário, “Comunhão” (“Communion”), by Eduardo Hargreaves, investigates the relationship between the photographic image and memory. The “máquinas de esperar” (“waiting machines”) that make up the installation provide the viewer with a reflection on spaces that still inhabit our landscapes, resonating coexistence from a period of artistic residence at the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum, located in the former Colônia Juliano Moreira.  

The mute and cloistered faces arranged circularly at the Oscar Niemeyer Museum, are not remembered through the photographs. Faced with the coldness of the photos archived in the records of admission to the asylum system, where individualities were erased and reduced to simple numbers or Someone's last name, many of these people are probably inscribed in the work of Arthur Bispo do Rosário, preserved by an affectionate gaze, making them survive through art architecture and project conceived to erase lives.

By inviting the spectator to take a position on the stage of an arena, from where a silent audience is watching him, Eduardo Hargreaves invites us to give a new meaning to these non-images, building an identity for these faces from unique memories, radically unsharable and, however, intrinsic to the collective memory of any civilizing process.

There was no time, when I was taking in the brightness and light, 

When the light went out, 

The brightness went out, everything was in darkness,

At the dawn of the world, 

Without light and when in the dark, 

They made an effort to catch the brightness and the light.

 Stella do Patrocínio

As in Stella's talk, a shipwrecked woman clinging to the verb, the works of Rick Rodrigues, Marlon de Paula and Fernanda Magalhães emerge from the sensitive gaze of the artists on the territory of the Colônia Juliano Moreira. From the poetry present in Rick Rodrigues’ embroidery and in the series “Alumbramentos” ("Dazzlements"), by Marlon de Paula, to the viscerality of “Barcas” ("Boats"), by Marlon de Paula, and “A Natureza da Vida” ("A Natureza da Vida"), by Fernanda Magalhães, the works portray a territory that is being reborn thanks to the extraordinary commitment of the Bispo do Rosário Contemporary Art Museum. Continuously integrating employees and former users of the mental health system into their artistic processes, the artists traverse the crossroads of documentary, fabulation and performance that permeate their creations and inhabit the former asylum territory with the desire to make these new worlds visible and rebuild, unveiling voices that need to be heard and bodies that need to be seen. 

The Nature of Life, Pavilion 10, where Arthur Bispo do Rosário lived,
Colônia Juliano Moreira, 2016

I dreamed of immersing in this place. In 2002, I visited the Colônia Juliano Moreira and the pavilions that housed Arthur Bispo do Rosário. I felt the need to perform there and more than a decade passed before the opportunity was realized. I was invited to participate in the program of the exhibition “Das Virgens em Cardumes e da Cor das Auras” (“On the Virgins in Shoals and the Color of Auras”), with the project Grassa Crua in Artistic Residency at the Bispo do Rosário Museum. Among the activities of the project, I looked for the moment to fulfill the dream in Bispo's cells. The performance “A Natureza da Vida” (“The Nature of Life”) consists of actions carried out in different places. These are actions in parks, squares, and other public places, where I am photographed, usually naked, discussing the standards imposed on our abject and dissident bodies. A body that occupies spaces by positioning itself and making itself present and visible. What drives the work is the proposition I make as an activator of the work, in the agency of looks and places, bringing meaning to each action, in the passage and sensations of my body in that moment-place. In the cells of Pavilion 10, a lot of energy is concentrated. Taking those photographs, which I had waited so long for, was tough. A shiver in the body, that very dirty and wet floor, the large pavilion with living spaces such as the entrance passage, the patio, the cells, the dining hall, and the cells with their latrines on the floor. The skin-walls with some inscriptions gave us clues of so many pains ingrained in the place and the bars on the windows explicitly spoke to me of the violence of a very close past and of what was announced as bad omens with the air of that moment. Discomfort, many emotions, being there naked, stripped of any artifice, skin-body in direct contact with the place, absorbing so much suffering and also feeling that place where, even with everything that was happening, Bispo produced his wonderful art that means so much to me, just as it brought me the emotions of other artists who passed through there, such as Stella do Patrocínio, Arlindo Oliveira, Patrícia Ruth and many others that I was getting to know up close. All of this pierced my skin and struck straight to the heart. This is how these images of the performance appeared, photographed by the artists who accompanied me on this experience. 

Fernanda Magalhães