Thoughts on the Project from Rigo 23

Comments in 2005 After First Site Visit:

The Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves contain the best and largest remaining examples of Atlantic forest in the southeastern region of Brazil. The twenty-five protected areas that make up the site display the biological richness and evolutionary history of the few remaining areas of Atlantic forest of southeast Brazil. The area is also exceptionally diverse, with high numbers of rare and endemic species. With its “mountains to the sea” attitudinal gradient, its estuary, wild rivers, and numerous waterfalls, the site also has exceptional scenic values.

A. My initial visit started in Cananéia, in Southern São Paulo, Brazil. Cananéia is one of a series of islands that run along the São Paulo coast and into Parana, the neighboring state to the south. It is connected to the continent by a single road, and what remains of the original Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves or “Mata Atlantica” (roughly 7 percent) is on both the islands and the mainland. The Mata Atlantica is very rich in water, plant, and animal life, particularly birds and primates.

In 1992, through a sizable grant from the German government, an area comprising most of Ilha do Cardoso was transformed into a nature park. Access to it became severely limited, and some of the locals who lived there had to relocate to other parts of the island or off the island altogether. Known as caiçaras, most of them are mestiços, a result of the intermingling of early European and African settlers with the local indigenous communities.

B. I chose the Atlantic Forest South-East Reserves for several reasons.

1. Portugal colonized Brazil, now the largest Portuguese-speaking country in the world. I was born and raised on Madeira, a Portuguese island in the Atlantic off the coast of North Africa, and have now lived half of my life in the U.S., the largest English-speaking country in the world. I was very interested to know how two European cultures—one based in the Portuguese language, the other based on the English language—developed on the American continent and what resulted from the consequent miscegenation. Implicit in this first reason is the fact I would be mediating the site without the need for a translator.
2. I was also attracted to the notion of traveling by canoe, moving about in a fashion that illustrates the condition of the visitor, navigating the waterways unaware of all the invisible markers, which are well known to the native population.
3. The fact that Brazil is home to the Amazon, the largest surviving forest on the planet and one of the most visible examples of how accelerated human progress impacts the rest of life on Earth, offered the possibility to build upon this known quantity—the Amazon—with a lesser-known reality or a less-traveled approach.
4. Before my visit I felt that we are helpless in protecting such sites as this because such threats as global warming and pollution are out of our control. Now, having spoken with the local population…

I am interested in the communities of the region: the Cananéia, Ararapira, and the Quilombo.

• Cananéia is purported to have been the original Portuguese settlement in Brazil from the early part of the sixteenth century.
• Ararapira, founded in 1776, was once a thriving commercial port town. It now amounts to a ghostly grouping of abandoned structures because of local social, economic, and ecological changes.
• The Quilombos are communities set up by runaway slaves who managed to hide and, therefore outlive, the institution of slavery. They still survive today with a very high level of autonomy and independence from the central government. The same land that in the past provided them with shelter and safety is still the basis of their existence and identity.

Needless to say, before going I had all the fantasies to be expected of someone traveling to a UNESCO-designated World Heritage Site. Some of them held up, some were greatly revised, and most simply vanished once the actual smells of the place registered. The latter of these three processes took its full course within the first half of the initial bus journey from São Paulo to Cananéia.

Immediately upon my return, my lasting impression was, and still is (saudades), a great urge to return and continue the conversation with the human and physical environment so welcoming to me and to my curiosity.

C. I visited some truly amazing places:

• The Waterfalls of Rio Ribeiro (Creek River). This creek has waterfalls that vary in height from just a couple of feet to nearly two hundred. A complex of caves sits at the top of the mountain source of the creek.
• The Mata Atlantica itself—its incredibly layered sounds and very, very dense fields of vines, leaves, roots, branches, insects, and birds.
• Ivaporunduva, one of Brazil’s oldest Quilombos, established in the seventeenth century.
• Ararapira, the ghost town referred to previously.
• Ilha do Cardoso, where I stayed at a lodge ran by a Caiçara Cooperative, which was governed by rules that are designed to preserve the integrity of the social and natural fabric of the area adjacent to the Natural Reserve and Park.

D. I approached this first site visit with a very open mind and heart, and without any preconceptions as to what kind of project I would ultimately want to develop. Having said that, I did go to the Mata Atlantica in search of an unmediated exposure to the greatness of Mother Nature and, therefore, was ready to experience some primal phenomena (external as well as internal).

The visit definitely expanded my horizons. I discovered that some of my most memorable experiences of the natural environment came through dialogue with the locals.

Project Proposal

On my initial visit I wasn’t able to meet the native community that recently moved into the park under the aegis of the German government. On a trip that I will make on my own, I plan to make contact with this community in order to learn about their ceremonies that demonstrate their participation in the cycles of nature.

Using these techniques and crafts, which exemplify a sustainable lifestyle, I will build replicas of contemporary U.S. weapons systems that represent the unsustainability of our lifestyle and exemplify the violence implicit in the imbalance in the access to natural resources.

In other words, the idea behind using the traditional crafts of the Mata Atlantica is to create something completely alien to the culture (weapons of mass destruction). In this way, I hope to highlight the contradiction between the usual practice of encouraging native populations to preserve their environment while developed countries exploit the world’s natural resources to sustain their own, often destructive, lifestyle. For example, the budget for the United States Environmental Protection Agency in 2006 was 7.6 billion dollars, while the recent peacetime defense budget was approximately thirty-six times that amount, and the wartime defense budget approximately seventy-eight times that amount.

Museum visitors will see the objects created at the site along with visual imagery in the form of video and/or still images of the people creating the objects and disposing of them through rituals or symbolic power.

Relationship of This Project to Past Work

There is a “current” in my work about displacement and deracination, both in terms of the development and history of the cultural situation and in terms of location (physical and personal cultural perspective).

An example is my work about the lost birds of the Mission District, San Francisco, which looks at a culture of people who have lost their birds and communicate via signs their situation with the public.

First of all, most of the birds are displaced from their environment—they were in captivity (although they may have bonded with their owners and formed a new culture of bird-people relationships) and therefore were not lost but freed. The format of communication about their plight (the 8 1/2" x 11" Xerox sheets) speaks of street culture and to naive or folk art (their attempts to draw). The elements of the unexpected, the ironic, and the displacement are key.

Likewise, in the painted murals I made during a residency in Taipei, I was an observer of a culture, and a cultural outsider. I began highly graphic paintings on tarp on site that I took with me on travels to Sweden, where I continued to work on them, and finally back to the U.S., completing the images in the new places where I could no longer see the original sites and consciously started adding elements from these new locales, such as Volvos in the Taipei traffic. The images are representational and metaphors for cultures that are in flux. The artist’s content changes and is subject to time and environment.

In the series of images made of colored pushpins on wood of misappropriated Native American names, such as Tomahawk, I address the ways in which not only has land been taken from the indigenous people, but their names as well. The misunderstood attributes of Native Americans (strength, agility, speed, and courage) have been ironically displaced onto military aircraft, weapons, and cars, which are, in turn, symbols of overtaking land by force and highway development.