Tropical melancholy

Abstract

The project is intended as a "synthesis stage" for productive lines that have been occupying my academic and artistic path for some years, and that point to aspects of a melancholy in the Brazilian landscape. The aim is to reach, as a result, the production of a book - anchored in literary and photographic creation - that surrounds the theme of the national landscape based on the temporal specificity of its ruins (an element of trace traditionally linked to the iconology of melancholy). In some territories, such as Brazil, the ruin seems to condense a speed and dynamism that concern not what persists (despite death), but what exists as an indication of what it was not even, that is, as an index an "incomplete outline". Usually, however, the image that Brazil projects to the world is that of a country that is not at all melancholy. On the contrary, there is the idea of a territory occupied by an exuberant nature and by a people that, despite material poverty, exude joy and receptivity; where, finally, "Joy is the proof by nine!", as stated by Oswald de Andrade in the Manifesto Antropófago. When we look at a possible history of the occupation of national space, however, we see that this joy is associated with a kind of "mania" (that state symptomatically opposed to melancholy, and with which it tends to alternate), which has unpredictability as a mark of euphoria for the new, creating, in a rhythm of incessant changes, a relationship in which terms such as memory, planning and preservation have little adherence. The visual work will be organized, in this project, from a varied archive, collected over the last few years, and composed mainly of deteriorated, expired, abandoned materials; that is, ruinous. The textual production, in turn, will be based on contemporary references from literature and essay - not necessarily Brazilian, however - in which landscape and melancholy play a central role.