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<\/figure><\/li><\/ul><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\nThe ambiguity of the circle<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the beginning, there was Chaos; there was Everything and there was Nothingness as well. In Egyptian mythology, at the beginning of time, the Kemetic god of creation, Atum-Ra, the female and male cosmic origin, created the Universe in the form of an egg. The term \u201cEgypt\u201d means \u201cland below the Aegean\u201d, according to the Hellenistic peoples who conquered those lands. The first Egyptian civilization called itself the \u201cKemet\u201d: \u201cthe land of the black men\u201d or \u201cblack earth\u201d. However, this is a story of epistemycide. The fable of Europe as the universal center of the history of knowledge, originating from the Greco-Roman civilization, arose during German Romanticism at the end of the 18th century.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
For Iorub\u00e1-speaking peoples, Oloduma- r\u00ea, the Omnipotent being, created the Universe through the interweaving of seven snakes, forming the gourd of existence. Heaven. Earth. The waters. The World and the cycle of Life were born. Humanity is generated through the primordial act of shaping the moldable materiality of clay.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
As with ir\u00fan<\/em> Oxumar\u00e9, the great snake that embrace the Earth, devouring its own tail in an uninterrupted process of transformation of existence, the acts that lead the investigation by Paulo Nazareth translate into a counter-ethnography.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
N\u00eago Bispo, a poet and activist from the Quilombo do Saco-Curtume in the state of Piau\u00ed, addresses the notion of countercolonization as a movement of resistance to the systemic violence of European colonization suffered by African and pindor\u00e2micos peoples [a term originating with the Tupi-Guarani peoples which refers to the lands contiguous with colonial \u201cBrazil\u201d], who did not permit themselves to be dominated in Brazil. In his series Etnografia branca<\/em> [white ethnography] (2016-19), Nazareth appropriates the ethnographic collections of different institutions which, by means of photographs, classify \u201cinferior\u201d people in their social and cultural dynamics \u2013 a colonial approach to inventory the Other using specific technologies. The white circles on the photos made with efum<\/em> (an African chalk compound), refer to the figure of the helmeted guinea-fowl and drive away the death represented by the documentary ethnographic production which works as a logical clash between memory and forgetfulness.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
An old man, born in the indigenous territory of Borun Nak in Governador Valadares, in the state of Minas Gerais, Nazareth revisits, in his first works, the violent history of colonial occupation of the Vale do Rio Doce region, the original lands of the Borun peoples.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cAll this is my place of birth at different times, I like to think that a part of me was born with my m\u00e3e<\/em> [mother] in the early 1944s and another part with the m\u00e3e<\/em> of my m\u00e3e<\/em> in the early 1910s.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
During this period, there was a coup d\u2019\u00e9tat<\/em> \u2013 the Revolution of 1930, with the involvement of political leaders from the states of Minas Gerais, Para\u00edba and Rio Grande do Sul. The Vargas Era lasted for fifteen years. After the decree of a new Constitution in 1937, state Governors were removed from office and replaced by Federal interveners. One of these interveners was the lawyer Benedito Valadares Ribeiro (1937-45). As political alliances were formed, Juscelino Kubitschek (JK), a doctor, was appointed Mayor of Belo Horizonte (1940-45). During his time in office, he invited the Rio-born architect Oscar Niemeyer to design the Pampulha architectural complex, a project intended to modernize the city and which was inaugurated in 1943. When JK became President in 1956, he invited Niemeyer to continue his modernist project with the design and construction of a number of buildings in the new capital Bras\u00edlia, inaugurated in 1960.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Ana, Nazareth\u2019s mother, moved from Borun Nak with her family in the 1980s to work in a residence in the rich neighborhood of Mangabeiras in the central-south region of Belo Horizonte, near the old palace where the state Governors lived.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cIn the por\u00e3o<\/em> [basement] of the mansion, the staff rooms were situated below the house, right in the basement, one floor below the kennels, from the bedroom windows we saw the legs of the c\u00e3es<\/em> [dogs] and smelled their feces and urine.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
After a month, the family moved to the rural area of a town called Curvelo and then to Vila Cafezal, in the Aglomerado da Serra, in Belo Horizonte. They finally moved to the Conjunto Palmital in Santa Luzia, a public housing project built by the Metropolitan Housing Company of Minas Gerais on the land of a former slave-worked farm. They lived in a small semi-detached house in Sector 7, nicknamed the Devil\u2019s Cauldron, \u201cthe remotest part of the housing estate and next to one of the old farmhouses\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
This historical context and personal story are reflected in the pamphlets Qu\u00e9 ficar bunito<\/em> [I\/you want to look good] (2005) and Important Public Notice<\/em> (2006). Starting with his artist\u2019s residency at the Pampulha Art Museum \u2013 housed in an old cassino designed by Oscar Niemeyer \u2013 in 2004\/2005, Nazareth investigates the relationship between modernism and architecture in Belo Horizonte city, as well as the impact of the modernist discourse on his own \u201cprosperous future\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
His exhibition at the museum in 2006\/ 2007 establishes new conceptual relationships with the \u201cwhite circle\u201d of modernity: the white circle of artists, curators, critics, architects; the canonical white circle of the history of art and its universalism; of the narratives that became the official ones; of Concretism \u2013 Geometrism in art. In contrast to all this, the white spot appears on the black body of the helmeted guineafowl): The white circle as the primordial et\u00fa of Obatal\u00e1<\/em> (King Dressed in White), to drive away death (ik\u00f9).<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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<\/figure><\/li><\/ul><\/a><\/a><\/a><\/div><\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\nThe helmeted guineafowl<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cthe people of the place were desperate with so many dead to bury for Death did not care if it took man, woman, young, old, sick or healthy then Oxala intervened in response to the prayers of those who remained alive,. sprinkled the black guineafowl with maniva flour sprinkled the black guineafowl with lime and plaster… sprinkled the black guineafowl with efum …. released the black guineafowl in the market sprinkled with efum<\/em> and Death, frightened by the cascading call of the black guineafowl sprinkled with efum<\/em> \u2013 something that it had never seen \u2013 went away from there\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The transcribed text belongs to project let helmeted guineafowl invade the grounds of the crime museum [anthropology of the black\/ anthropology of banditry] city of Salvador\/ BA, 2014. The pamphlet presented the appearance of the helmeted guineafowl when Obatal\u00e1 (King Dressed in White), or Oxal\u00e1 (Great Orix\u00e1), who created every form of human life, blew efum<\/em> powder (white plant \u201cblood\u201d extracted from chalk and used in rituals) over a black chicken. This gesture drove Death away and reestablished balance in the world. The helmeted guineafowl is thus associated with the initiation and encompasses the opposition between life and death, the beginning and the end, white and black.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the exhibition Sobre o deslocamento de coisas e gente<\/em> [on the displacement of things and people] (2008) at the Palace of the Arts in Belo Horizonte, Nazareth reflects on the migration processes in Borun Nak, which started during the rebuilding of the Vit\u00f3ria to Minas railroad in 1942, and again in the 1970s. On the day it opened, the artist smuggled three et\u00f9s<\/em> into the exhibition space. The helmeted guineafowl (considered a \u201csubject of art\u201d by Nazareth) is timid in nature and has a distinctive call of cascading sounds: when one calls, the others join in, calling and walking in restless circles around the gallery.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
They were first brought to Brazil from Africa on slave ships to disguise the human cargo, as a strategy to circumvent the law after the slave trade was banned in 1831. (The town of Porto de Galinhas [literally: the chickens\u2019 harbor] in Pernambuco was also named because it was an important entry point for the illegal slave trade.) In his video Galinha da Angola<\/em> [helmeted guineafowl) (2017), Nazareth walks through the commercial district of Johannesburg, the largest city in South Africa, using a headdress made of et\u00f9<\/em> feathers. Johannesburg was considered non-white territory during the period of apartheid, from 1948 to 1994.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Its multicultural society is formed by the coexistence of different ethnic groups, such as Zulu, Soto, Tsuana, Xhosa, Tsonga, Su\u00e1zi, Venda and Ndebele. South Africa has eleven official languages. The policies which made black bodies invisible in that country resemble the Brazilian context, although here segregation had happened in an unofficial way. But such policies were also systematized in a political and educational project in Brazil that still reproduces asymmetries.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In the performance, Nazareth walks toward the future in tune with other black bodies, a reference to a non-mythological and complex Africa. The figure of the helmeted guineafowl acquires an even more intricate symbolism with the feathered headdress, a powerful symbol of the indigenous peoples, placed on the tight curls of an afro head. Galinha da Angola<\/em> consists of a cross-over of entangled times, in a fusion of stories full of the systemic violence between the two continents: the metaphor of the son of the diaspora who constantly seeks to tear the tight knots of colonialism apart in his reunion with ancestral Mother Africa.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
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