It bears no relevance with regard to my art projects but it's impossible to document living in the state of Rio de Janeiro without talking at least a bit about the foods, especially the exotic fruits available at the green market, the local snacking customs, and some widely-accessible popular street foods.
A good segue to the topic of this post is a quick note about the relationship between land and people in this area as seen by us, Pacific Northwesterners. It also has to be noted that our tiny sliver of a view cannot be generalized to encompass the entirety of Brazil, where each region has its own specific environmental resources and challenges.
Traveling around in the state of Rio de Janeiro, we’ve often wondered about the situation of nature conservancy, and the general attention that is being paid in order to preserve and maintain the natural beauty and bounty of the land and the waters. There are many areas that are designated as parks and nature preserves, which is great to see. These are generally less accessible and less developed for tourism than corresponding sites in the US. However, and maybe exactly because of the vastness of nature (and the large number of people who travel to it), there seems to be a general attitude of ignorance about litter or finite nature of environmental resources.
On the other hand, there is an overabundance of chemicals, be that in the form of generously applied cleaning products, or in case of food: pesticides and fertilizers. At Largo, our studios were cleaned by two ladies before each exhibition opening, during which time it was nearly impossible to stay in the building. The cleaning products made our eyes water and throats sting. We have been warned by many different sources not to eat leafy vegetables at all, due to the industrial farms heavy use of pesticides and fertilizers. And, of course, every day we have to slather ourselves generously with DDT to avoid mosquitos bites (there has been a high incidence of Dengue fever since we have arrived). When chatting with Ernesto Neto, he joked about the government oversight of food industry that is essentially a control of farm foods (really targeting and restricting the organic and farm-to-table movements that are just springing up in Brazil, in favor of the more industrialized production). Many friends we made here are increasingly involved with the political side of sustainability, actively exploring ways of going outside of the regulated systems and focusing on sustainable green ways of eating and, as a necessary consequence, farming and cooking.
Another interesting footnote is a news report statistics, which I saw recently, that claims that there is an increasingly growing trend of eating outside of the household. Now, the majority of city dwelling Brazilians eat daily in one of the by-the-kilo fast food restaurants or buy ready-to-warm prepared industrial meals in the supermarket. There is too much sugar and too much salt in everything. Manioc root is the main source of starch, with is used in ample quantities to thicken sauces, filling, creams and puddings and to make breads rise into a fluffy white cloud (a cheese laden version of which is “pão de queijo”, cheese bread).
But with some time devoted to exploring, one can find lots of exotic discoveries and local curiosities in the niches, many of these are an exception from the general issues mentioned above. The best place to look is at the local fresh markets, one of which is being virtually every day of the week in a different neighborhood in Rio. Markets open at 7am and go until about 2-3pm, with prices dropping on hard-to-keep fruits around noon. We were lucky enough to live right on a square that holds both an immense fresh market on Wednesdays and a small organic market on Saturdays in Copacabana. I’ve been often taken aback by both the immense quantity of produce and the—by US standards—lax sanitary conditions (especially problematic for fresh fish and meats in the heat); but buying all our food at the market became a regular program and a bit of an addiction.
Herbs and flavorings.
Manioc roots.
Fruits and vegetables in a cacophony of colors and shapes.
Spices and peppers of all kinds.
Maracuja or Passion fruit. The fruit is the yellow-orange stuff around the edible black seeds.
Many kinds of bananas. Each has a distinct flavor and texture.
Little sardines are being gutted on the spot and sold by the dozen.
Citrus varieties.
Fish of all kinds. By mid-morning, there is usually no visible sign of ice under the fish.
Crab vendor.
Out of the amazing exotic tropical fruits we got to try in Rio perhaps the caju (cashew apple) is the most interesting.
Caju fruit.
The cashew nut shell cut into two. This is very toxic; needs to be dried and roasted.
The cashew nut is inside the green skin that sits on top of the fruit.
The caju fruit has a soft creamy-yellow flesh and a pleasant slightly bitter taste.
Mixing a caju caipirinha: Cut fruit, add sugar, then crush in a mixer (or glass jar here) with a wooden-pestle. Add cachaça and ice and shake.
As for eating on the go, there are lots of forms of eateries, each with their typical selection of products. "Lanches" are places for things like sandwiches and (recently) burgers. They also offer typical regional “salgados” (baked pastry-type or breaded and fried filled savory snacks) although those are often sold at "padarias" (bakeries) and "confeitarias" (pastry shops) as well. The most famous confeitaria in Rio is Colombo. Salgados and other cakes and pastries are eaten all-day-round, but mostly in the afternoons, accompanied by a short cup of coffee, a “cafezinho,” taken black. Coffee, of course, is a strong part of culture. It is the equivalent of hospitality, any time of the day, and thus cannot be refused.
Sangados
Signature pastries from Confeitaria Colombo. These are typically of Portuguese origin.
Confeitaria Colombo
The endless mirrors in the sitting area of Confeitaria Colombo.
Finally, two of the most often seen street foods: "Tapioca recheada" (snow-white pancakes filled with any kinds of ingredients from meats, cheese, guava paste, condensed milk, coconut, and these in any combinations). These are made with a special kind of manioc (also known as cassava or tapioca) flour that has been through a fermentation process. At the fresh market, manioc-product vendors make the flour fresh by adding some water and putting the mixture through a coarse sieve (resulting in a grainy but dry substance) but the same is also available pre-packaged at the supermarkets. The product is ingenious: Putting on a hot skillet, the small starch pearls will fuse together (due to water and heat) into a thick crepe. Nothing else is needed. It’s quite bland by itself, with a very unique fermented perfume, so any kind of filling would go quite well with it. Vendors have small metal push-carts complete with a hot-plate and skillet, making them one-by-one, fresh to order.
Here is a YouTube video by Vovó Cristina on how to make it:
Another street food that is interesting to watch in the making is “acarajé.” Acarajé is of Yoruba origin and comes from the state of Bahia (most typically from Salvador). Making it requires a bigger setup, usually a tent with steaming hot caldrons, so it’s often sold at street fairs, like the Sunday Hippy Fair at Ipanema by cheerful round ladies dressed in gleaming white layers of skirts, blouse and wearing matching white majestic head-wraps. The image of these ladies is iconic in Brazil and fills many of the tourist gift items, but it also represents the aspects of Brazilian culture that are of of Nigerian origin. I did not come to love acarajé as much as I would have liked to but the whole preparation and presentation of it is an experience worth trying. Acarajé is a deep fried bun made of mashed black-eyed peas that is fried in “dendê” (red palm) oil, which gives its characteristic flavor and red color. The bun is cut and filled with “vatapá” (a stew of ocra, cashew and shrimp) and topped with “caruru” (a kind salsa of red and green tomatoes and cilantro) and with more tiny smoked shrimps.
It's like as if the Jardini of the Venice Biennale moved to the tropics, got more color, more polish and a much more cutting edge architectural style, and was lavishly dressed for a wedding. I've been told repeatedly that one couldn't be an artist in Brazil and not visit Inhotim. Some local friends have called it a pilgrimage that one has to make before dying and I've also heard it unflatteringly nicknamed as the Disneyland of the artworld. All of above are true together.
It's a magnificent and magical place, an artist geek-out in the middle of "nowhere" in rural Minas Gerais (MG), a state northeast of the state of Rio de Janeiro. It's an hour flight from Rio to Belo Horizonte, the capital of MG, plus another 2 hours drive on badly marked, insanely rolling rural roads. It took both of us to navigate these roads, in addition to a rental car GPS and many carefully selected printed google maps (thanks to Sandor's excellent planning) that showed every possible intersection and turn to be encountered.
As a gift for my birthday, we took a 3-day trip to MG, visiting the historic town of Ouro Preto, the Serra de Moeda mountain range, and Instituto Inhotim.
According to their website, "Instituto Inhotim began to be conceived in the mid-1980s by Minas Gerais businessman, Bernardo de Mello Paz. With time, this parcel of private land was transformed into a unique place, with one of the most significant collections of contemporary art in the world and a botanical collection containing rare species from every continent." Paz commissioned architects and landscapers for making "temples" for the significant artworks that were already in his collection, as well as over the years he has continued to commission many more of the leading contemporary artists for making site-specific works, many of which enjoys the benefit of a close collaboration between artist, architect and landscape architect. The result is a mind-blowing exploration of space and the senses, the visual just being a tiny fraction of this equation.
A long palm-lined path leading up to the entrance of Inhotim.
Groundkeeper at work in the magical landscape of tropical colors and textures. Among the trees, there are hundreds of hidden sites for resting. Clever nooks landscaped from plants, rocks and roughly carved tree trunks provide well-disguised shelters for a quiet enjoyment of the park.
The pavilions and the surrounding landscape are custom designed for each of the artworks; often in a close dialogue between artist and architect. This striking red and white space is housing True Rouge by Tunga.
Matthew Barney's De Lama Lâmina (Mud Slide) in its geodesic glass dome.
Each pavilion deserves not only to bevisited but to be carefully and meticulously explored. Delicious architectural surprises await on rooftops, in corners, passageways, and even in the minute lunchbars that are part of some buildings. The artworks are showcased, celebrated, and made love to by the architecture. For example, Janet Cardiff's two sound installations are overwhelming and momentous in their cavernous but otherwise empty halls. One can make out in a hammock while slides flash through and Jimmy Hendrix is playing or take a dip in a dimly lit swimming pool while listening to John Cage in one of Helio Oiticica's Cosmococa environments. (Do your part to erase the division between art and life!) Smell the flowers, or better yet, plant them in Marilá Dardot's installation, Origem da Obra de Arte; listen to the belly of the Earth growling 200 meters deep in Doug Aitken's Sonic Pavilon or be shaken to the bone by the darkness emitting from the photographs, installations and corten walls of the pitch-black galleria Miguel Rio Branco. The exploration of the park is a step-by-step process, and there is a great joy in not knowing what is up next. Inhotim is simply insane, and it is impossible to put into words or present through a few badly composed photos taken from the outside (the Institute forbids taking pictures of the artworks inside of the buildings). Inhotim is simply a must see. It takes two days to get through it and it could possibly take a whole week to leisurely and fully enjoy every bit of what the park offers.
Helio Oiticica's Magic Square #5 is a proposition for blurring the division between sculpture, painting and architecture, between space and object.
Pavilion designed to house one of the major works by Lygia Pape, Ttéia 1C.
Paying homage to the artist, not only the walls make a 30degree twist between the square of the floor and that of the roof, but the passage way between the entrance and the gallery is shaped like it could be one of her characteristic geometric forms.
Here is a blurry photo of the piece itself. The whole thing is made of nothing more but lights and metallic threads. It is mesmerizing and breathtaking.
Olafur Eliasson's Viewing Machine
The inside of Olafur Eliasson's Viewing Machine
Marilá Dardot's participatory work in which visitors can plant seeds in letter-shaped pots and place them out in the pasture. This sign must have said "Obrigada Deus" (Thank you, God.) until the R and the U were pirated by other participants.
Some of my favorite flowers from the park (I don't know any of their names... I have about ten times as many photos of plants that I took.)
We toasted my birthday on the "top of the world" in the Serra Moeres mountains.
The amazing view from our window of the fog slipping through the valley at 6:30am in the morning. Inhotim is at the opposite end of the valley, about 35Km, 1 hour driving away.
En route to Inhotim, we stopped for a day in Ouro Preto, the center of gold and silver mines in the 18th century. This city was made rich with gold that was mined from its mountains, washed from its rivers and picked from its land. Lavish architecture was comissioned by the Portuguese, which is well preserved due to the city's status as one of the World Heritage sites. Ouro Preto (Black Gold) is a marked contrast to the dirty, ignored, run-down, unhealthy cities and villages that are a majority in Brazil.
View of Praça Tiradentes (the main square) in the Center of Ouro Preto.
This may be the steepest incline that any street on this earth has. The sidewalk (aka the narrow catwalk by the houses) has many steps to prove it. The road itself is barely passable. While climbing up, we met a car which was driving down. It was 1degree away from free fall.
Igreja S. Fco. Assis (Church of Saint Francis of Assisi)
Ceiling fresco in the Church of Saint Francis of Assisi. The style and symbolism is very particular to this area of Brazil. The combination of reds and blues make all the decorations quite lovely. There are expressive hand and facial gestures and Christ is often symbolized with a pair of crossed (wounded) hands placed over a heart.
The fountain in the back of a garden. Notice the decoration of broken plates and seashells and the blue color.
Dar Uma Palavra. Ter Uma Palavra. (Give a Word. Have a Word.) Documentation of the participatory word exchange project at Largo das Artes, May 12th 2105.
I've been fascinated with the Portuguese language since arriving to Brazil. In particular, with the sing-songy dialect of Brazilian Portuguese spoken in Rio. I regret now not having the time for classes in advance, which would have prepared me with an understanding of the grammar and syntax. But learning on the fly has been fun, especially that (thanks to smart phones and translator apps) help is always at hand. I made best friends with the soft female voice of the text-to-speech translator app from which I learned my pronunciation and, in the studio, I rely constantly on the aid of Brazilian artist friends. Many of them had been living or studying abroad for years or, in the case of the younger ones (being part of the fully connected Millennial generation) have learned fluent English through the Internet.
Outside of a small circle of travelled or business people, very little English is spoken in Brazil. For this reason, I had decided early to try to communicate in Portuguese as much as possible, only reverting to a feeble voiced "Você fala Inglês? Eu não falo Português." when the conversation situation gets really confusing.
In the first week of our stay, I was dispatched to our neighborhood drinking water store (armed with a cheat-card of possible sentences that I had made beforehand) to place an order for a home delivery of a replacement wanter tank. (Unless the home has a water filter system, potable water in Rio, sadly, comes from the store in a 20 liter plastic tank.) Five weeks later, I participated in a day-long workshop on Places and the City lead by artists Gustavo Ciriaco and Fernanda Eugenio and attended a two-hour "bate-papo" (chit-chat) with Ernesto Neto (all in Portuguese). Yesterday, I made my first phone call. I still can't muster more than a baby-talk but understand enough to get by and able to comprehend a large percentage of almost any kind of printed information (thanks to other Latin languages I had encountered).
During the participatory project, "Dar Uma Palavra. Ter Uma Palavra." participants not only explain the meaning of the word to me but also patiently correct my pronunciation. The conversations are in Portuguese or, rarely, bi-lingual and most people curiously flip through the log to see the words given by others and to discuss what words they like and why.
A page from the logbook showing some of the words received.
Back in Seattle, I had a project idea for some kind of an exchange to be done in Rio that would take place in the public space. With the students of my Art and Social Practice class, we always close the quarter with a project that asks them to learn a forgotten skill and not only to make some kind of a gift with it, but also to document and present their learning process with the purpose of transmitting the making skill to the rest of us. It's a very popular project, and when taken seriously, it results in a great deal of information acquired and in a "white elephant exchange" of the resulting gifts. This gave me the idea for the initial plans for a participatory exchange project in Rio. There are lots of makers here. Many of them conduct their craft on the street: from caning chairs to cooking food.
For many weeks, I was looking for both a way and a place to exchange various kinds of skills with the public but could not find a simple method for doing it. Slowly, it has become apparent that language itself should be the subject and the material of such exchange. I would be both the transmitter and the beneficiary of words passed on and acquired.
I act as a scribe, a relay, while everyone who participates by giving a word would also become a receiver. Each card handprinted with the letters of the word arranged in a composition and signed in the back with the word given and the date of the exchange.
I tested simple processes by which I can quickly form any word that is given to me in Portuguese and pass it on to the contributors in some kind of material form as a token of our exchange. Since my last project involved cutting out words, my first attempt for this was in the form of cutting vinyl, which proved to be a slow multi-step process. After a few hours of brainstorming with the British artist Claire Nichols, which helped to clear my mind and articulate some do's and don'ts of my priorities, I quickly arrived at the final solution: using the cut-outs of individual letters as rubber stamps. The words then can be arranged from the letters in the form of concrete poetry, following the venerable Brazilian tradition of Augusto de Campos, Ferreira Gullar, Eduardo Kac, Lygia Pape and others. Each word is printed to be given away as a greeting card size text-object.
Building the letter-poem.
Some of the printed cards ready to be taken away.
During residencies, ideas are turned into projects on a rather short order. Often, they would deserve longer time to mature but time goes by quickly and there is much more to see, consider and do!
In a matter of a weekend, I've had the wood cut and prepared, and have collected all the letters that I wanted to use. During a few late-nighters the stamps were made and I was able to conduct the first test run of the project during the reception of “Transição e Queda,” a group exhibition that opened on May 12th at Largo das Artes.
The typography for each letter was selected from my own photographs of Rio street signs and markings, including business logos, official and informal hand-made street signage as well as graffiti. Each letter is re-drawn on a 3x3cm scale, cut in rubber and glued on a wooden block.
Lacking the proper tools at Largo, I had to find a neighborhood shop selling wood (madeira) and talk this nice man into cutting it into little blocks for me. After our lengthy negotiation he climbed up to the attic to find a piece of material, then came down with something very different from what we had agreed upon. Next, he set the rusty old table saw and cut it to the exact square stock, then into the pieces I asked for. He even had to make the tool with which he pushed the tiny blocks through the saw. He only charged me for the wood and not for his labor and taught me words like "lixa" (sandpaper). He was perplexed to hear that I needed these for an art project. The wood is some kind of native Brazilian wood. Smells delicious and has a beautiful grain.
