ENGLISH

The Brazilian Curator Private
by Paulo Herkenhoff and Adriano Pedrosa

I worked with Paulo Herkenhoff in the XXIV Sao Paulo Biennial as an adjunct curator and as editor of publications for a little more than a year and a half. Actually, despite being a Biennial, the exhibition was conceived of, put together and exhibited in just 19 months. The Sao Paulo Biennial is the most complex art exhibition on the planet, and its high numbers of curators, artists, works, square meters, cost, visitors, educational programs and publications are proof of that. But, as I wrote a few years back about another Sao Paulo Biennial, the numbers may prove the size of the event, but they never comment on its excellence. It is not the great numbers and statistics that will be most remembered about the XXIV Biennial, but rather the indelible mark left by its curator on the history of the institution. With his fine cross between criticism and poetry, his commitment to educational programs and art theory, his ability to negotiate with foreign museum directors and with those of the Biennial foundation itself, Herkenhoff has established new structural and conceptual standards both for the exhibition and the institution. Herkenhoff has done all of this with a complex and multiple conception of the exhibition, one that is Brazilian and open to the world, both contemporary and in dialogue with history: anthropophagy (I have yet to explore its extreme relevance since we took so long to produce an exhibition on the subject). Four months after the exhibition, I returned to Rio de Janeiro, where Herkenhoff had once again reinstalled himself in his book-filled apartment for a few months before moving to new York, and we spoke about the rich and dizzying experience that was the construction of the "Biennial of the Century," as a Brazilian weekly called it. At home, Herkenhoff revealed to me a side of himself that I thought I knew intimately, reflecting on the role or future of a First-World mega-exhibition organized and financed by a Third World society. The days I had scheduled to be in Rio turned out to not be near long enough to complete our discussions, and at the end I accepted, without a great deal of resistance, Herkenhoff's appeals to extend my stay in the most seductive city in the world. Amidst telephones that rang softly every fifteen minutes and pauses to appreciate one or another book or art object in the Brazilian curator's collection, we arrived at the following text.

Basket of Nouns

When I began working on the Biennial I brought with me a basket full of nouns: will, joy, fear, challenge, certainty (that a Biennial is an intellectual process, a process of knowledge, rather than a process through which works, books, catalogs or texts are produced), solitude (in the sense of not knowing I first I refused to acknowledge what the Biennial meant in the way of power, until I understood that it encompassed possibility and potency). There were also nouns that were not emotions: density, alteridade (or what is the responsibility of associated alteridade in curatorial work?), ideas on education, Brazil as a starting point, Latin America as a principal territory, asynchronicity and difference in a world without center.

Bagunça
I love bagunça and not just Tunga's idea of it. Back then, the Biennial had a bit of that bagunça. Bagunça means that one is searching to understand the fluctuations that are part of life, of art and of the creative process. That is where we get two basic Brazilian sentiments - saudade (longing) and quintal (backyard) - which are hard to express in other languages. Quintal is not just the notion of backyard, it is something different. Bagunça is not just chaos, it is instead a flux of activities, a giving into the impulse. That flux of things which touches us so deeply and about which we require so many explanations, is part of Cildo Mereiles' Desvio para o vermelho (Deflection for Red). Beatriz Milhazes traces the idea of consolidation, of a specific tradition of anthropological desire in Brazil. Adriana Varejão, like Cildo Meireles, looks to constitute a kind of presentness in tension with history. That is where we find the issue of desire in the art history of Brazil, and also the presence of the flux, the energy that courses through our veins, in art, in looking. We look to incorporate a sensuality that is greatly in evidence in the work of Lygia Clark and Helio Oiticica, after Ernesto Neto. This was a Biennial that had a creative part very much linked to the Rio de Janeiro tradition. And in being the first curator from Rio de Janeiro to take charge of the Sao Paulo Biennial, I also wanted to imprint upon the exhibition some of that city's character, something beyond the provincial dispute between the country's two major cities. There was then something of a secretive curatorial attitude that I decided not to announce, which led me in turn to give myself up to the fundamental impulses of the work of some of Brazil's most fundamental artists. I learned from Waltercio Caldas this entire business about the space between things, space or air, the light that exists between things. A bit like Morandi, really. Take for example, the notion of "magnetized space." Caldas wanted to magnetize the entire Biennial, he explained that there should be no space where things were hidden, all places were worthy of attention, ideas which are also present in the conception of Lygia Pape's work. What I carried from these experiences was, in fact, that I wanted to put together a Biennial that took as its starting place the things I had learned from the artists.

Snail, Periwinkle, Abyss
No one knows how to put together a Sao Paulo Biennial. Those who have organized one do not know how to organize another, since they should always be different. A Biennial is wrought like a snail, a periwinkle shell built throughout the time of its existence. In the case of an exhibition involving 30 thousand square meters and 87 curators, there is no possible, practical or real time to first put together a curatorial architecture, seek out the work and announce the results. The Biennial develops in its own time, develops its own muscles, grows, constructs and extends the shell which is the final view of it people will have. That time is so heavy that the process becomes invariably much more significant than the curator intends. This is one of the Biennial's limitations. In the present model, the hugeness of the Sao Paulo Biennial is its abyss. There is an operational mechanism at work here, the city's and the public's expectations. The city codified its own Biennia long ago: they have great expectations. They long or the Bienal to make a great impact. Relations within the city become singularized, thus redesigning the limit go the exhibitions own abyss.

Size
If I had had more time, I would have made the Biennial smaller.

Far-near
Initially, we establish an approach in a centrifugal process that seeks to raise a maximum of possibilities with regard to interpreting cannibalism and anthropophagy, something which appeared disperse. All of the interpretations of curators, texts or people involved in the Biennial were incorporated into a list published under the title "165 Forms of Anthropophagy and Cannibalism from Among 1000." It seemed a paradox to accept a centrifugal position and at the same time return to a focus, to a concentration, in centripetal form. Cannibalism is multiple and a way to shed metaphors, a topos of argumentation that obviously does not allow for the reception of everything and anything. In a globalized world, the Biennial sought out likenesses to explore specificities.

Education
I have always said that the Biennial is an important educational tool. It's also clear to me that the cost of a Biennial is often too high. This expense increases when we consider that Brazil is a Third World country. Consider the political crisis inside the Bienal de São Paulo itself, as it appears to be a First World event: a sure symptom of Third World-ism, since that sort of idea obviously does not exist in the more developed economies. Hence, and ethical conflict arises once funding becomes an issue. The solution is to modify the profile of the social benefits derived from the Biennial. In this respect, my dialogue with the President of the Fundação Biennial de São Paulo, Julio Landmann, was extraordinary. As a result of our talks, the Bienal was conceived as a tool for educational, something that marks and influences the curatorial process itself. There is no inherent incompatibility between critical rigor, an art historical perspective and the issue of education. At the same time, education should be conceived of at its highest level, that is as books with text, references and curatorial perspectives that can, for example, serve a graduate student in his/her research. The educational process thus became one of the exhibition's priorities.

In my approach, the basic challenge was to transform the Biennial from an exhibition in which the student had most often been merely just a statistical factor into something else; to transform that Biennial of four hundred thousand visitors into a Biennial for one that would duly individuate the experience of each visitor. That is the standpoint from which we conceived the exhibition's wall texts, for example, which were addressed to the general public of the Bienal. We knew that 40% of those attending were seeing the first art exhibition of their live. The greatest leap made by the Bienal, in terms of the country's experience, was the process of integration with São Paulo's public school system. That is, the effort was directed towards the education of the lower middle class and above all, the underprivileged. We provided more than ten thousand teachers with the equipment of permanent value. Said material has now reached 3 million students. This statistic is important, its substance is more than a mathematical abstraction. We provided services to approximately one hundred fifty thousand students, and prepared more than one thousand teachers with thirty hours of classroom training. This is not only a matter of art appreciation, but also the beginning of the formulation of the critical gaze that comes with having been educated. This effort opened the eyes of thousands of young people to contemporary art. The responsibility of carrying out this extraordinary work fell on the shoulders of Evelyn Loschpe and her team.

History(ies)
The quality of the people who worked on this Bienial indicates that we were experimenting with another model of the exhibition's relation with art history. Historical important should be seen in the contact if the Bienal to revoke the need for that kind of history ; precisely because we are celebrating a history that is not so Eurocentric. Formerly, the Bienal de São Paulo had always ben the triumph of the Eurocentric Modernism. The idea, this time, was to work with the notion that history and critique are imbricated, interrelated. the XXIV Bienal clearly placed the question go the historical in present time. Historicism and the critique of the historical appear in this Bienal because the exhibition was critical of the notions of history and of certain curatorial practices. This Binal sought to problematic history and the very presence of history in the exhibition. Traditional historians, positivists, Greenbergians, etc., had a great deal of difficulty in relating to the exhibition.

Anthropofagia
Anthropofagia is a Brazilian process across the centuries in which a society as complex as ours-- one made up of Africans, Indigenous people and the Portuguese,-- absorbs multiple influences from other culture beginning in the seventieth century, transforming and contracting its own language while assuming new relations with the Western world. Antopofagia was already manifest in the Baroque literature of Bahia in the XVII century. It is a Brazilian tradition, but also a Latin American one. What is curious about that this process of eating the other -- the other's culture-- and transforming it into one's own, worked to stimulate curators and historians rom other part of the world to study Brazilian culture, to offer a response and to find a dialogue. It is interesting to consider tat a MoMA curator -- someone from the Popidou or the Louvre-- has studied anthropofagia in Brazil, written on it, and explored parallels and differences within the concept. Through this, we place Europe in the position of reflecting on its cannabalistic ghosts. These are processes which, as discussed, signal the maturity of Brazil's cultural milieu.

Presentidentification
The Bienal we are discussing had no history, In spite of its historical nucleus, it was a Bienal in which questions were wholly pertinent to the present, and the sense of the works presented therein were relent to contemporary issues. The exhibition gave density to the condition of existence and gaze of the present. For a country like Brazil, a painting by Albert Eckhout made in the sixteenth century and a Tunga sculpture from the 80s have the same relevance. We live in completely difference social and synchronic times. Régis Michel, e curator who discussed issues of cannibalism in the ninetieth century was, in fact, speaking about ideas that are absolutely necessary for us to examine today. I dare say that this was an exhibition of fundamental importance. Not for the act of history gazing upon cannibalism, but rather for the relation of a man with himself: his relation to the State, learning whom devours whom and who devours humanity and desire today. In the past, rival groups existed. In Freud, sons devoured their fathers. That continues to be relevant today. The chronological relations between the works were nullified. History was taking as ground zero point of contemporary art.

Contamination
An example of contamination as a curatorial strategy is the inclusion of contemporary works in an exhibition at the Historical Nucleus of the XXIV Bienal. We may also invert this, saying that we constructed an exhibit dedicated to the XVI-XVIII centuries around Tugnas work. Tunga's TaCaPe, for example, speaks of birth, primordial sculpture, with a grade at its interior, which Tunda identifies as the first sculpture of a woman, engaging in the loving gesture of combing her hair. Besides TaCaPe, there were have extraordinary painting by Albert Eckhout from the XVI century -- of the Indians' dance, where we also find the concept of tacape, and of four women. Besides that lay two large books that revealed cannibalism to the European world in the sixtieth century. These are books by Hans Staden, Jean de Lery and Andre Thevenet. The first book exhibited was opened up to a page featuring a mean in which the tacape figures once again. It presents an image of the instrument by which the victim of exogenous cannibalism was killed. Another contamination is later revealed in the Proposal for a Cataquesis, a painting by Adriana Varejão. The contamination of the contemporary by the historical, or vice versa allows us to act in another way. For this Bienal--where the anthropological and historical questions were so fundamental for the present time---we never wanted to (and in fact never did) exhibit ethnographic pieces that had been removed from a living culture. This way, Tunga's TaCaPe was there so that we could make use of its sacking. At the same time, indigenous pieces which which we presented in the Brazilian Modernism exhibition were archeological pieces from cultures that were already extinct when the Portuguese arrived in Brazil. Contamination took place in that passage of time: in what is past, in the present of those ghosts of the future in human experience, in the social process of art history, and in contemporary art. iI learned about the relevance the notion of contamination could carry from Adriano Pedrosa. The idea of contamination is opposed to the white cube as the ideal site for art require by modernity. The counterpart of contamination in curatorial architecture is the fact that we selected --as the site for the white monochrome exhibition--a room that had a column in the middle as we'll as a red fire exit sign. In this case, we could have just as well set up a white ceiling, white calls, thereby imprinting a huge lightness, a beauty suspended in relation to the world. Our option instead remixed jus that it is impossible to isolate art from life. Those conceptual or architectural contaminations constitute a passage that each human being establishes and experiments with in his or her own sense of time. On the other hand, contamination is connected to cannibalism, to its affliction insofar as human flesh contaminated human flesh. When a person doesn't follow the rules as regards to consumption of the human body, he or she immediately becomes a diseased person. This is so for he of she has eaten something that does not find into the structure if that culture's status. We think than in the illnesses that devour men: one subject the rich discussion of cannibalism opens up for. Human knowledge is infused with enormous possibility for metaphor.

Noises, Reflections, Migrations
In putting together the Biennial, there was a great deal of clamor for the contemporary over the historical, as in, for example, the reflection provided by Bruce Nauman's work which in Robert Storr's installation is projected onto the window enclosing the works of Aleijadinho and on the seventeenth century Dutch varnish of Eckhout's and Frans Post's paintings. That reflection seemed splendid to me, as it made the viewer search out an angle of vision. At the same time, the reflection cast a cycle of historical precursors in the Biennial's Museological Space, projecting the Nauman into the first room in the Historical Nucleus, which was dedicated to the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Eat/Death reflected onto a painting which represented a cannibalistic Indian as a monster, due to the fact that he devoured other beings of his own group: a destiny was traced out then and there of a people's extinction. The delicacy of that neon light could be seen as a projection of new meanings for the exhibition. These are very refined, special details which obviously the wider public did not have the opportunity to appreciate and interpret. In the same way, there is the virtual line traced out by Giacometti's Bust of Diego in the Historical Nucleus and the aim of Gabriel Orozco's The DS, in "Itineraries symbol 188 \f "Symbol" \s 12 " [CHECK SPELLING EXHIBITION]. Or the work of Oiticica, Homage to Horse Face, that traveled the Biennial Pavilion during the exhibition, passing before the Monochromes, Matta, Siqueiros, Bruce Nauman and before Gericault, in the exhibition dedicated to the nineteenth century. In the exhibition of the Venezuelan painter Revern in the Historical Nucleus section, with its totally white equatorial passages, it was possible to feel the temperature of Olafur Eliasson's work, located in the space reserved for the section on National Representations. In Eliasson's installation, an ice landscape, it was possible to remember Rever?n's torrid landscape.

Medusa's Fleet
These are the transforming appropriations of the Raft of the Medusa. Beyond Gericault's own studies, there was a Raft by Asger J?rn [CHECK SPELLING] in the CoBrA exhibition, and another where David Alfaro Siqueiros work was. There was also Dead Troops Talk by Jeff Wall in the "Itineraries symbol 188 \f "Symbol" \s 12 " section, a photograph that has a conceptual and compositional organization that references Gericault. There were still other rafts, though some were more permanent than others. In spite of the effort to secure the loan, we were left without Thomas Struth's Louvre IV, a photograph that captures Gericault's Raft at the Louvre, which we reproduced in the catalog. Another absence was Kcho, whose ships articulate politics, territoriality and hope, and for these reasons recall the libertarian raft. Sometimes we have to learn how to die on the beach.

National Representations
At the time, amidst the complexity of the Biennial, I felt that I arrived at my limit of possible dialog with other countries. I find that it is possible to advance a bit further, yet there is a limit, and that should lead the Sao Paulo Biennial to ask itself: Why continue with the section on National Representations? Why? What function does it serve? It seems that it is merely a matter of tradition. Sometimes it seems like a matter of economics. Many have said that the Biennial always allows for the arrival and participation of economically peripheral nations, and that today those nations don't have the financial conditions to represent themselves in a Biennial, since everything is so expensive. I personally believe that the Biennial no longer needs national representations, and that the Biennial needs to have an even larger voice together with the countries in the formulation of the exhibitions. There was a European curator who asked me what a regulation was so that she could break it. What does that represent in a situation of dialogue? For some a regulation is bureaucratic, for others it is a barrier to be transgressed, for others yet it is an exercise with a political role that is absolutely local, which attends domestic interests, and evidently the interests of those who work seriously with the Biennial. In any event, the limits of dialogue are very clear. The process of mounting the National Representations have suffered a test and now await a radical transformation.

Institution
This Biennial marked a period of curatorial autonomy within its process. This was possible because Julio Landmann, as President, understood from the outset that the idea was not to "concede" autonomy, but rather to recognize the independence of the curator in the process. That is not what happens in the periphery, but it does in the United States, in Europe, and in other places where the intellectual activity of a curator is recognized as a discourse; it does not occur to the bureaucratic authorities to use the very presence of artists within a critical or theoretical discussion. That is something - I have to say, with a great deal of pride - that changed in this Biennial. There were curators in the past that managed to negotiate territories of autonomy within the Sao Paulo Biennial. Yet it was the XXIV Biennial that marked the growth of the curatorial process and a maturing of the institutional process of the Sao Paulo Biennial. On the other hand, I think that Brazil is a bureaucratic country, where insider groups and friends impose themselves on society, and why should that not happen in arts institutions? I am not saying that Brazilian art institutions are any different or superior to the rest of the country. What I encountered was an extraordinary kind of agreement with Julio Landmann, and had in the President of the Biennial Foundation a working partner and an enlightened man.

Absences
There are artists who, for one reason or another, were left out, artists whose work I like very much. For example, Mario Cravo Neto, whose absence from the Biennial is more significant and has greater weight than that of many presences. Another case is Nelson Leirner, and it is a pity that the bureaucratic weight of the Biennial excluded him: he is practically a revelation of mine. It was also hard to do a Biennial where the figure of the father was discussed by many curators and works, like Louise Bourgeois' The Destruction of the Father, and her father died a few months after the event was inaugurated. My father gave me access to art books. In my house, in the interior of Brazil, there was a book on concrete art which I could leaf through before I learned how to read and that coincided, at the time, with the Frente Movement. As an everyday experience I also experienced the absence of Rio de Janeiro, though Sao Paulo is evidently a tremendously stimulating city. There is also David Hammons, whom I missed very much. Thomas Struth was a tremendous absence, since we could unfortunately not count on the help of the gallery he asked to handle the matter. There was the absence of the Brazilian artist Marepe, from Bahia, in the African Itinerary, due to the fact that he was ill and could not participate. Due to the lack of pieces in the collection of the Sao Paulo University Contemporary Art Museum, there were works denied on the eve of the exhibition, like the white Arp for the monochrome room, after it had been indicated that they would be available. But there is also the fantasy of perfection. Ergo the fact that this Biennial remains memorable principally due to the energy that went into it, among the curators and artists of the different sections as well as in the exhibition's relation to the public.

Central Space
The XXIV Sao Paulo Biennial is a discourse of the margins directed towards an encounter in the central space, the space of circulation. There is use made of the margin or for the margin. Symbolically, up to that time, I had not wanted to work in the central space of the Pavilion, which corresponds to a three story space which has always been in great dispute. In the past, the place has been used to exhibit work by Anish Kapoor, Richard Long and Joseph Beuys. It is a very marked space charged with an intense architectural drama. I did not want to significantly exercise power over it. So the criteria became which requests I got for the space: if no one asked for it, no one would show there. Finally, Choi Jeong Hwa showed there, an artist in the "Itineraries symbol 188 \f "Symbol" \s 12 " section, so did Jennifer Allora and Guillermo Calzadilla, a Puerto Rican artist collaborative, and Mischa Kuball, from Germany. At the last minute, a work of Lygia Clark's was taken out of the show, otherwise it would have found a place there. The selection of Choi Jeong Hwa by Apinam Poshyananda, the curator of Itineraries Asia, was very interesting. For the first time the space was dominated from floor to ceiling by Encore, Encore, Encore, a large, gold, inflatable plastic column on which rested a fat figure with his wings open. There was great deal of noise created by Giacometti and Maria Martins on the third floor, a contrast between modernist sculpture and a biting critique of sculpture itself, of the pedestal, grandness, something which certainly upset an elegant, mainstream view.

Transparency Over Sao Paulo
From the outset I had certain ideas about the architecture of the Biennial. We should not occupy the spaces outside the Biennial, adding rooms, etc. We would definitely not have closed rooms, which would have made the Biennial space look similar to Art Fairs, those warrens where people enter a little room, see work, etc. The rooms are a map, they have a cartographic sense, of restoring frontiers, especially where we know that art and ideas circulate through and above frontiers, against or in spite of them. That division of rooms would not exist based on the political territories defined by the national representations, but rather out of an intrinsic, essential and unmovable need of the works themselves: silence, contemplation, isolation, penumbra. In an anti-historicist Biennial in which there are dialogues between art and critique and past and present, transparency is necessary so that there is no rigid separation between the historical and the contemporary. At the same time, we open the windows onto the city of Sao Paulo. The resident of Sao Paulo and the Biennial had always denied the city as a physical fact, and there it was, a Biennial in which the city really appeared: in Staden's sixteenth century book, in Volpi's paintings, in M?rio Andrade's Paulic?a Desvaraida, on the cover of our four books. At the same time, the building was open to the city. That is a very important correlation up to that point because anthropophagy has been a phenomenon of Brazilian culture for centuries, and furthermore it found its formulation in Oswald de Andrade's 1928 "Anthropophagy Manifesto." Transparency also indicates a very precise study of architecture which is akin to sculpting an absence of walls, constructing both architectural absence and presence within the Pavilion. In this context, it was a great privilege to work with Paulo Mendes da Rocha and his great sensibility. His admiration for Oscar Niemeyer made possible the interruption of a temporary internal tradition of architecture in conflict with the Biennial's permanent architectural structure, designed by Niermeyer. In the design of "Itineraries symbol 188 \f "Symbol" \s 12 " the curatorial articulation and interface provided by Ivo Mesquita was very important. This Biennial was to the best of its ability a Biennial where transparency signified that certain physical or mental structures were necessary to play an intermediate role between artist and work, on the one hand, and for the public, on the other, without having that intermediate role play a disturbing or obscuring role.

Cohesions
There were two examples where territorialization was paradoxically important. The first case was Central America and the Caribbean in the national representations. For the first time, the Biennial visited the region, and we tapped Virginia Perez-Ratton, a local curator, to put together an exhibition of artists from the region. This was a singular experience and of close dialogue, and in turn we managed to present a cohesive view of the region, providing a certain visibility while maintaining a conceptual relation with the larger group. The result was significant, and secondly Virginia herself for the first time presented a view of Central America and the Caribbean in an international exhibition of this magnitude, an effort that was commented on by many critics. Another very important point of cohesion was Africa in the "Itineraries symbol 188 \f "Symbol" \s 12 " [CHECK SPELLING] section. On the second story of the Pavilion, the visitor who attended the Contemporary Brazilian Art section around the axis of One Among Others (which was about an abandoned society with intense internal conflicts, about abandoned children, the situation of the Indians, internal migrations, etc.) passed through the African Itineraries. The African continent was not just presented as a formulating force for Brazil, but in addition the Afro-Brazilian suffers economic troubles that can be connected back to the period of slavery and to racist policies. That then appeared as a direct passage, though not so very explicit. We had also thought of making bridges between the contemporary cultures of Africa and Brazil with the presence of Pierre Verger, who figures among the photographers from Mali, like Seydou Ke?ta, and Marepe, an artist from Salvador, whom we had decided from the outset would be in that section together with Lorna Ferguson and Awa Meite. At the last minute, due to illness, Marepe was unable to participate. This frustrated me a great deal because I did not want him to represent the Brazil of African origin in a miserabiliste or victimizing manner, but rather as an agent for dialogue with his African origin.

Anthropologies
A Biennial that has as its center an anthropophagy judged to be one of the processes through which Brazilian culture has been formulated and a discussion of how Brazilian appropriation of cannibalism offers multiple possibilities for interpretation must consider that anthropophagy already implies an antral consumption; it is already equipped with the Greek notion of the human being. There are those who blindly understand cannibalism to be a species of primitivism in which Brazilian culture did not share that kind of attitude. Understanding said "primitivisms" as a negative notion may also be problematic. Multiple customs associated with non-European or non-modern cultures, like fetishism or anthropophagy itself, were great driving ideas in modernity. In them resides Freud's psychoanalysis. The discussion of the fetish object was in Marcel Duchamp, and the relation of art itself may also carry with it implications of fetish. Therefore what is particularly interesting is that the reductivist manner, let us even say the positivistic manner, of relating cannibalism to a retrograde primitivism has been frustrated. Jean de Lery's story about the experience of Antarctic France in Rio de Janeiro, a fundamental text on cannibalism, has such a separation of narrator from his subject that it led L?vi-Strauss to affirm that the tale was a summary of ethnography. L?vi-Strauss even considers that ethnography begins with a reflection on cannibalism. It is with cannibalism that Montaigne begins his reflection on the relativity of human values and produces something akin to a non-Eurocentric reverberation within the discourse of the European philosophy of his time. This is then a group of images of cannibalistic Indians in which Eckhout makes paintings of an ethnographic character. I was very interested in this ethnographic itinerary. We worked with pieces or moments just as fundamental in the formulation of the ethnographic idea, just as if we had no conscience of ethnography, and cannibalism was highly present in that process. There is also the presence of L?vi-Strauss with Tristes Tropiques and other texts that serve to understand Brazil's situation, together with the Brazilian sociologist Florestan Fernandes and his idea of constituting the history of the Indian, the Indian as a subject of history, which also signifies a rupture with the Hegelian historical perspective. What is more, in the Biennial transformed into art work, we presented work where the issue of ethnography was loudly announced. Siqueiros' Ethnography, a painting of a totemic being with a head that is something between military armor and an archeological piece, traces out a certain devouring sense. We arrive here at one of the great moments of the Biennial, that being the installation Anthro/Socio (Rinde Facing Camera), by Bruce Nauman, where the artist specifically speaks about anthropology, a sociology where antagonistic situations have been traced out: "Help me, Hurt me, Feed me, Eat me." "Eat-me" is the request of the individual who wishes to be devoured by knowledge. There was a vertical contamination: ice confronting the tropics in the work of Olafur Eliasson and the brilliant white of Francisco Tropa and Lourdes Castro's installation in the National Representations; the arctic landscape poetry of General Idea's Fin de Sicle (a plush and isopor Caspar David Friedrich) [CHECK SPELLING] in "Itineraries symbol 188 \f "Symbol" \s 12 "; the white equatorial passages of Rever?n and the white monochromes (Oiticica, Barsotti, Mira Schendel, Clark, Fontana, Soto, Klein, Otero, Ohtake, Manzoni, Ryman and Rauschenberg) in the Historical Nucleus; and finally the disastrous sleet shower the night after the opening. Dixit Wittgenstein: "white must be the lightest color in a picture." White is the color which devours and digests all the other colors.

End
The curator always has to anticipate the conceptual and visual relations in an exhibition - the works in the space - for at bottom a curatorial project is an articulated proclamation of the senses and simultaneously a visual revelation of a discourse among diverse symbols. That moment of putting up the exhibition is like a comprehension of the sublime, a personal experience. Thus, at the beginning of the exhibition, I also like very much to see the dismounting of the exhibition and the dispersion of the works. The more monumental the effort to put together this Biennial, I experienced and very much appreciated the process of dispersing the works, since this meant returning the works to their place of origin where they reside on a more permanent basis and are steered in the direction of new meanings. I am alive and stronger than ever, because at last anthropophagy has not so much to do with death as with life, with the inescapable and utterly simple fact that we need the Other in our existential experience.