Tropicália is used to describe the explosion of cultural creativity in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1968 as Brazil’s military…

Tate Modern – London

Hélio Oiticica

Until Summer 2019

Tropicália

    Tropicália is used to describe the explosion of cultural creativity in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in 1968 as Brazil’s military regime tightened its grip on power.

    Many of the artists, writers and musicians associated with Tropicália came of age during the 1950s in a time of intense optimism when the cultural world had been encouraged to play a central role in the creation of a democratic, socially just and modern Brazil. Nevertheless, a military coup in 1964 had brought to power a right-wing regime at odds with the concerns of left-wing artists. Tropicália became a way of exposing the contradictions of modernisation under such an authoritarian rule.

    The word Tropicália comes from an installation by the artist Hélio Oiticica, who created environments that were designed to encourage the viewer’s emotional and intellectual participation. Oiticica called them “penetrables” because people were originally encouraged to enter them. They mimic the improvised, colourful dwellings in Rio de Janeiro’s favelas, or shanty towns. The lush plants and sand help to convey a sense of the tropical character of the city. When Oiticica exhibited the work, he also included live parrots.

    From its beginning, Tropicália was seen as a re-articulation of Anthropophagia (“cannibalism”), an artistic ideology promoted by Oswald de Andrade.

(www.tate.org.uk. Adaptado.)