Caetano Dias: Céu de Chumbo

Céu de Chumbo [Leaden Sky] presents 12 new works created by Caetano Dias (b. 1959, Feira de Santana, Brazil) in several media, such as installation photography, specially for his solo show at Blau Projects.

For his recent production, the artist searched for inspiration in the sertão (a sub-region of the northeast of the country), specially in his incursions to Canudos, in the state of Bahia, where one of the most tragic episodes of Brazilian history took place: between 1896 and 1897, the Canudos War was the centre of a massacre where thousands of sertanejos where murdered, including the leader of the Canudos village, Antônio Conselheiro.

”Adeus terra” [Goodbye land] is a diptych composed of the records of a photographic performance held in the Canudos State Park. The statement attributed to Antônio Conselheiro, “the sertão will turn into sea, the sea will turn into sertão”, inspired the photograph “Entre terras e águas” [Between lands and waters], where we see Caetano throwing land from Canudos at the Porto da Barra, the port where Bahia was founded, and poured water from the sea at Canudos’ soil.

The piece that titles the show is a photographic work where the artist recorded the 360 degree view from a house that was built to shelter the engineers responsible for creating the Cocorobó dam, that covered the former village of Canudos. “Cruzeiro do Sul” [Southern Cross] is a diptych taken at the Vale da Morte [Death Valley], where thousands of people that died in conflicts in the region are buried.

The artist also presents three string musical instruments built by him: “Mulatos I”, “Mulatos II” and “Mulatos III”. For one of them, he uses the military map of the Canudos invasion, published in iconic book “Os Sertões”, by Euclides da Cunha, and unites a chord of the instrument to a bullet from the time of the war. Finally, the exhibition is completed by the works “Sob o céu de 1897”, “Retrato de família” and “Tempo de chumbo”, all from 2015, and the film “Rabeca”, already released to theatres, and showed for the first time as a video-installation in three screens.