Ícaro Lira: Campo Geral

For the last six years, Ícaro Lira (b. 1986, Fortaleza, Brazil) has been analyzing the implications and consequences of political and historical acts through an artistic research that works with the concepts of document, archive, archeology and fiction. His exhibitions have been presented structures similar to small museums, where the artist gathers several fragments of Brazilian history. For his exhibition at Central Galeria de Arte, curated by Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo, he chose to investigate migratory routes departing from his homeland, Ceará, since the decade of 1840.

The first route was followed by people that had abandoned their lands due to droughts and left for the capital in search of work. These people were seen as disrupting elements that testified against the image of beauty, progress and modernism that the State wanted to promote. Concentration fields, where they were kept segregated, were created to avoid their arrival to the city. The second flow was constituted by men that, also fleeing the drought, were tempted to try a better life in the Amazon, their hopes fed by the rubber cycle. The government and religious and oligarchic powers turned the “dry state” in a laboratory for hygienist, compartmental and medical measures for population control, whose effects are still experienced today.

With this premises, Lira traveled, during July and August 2015, towards those directions: from Manaus to Fortaleza, and from Fortaleza to Crato – home of the most isolated concentration field, in the south of the Ceará drought zone. These trips were sold as opportunities to “be part of the system”, but they only kept people on the margins, apart from the “opportunities” offered by modernity. During these traffics, Lira kept a dialogue with Marta Ramos-Yzquierdo, reflecting about migrations, its landscapes (physical and social) and its historical construction.

The core of the show comprises documents, letters and works originated from the artist’s journey in his attempt to investigate these “excluding insertions”.