Pai dos burros
Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade receives the installation “Pai dos burros”, by Teresa Berlinck and Julio de Paula, from 20 August, 2016. Curated by Maria Catarina Duncan, an immersive work revisits the classical dictionary of Brazilian folklore with a series of drawings and sound piece.
What are the forms incorporated by culture in contemporaneity? How is knowledge transmitted today? What spaces hold the habits and behaviours that constitute what we call folklore? Founded by these queries, the installation Pai dos Burros, by the artists Teresa Berlinck and Julio de Paula is composed of 400 drawings and a sound piece that revisits and recreates the Dictionary of Brazilian Folklore, by Luís da Câmara Cascudo. Opposing contemporary tools of memory and the internet, the work will be exhibited from 20 August at Oficina Cultural Oswald de Andrade, curated by Maria Catarina Duncan.
Pai dos Burros is a popular Brazilian expression that designates the word dictionary as the ‘Father of the ignorant’. The research for this project begun in 2013, based on the Brazilian Folklore Dictionary. Still referenced today, it was published by the historian, lawyer and ethnologist Câmara Cascudo in 1954 and compiles cultural practices and traditions from the whole country, from customs to legends, superstitions, costumes, food, drinks, beliefs, musical styles and dances, among others. Interlocutor of Mário de Andrade and one of the main intellectuals of his time, Cascudo was a scholar without erudition. He used to say we are agents and reagents, carriers and interpreters of overlapping cultures.
Trailing parallel paths, the authors of Pai dos Burros propose to revisit and “update” the Dictionary entrances. The 400 drawings made by Teresa Berlinck have as support the pages of a 1962 edition of the book, complete and dismantled. Researching on Google Images the entries highlighted on the top of each page of the dictionary, the artist encounters and selects images that can be bases for her drawings, made by observation with nankin ink, brush and feather on the lose book pages. Coming from previous experiments using books as support for her art work, the artist encounters online Brazilian traditions that are still lively and pulsating; but also takes advantage from the layers and symptomatic mistakes from a moment of transition between forms of access and archiving of culture and memory.
The multiphonic sound piece in 10 channels was created by Julio de Paula and is based on entries chosen from the Dictionary. The artist intention is to (re)translate into sound language a repertoire that is native to oral tradition. Composed of 50 fragments poetic-musical, it articulates interviews and testimonies, noises, musical fragments and sound landscapes extracted from field recordings, sessions with invited musicians and historical archives. Quotes by Câmara Cascudo, the chanting of a beggar from Juazeiro do Norte and the sound of a vereda path recorded in Minas Gerais are among the multiple fragments used by the artist, who studies popular culture since the 1990’s.
Pai dos Burros is completed by the juxtaposition of the drawing-pages and the sound piece in the exhibition space, which incites associations between references of text, images and sonorities, illuminating the reinterpretations of Câmara Cascudo’s work. Apart from questioning the forms of perception regarding Brazilian traditional culture and the meanings or associations with what we call folklore, the work touches on themes such as originality, authorship and appropriation, by articulating relations with books, reference archives, individual memories and accumulation of information on networks.
“Popular culture lies in the ways people feel, live, eat, speak, consequently, it’s a plural topic, subject to transformation and in constant negotiation”, says the curator Maria Catarina Duncan. “As they leaned over the Dictionary of Brazilian Folklore, Teresa Berlinck and Júlio de Paula board onto an exercise of re-signification, unfolding myths, gods, culinary, music, expressions, utensils and superstitions that belong to the imaginary of Brazilian people. Through drawing and sound, we see and listen every word alive in Pai dos Burros”.
