Associação Cultural Videobrasil

Born in the emblematic year of 1968, when the world reached boiling point with the defense of new values and habits, Ayrson Heráclito would later put to boil, in new pots, concepts, traditions, and beliefs of Brazilian culture. Immersed in a reality made up of intellectual references from childhood—his mother used to recite poems by Castro Alves—, the artist incorporated fusion, a multidisciplinary approach to understanding the world, and a taste for looking at facts from independent vantage points from an early age. Mixing things up was the rule, rather than the exception. Since always, he drank the sap of African Brazil that features in his works—his father, a black man, was a sergeant with the Military Police. His mother, a supporter of the abolitionist cause, white, was a history teacher.

The taste for analyzing the past was acquired at home under the influence of his mother, as described by Heráclito: “It was through her voice and the fantastic images in her books that I realized I was an artist. That left a deep mark, not only in me but also in two of my six brothers and sisters, who are historians.”

In the 1970s, the family moved to the city of Vitória da Conquista, where the boy—an avid reader of books about the oeuvre of great names in the history of art—would delve deeper into the universe of knowledge. “In high school, I had a very special history teacher, the daughter of [playwright] Nelson Rodrigues, who provided me with the foundation for critical thinking and a social conscience, and a seductive arts teacher who, in addition to encouraging the practices of drawing and painting, informed me, by means of Seurat’s work, that there is also a fine line between art and reflection,” he says.

As an amalgam of all these influences, tracing back origins, seeking unexpected connections, and coming up with new interpretations for the country’s official events were tasks to which the artist from Bahia dedicated himself in his academical “baptism of fire,” a project that ensured him the title of master in visual arts from the Federal University of Bahia, in 1998. Heráclito proposed to decode the oeuvre of Gregório de Mattos using installations in Segredos no Boca do Inferno: arte, história e cultura baiana.

One decade earlier, the professor with the Federal University of the Recôncavo da Bahia, who also holds a license in artistic education, had attracted the exhibition circuit’s attention for the first time, as he won both the specialized and popular jury prizes with the works he submitted to the 1st Metanor/Copenor Bahia Visual Arts Salon, in 1986. The works were pictorial translations of his reflections on poverty, the social meaning of Christianity, and knowledge as power.

Performance became part of Heráclito’s career as he entered college, also in the 1980s. The artist, who at age eleven would already introduce himself as a “communist militant,” now had new media, languages, and philosophical tools to make his art into “any kind of being,” as he states in the interview published in this Dossier.

Among his performance work, Transmutação da carne, presented in the year 2000 at the ICBA in Salvador, presents accounts of acts of torture committed by farm owners against their slaves, as men wearing pieces of flesh brand and are branded by fire. The “holocaust of slavery,” as the author defines it, also sets the tone in Barrueco, a video shot in 2004 that was selected for the 15th Videobrasil, held in 2005. In the Festival’s following edition, in 2007, the artist would be awarded for his As mãos do epô.

Heráclito brings to the table dendê [palm oil], life in Colonial Brazil, jerked beef, sugar, fish; sperm and blood, body, pain, rapture, apartheid, and dreams of freedom. As a professor, he also walks away from safe, much-trodden territories to champion the teaching of art as a catalyst against juvenile violence. At the institutions he taught in, his “art-activity” classes have replaced the “artistic education” common to most school curricula.

Currently, the artist is working on three creations that he should execute between this year and the next, all involving performance and video: he is going to make dendê rain over the city of Salvador in A chuva de epô; recreate one of the most important rituals in the Candomblé religion, in Bori; and organize a mass featuring members of afoxé group Filhos de Gandhi.