Associação Cultural Videobrasil

The invisible layer: an oblique gaze at Ayrson Heráclito’s video work

Ayrson Heráclito’s artistic work analyzes the complexity of values pertaining to African heritage in Brazil, while laying bare the colossal size of the historical and conceptual gap regarding the subject. His pieces promote a needed reflection on the black man’s contribution to the formation of the Brazilian identity—I emphasize the use of the term “black man” in its ethnical, cultural, and geographical dimension, instead of the euphemistic “African-Brazilian.”

In a time of “high-definition image,” what are the undefined images in our culture? What is it that is unclear in our history? More than a physical issue related to image quality, there is a process of historic “invisibilization” of certain aspects of Brazilian culture, which little by little unveils an ethic component to what is visible in our everyday lives.

Bearing in mind that the relevant in art is not the media, but rather the strategies that materialize the creative energies of culture, in the last two decades this artist developed a series of works using organic materials present in the culture of Bahia, such as sugar, charque [jerked beef], and dendê [palm oil]. Based on various data (historical, sociological, economic, etc.), his work proposes reflection on several cultural issues pertaining to African-Bahia.

Ayrson Heráclito is one of the leading names in the new generation of artists from Bahia. He holds a degree in artistic education from the Catholic University of Salvador, a master’s degree in visual arts from the School of Fine Arts at the Federal University of Bahia, and is presently a professor with the Federal University of the Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB). Since 1989, he has held four solo exhibitions, participated in more than twenty exhibitions in Brazil and abroad, and won the Braskem Culture and Art Prize, and the Acquisition Prize at the 9th Bahia Art Salon, both in 2002. His artistic activity developed in the field of painting until the early 1990s, when he started exploring other languages, such as installation, performance, photography, and video. A significant share of his production is recorded in a comprehensive catalogue launched in 2003.

Generally speaking, there is an inverse relation between the density of contents dealt with by the artwork and the simplicity of the expressive resources that are used. If, on the one hand, in technical and visual terms, the artist’s construction can be summed up into relatively few elements, on the other hand, from the late 1990s to his latest works, his production has been gradually stripped down from the factual to the conceptual, going from more emotional and literal work, that hits us in a more direct manner, to more sophisticated images, whose subtlety and perceptual timing require slower introspection and apprehension.

The videos Barrueco (2004), Transmutação da carne (2005), Sangue, sêmen e saliva (2006), and As mãos do epô (2007) can be understood as a “tetralogy of slavery.” The four works are linked together by the same theme, also tackled by the artist using other media, however the works differ from each other in some aspects of language and poetic-narrative elements.

The history of the black man, as that of the Indian, is an aspect of Brazilianness whose historiographical references, when compared to the history of the white man, barely surpass an anecdotal character. More than making differences known and valued, the discursive ambiguity of cultural equality has been leading to a phenomenon of “smoothing out” of diversities. Pasteurization of characteristics, folklorization of qualities, and the commerce of trends succeed each other in a frantic consumption of fake innovation, immediate and ephemeral. Despite some significant advances in the cultural policies of the last decade, market pragmatism has sought to level off different cultural components, by using the same parameters to deal with issues that are different in essence. Within this context, exceptional are the cases in which references to black culture extend beyond the exotic and factual.

It is precisely against that that Ayrson Heráclito constitutes his radical proposal, in the original sense of getting to the heart of the question. Our scarce references about slavery are displaced out of the superficiality of everyday life, and into an acutely reflexive conscience. The majority of his work approaches, in one way or the other, the important issue of knowledge formation regarding the black man: the need for a specific set of conceptual and theoretical tools. The notions of time and space, matter and spirit, real and imaginary, as well as the forms of perception and knowledge of the world in black culture are different from (sometimes opposite to) those of our Eastern, Christian conceptual spectrum. We have virtually no knowledge of the logic of black languages, from which part of our daily vocabulary derives, most of all in the state of Bahia, and we are thus depriving ourselves of an important part of the logic of our contemporary culture. We must acknowledge that we seek to understand our reality in a partial, limited, and one-sided manner, with regard to our cultural roots. Furthermore, the politically correct discourse, the situation of being “neither here nor there,” and the unconditional submission to market laws comprise the tripod that characterizes the territory of contemporary sameness.

It is this “non-place” that the art of Ayrson Heráclito rescues us from, by means of a visual poetics that turns the boundary separating ethics from aesthetics into its subject matter for research and debate. To that extent, the work Transmutação da carne is arguably the most explicit. The work presents a performance that was featured at the ICBA in 2000, and then featured again as a video installation in Koblenz, Germany, in 2005. In the action, shown in three écrans, four performers from Bahia, all wearing clothes made of carne-de-sol and charque [both types of sun-dried salted beef], are branded with fire, which is how enslaved black men were identified in Brazil up until the 19th century. The video features a language that oscillates between documentary film and performance recording, showing the performers’ entire action with a voiceover reading a report by the commissioner of the Holy Office to the Reverend Mister Antônio Gonzalez Fraga about “the heresies committed by slave master García de Ávila Pereira de Aragão.” Said heresies detail some of the horrors practiced against the Blacks by the master, as the performers walk on burning coal, recreate the skin marking practice with hot iron, or roast a body wrapped in carne-seca [jerked beef]. The silent action reproduces a small, but eloquent “human cattle” which, in addition to exacerbating the historical memory of these cruel procedures, alludes to current forms of slavery in which other bodies, materialized by the meat clothing, are also negotiated and/or humiliated, from prostitution to sales of human organs.

In Barrueco, a work coauthored by Danillo Barata and based on poem Divisor, by Mira Albuquerque, images convey the history of slavery from the vantage point of the slave ship. The object of artistic investigation is displaced from the skin’s surface to the space of the ship’s hold; the recreation of the pain of the bodies is combined with the psychological torture of the uncertainty of fate. With a poetic language made of simple resources (image superimposition, slow motion, static focus), using a limited repertoire of elements, the narrative timing is marked by the word more than it is by the action, with sober images stemming from the poem as we read it, and the song Black Is the Color, as sung by Nina Simone. A giant stingray (the condor of the Atlantic, which had become a moqueca—typical dish from Bahia—in a performance by the artist) simbolizes the “oceanic black solitude.” A paper boat, metaphor for the frailty of the trip, crosses the sea of dendê pushed by a divine hand. The reflection of performer José Domingos Coni is an antithesis to the myth of Narcissus over the palm-oil sea from which yellow pearls emerge. From the path of suffering, the only thing that can be rescued is the preciousness of survival.

In Sangue, sêmen e saliva, the artist develops the visual theme of the boiling dendê as a metaphor for the black vital fluids boiling after years of submission to the white man. The palm oil that used to be sea, the Atlantic territory of suffering, now represents pulsating life. The same fire that used to heat up the iron to brand the skin now boils the oil that is at times a symbol of resistance and, at others, the ejaculation that ensures the perpetuation of the species. That which, in principle, might allude to a restrained eroticism, on the contrary, seems to symbolize an effort to survive by the black nation. Featuring a structure similar to that of the video installation Transmutação da carne, the work was conceived in order to be shown in three écrans and was also presented in Germany. As in Barrueco, the poetics stirs a permanent collision between the sensorial pleasure of images and the pain caused by the awareness of a past of slavery. It is a double process of forming our artistic sensibility and informing our historical-critical sense; more specifically, it is an inseparable relation between the cultural multiplicity of Bahia and the construction of a conscience of its origins.

In his most recent work, As mãos do epô, the artist evokes the religiosity of African slaves. Based on elements that had already been introduced in previous works, the video introduces the Orishas [gods] by means of hand gestures over the epô [palm oil], a soft support that houses the different actions of the gods, to the sound of the atabaque hand drums. The mythology of the Orishas, a true army of protection against the adversities of the African Diaspora, is a metaphysical explanation for the resistance and survival of black men. The blandness of the palm oil confronts the harshness of the trip across the Atlantic and of survival in the cane fields; the softness of divine gestures neutralizes the wounds of the chains and whips of the masters; out of the palm oil’s intense color emerges the light that illuminates the holds of slave ships and senzalas [slave houses].

Differently from the embodiment of a saint in a religious ritual, the images materialize, by means of gestures of the hands, the characteristics of ten divinities and of Time (which “swings the pendulum of life and writes down the destinies”). Even though the technical and poetic resources are basically the same ones already used in other works, the structuring of narrative timing and the discourse of image make an important quantum leap. To those unfamiliar with the ritual and conceptual repertoire from African-Bahia, As mãos do epô may seem repetitive, as the delicate choreography of the hands in the amorphous scenario of palm oil may go unnoticed. Therefore, I recommend that the video be watched more than once, observing the dialogue between the subtlety of images, the slow action of the hands (always different from one Orisha to the other), and the alternation of word and acting.

It is possible that, for many, that which is perceived as “hermeticism” in the works of Ayrson Heráclito is a reflection of our inability to apprehend or understand the universe to which he refers, precisely due to the lack of a philosophical, ethical, and metaphysical corpus different from the one we are accustomed to. It is, perhaps, this exercise in aesthetic construction and ethical questioning that pushes us in the direction of the painful and paradoxical revelation between what we know that we do not know, and what we wish we had never known.

Holder of a degree in architecture, the Uruguayan Alejandra Hernández Muñoz has lived in Salvador since 1992. The holder of a master’s degree in urban design and pursuing a doctorate in urbanism from the Postgraduate Programme in Architecture and Urban Planning at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), she has taught art history at the School of Fine Arts (EBA) in the university since 2002. She has published several works in the areas of art history, art critic, and architecture. As a curator, she was responsible for the exhibitions Pasqualino Romano Magnavita - 1946-2006: 60 anos de desenho de cidades (Cañizares gallery, EBA/UFBA, April 2006); Visões do labirinto (Casarão at EBA/UFBA, November 2007); and, recently, the exhibition EBA 130 anos - núcleo EBA em processos (ICBA gallery, March 2008), all held in the capital of the state of Bahia, Salvador.