A exposição bufê dinamite marked the one-year anniversary of CAROÇO, and I had the joy of participating as curator, alongside Flavussh and Pauli Carvalho, who also participated as artists. As curator, I worked on the selection of artists and, more intensely and directly with each of them, on the choice of works and, finally, on the exhibition design, aiming to compose a group show that—despite including sixteen artists with unique research practices—would display aesthetic and conceptual cohesion. Below, some photographs of the exhibition (courtesy of Estúdio Em Obra), as well as the curatorial text I composed for the event.
bufê dinamite
Celebrating the one-year anniversary of CAROÇO, an independent project for the fostering and dissemination of contemporary art in São Paulo, Brazil, bufê dinamite brought together 16 young artists from São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro to savor the bittersweet aftertaste of nostalgia surrounding the celebration of childhood. Birthday parties—moments of joy and festivity on the surface—are often symbolic memories of painful pressures demanding the conforming of the infinite possibilities of youthful becoming into the molds imagined by social institutions. Family, school, and work—traditional sources of violent physical and epistemological domination along the axes of gender, class, and generation—have, since the last century, been forced to compete with a third identity-producing element: mass consumption. The growing ubiquity of industrialized products, accompanied by the various media created to guarantee that we remember their trademarks—from radio to the internet to TikTok, from animated series and their characters to the mascots of global corporations—ensured the continuous obfuscation of the role exercised by family narratives or religious morals in the formation of individual personality. Parables and the memories of ancestors came to share space, in our self-narratives, with animation scripts designed to sell plastic dolls manufactured under dimensions specified in copyright licensing contracts.
If this movement is sometimes seen as liberation—I am more myself insofar as I choose which Disney cinematic universe I should follow—it seems evident that the uncritical consumption of affects orchestrated by advertisers can be as empty or harmful as in the case of past institutions. Far from turning into passive digesters of life lessons written to maximize the value of the airtime reserved for toy advertising, or, on the contrary, adopting a blasé antagonistic distancing toward what is read as “popular” (a category emptied of meaning already for decades), the artists of bufê dinamite instead bring us a subversive and neo-sincere reappropriation of corporate folklores which, if left alive as affective memories, are revalidated only after a complex and transformative digestion, one that passes through (and surpasses) the simplistic cynicism of irony and the paralyzing dissociation of post-irony in relation to the consumption-identification object: thus is formalized the homemade-industrial flavor of Happy Meals™ as an aesthetic, but corrupted to serve narratives other than those imagined by their marketing scriptwriters. Just as our ancestors, we stitch and wear the skins of our hunt, now collected from supermarket aisles. We have replaced the sanctioned images of our idols with pirated versions, our own reinterpretations that at last serve the representation of our own image. With their paintings, sculptures, installations, and performances, the artists of bufê dinamite lend shape to the diffuse collective unconscious of a generation marked by the collapse of geographic and semiotic barriers that has made the postmodern condition and the dissolution of tradition into fundamental facts of existence.
- date June 2023