Luso Abuso, Brazil, 2019.
Portuguese caravels on colony’s sand
Analog photography.
Portuguese caravels continue to be seen off the coast of Brazil. Was it a sign of ill omen? Simple signs of a return to the grotesque, seductive shapes that bring us beauty and ambiguity. As if little dots of history blinked at us announcing danger and repetition.
They remind us of the Great Navigations, the adventures of cowardly heroes, rapes and invasions narrated in history books with unquestionable bravery. The present times, as well as the past, are marked by the retrogression of the rights of the original peoples, the calamitous environmental policies, the authorized machismo, the bubbling femicide, the thinking centered on the weapon (War), the fixation on the phallus, the return to Brazil Cologne. There is nothing more phallic than the arrival of Europeans in Brazilian lands.
The Caravels were war vessels, an innovation by the Portuguese who first equipped them with cannons and modified sails to cut the wind in a more dynamic way and get closer to the coast and guarantee conquests. They were a fundamental weapon in great navigations.
Portuguese Caravel is also the name of the most poisonous cnidarian.
Alluring, these shapes don't show the danger they are. Beautiful shapes, rare colors, so natural they look like plastic. Manly symbol, almost pornographic like a used condom that withers before morality in the sands of Brazil.
This work was exhibited for the first time as an urban intervention, in the port area of Rio de Janeiro. The region, known today as “Little Africa”, received an estimated 600,000 enslaved Africans and was one of the most active slave market in the world.
Luso Abuso also had a small print run in postcard format, experimenting with other ways of invading, arriving and reaching through Postal Art.
It also gained a version with golden frames referring to what could be framed in the colonial period.