Since 1969 the Museum of Modern Art – MAM – in São Paulo has hosted the art event, Panomara of Brazilian Art, considered one of the most important art events after the Biennale of São Paulo in past decades. Now that its brightness has shone down, its relation with the art market is quite different. However, its 34th edition innovates as it reaches out to respond to a call, bringing the environmental question to the table. What’s more, it dives into the collective of memory. Very suitable for the present moment, instead of a new country and an uncertain future, the audience discovers a land that corrects the “quaint and stereotypical” notes of foreign drawing artists who came to Brazil more than a century ago.
Marcel Proust was one of the first intellectuals to signal the importance of memory in the creative process. The rescue of territories by means of aesthetic practices is imposed differently between artists working in different contexts. The environment features as the theme of the Panorama with the dialectic between six contemporary artists and works of people who inhabited the Brazilian coast in prehistoric times, all in order to reflect upon the unsettling situation on the planet.
Curated by Aracy Amaral and Paulo Miyada, the collective show “mixes up” temporality. As noted by Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), the memory of the past can lead to dangerous discoveries and the established society seems to have grown apprehensive about the subversive contents of collective memory. Polished stones produced between 4000 BC and 1000 BC by sambaqueiros, ancient inhabitants of the coastline, which today stretches out all the way from the south-eastern Brazil to Uruguay, are confronted with contemporary works of established artists. In order to rebuild the past tinted by mental and emotional processes, Aracy preferred to rely on mature artists to confront the emerging artists swarming in the largest exhibitions of today. “The young are for projects such as Directions of Arts; I preferred to work with more experienced artists.”
By making use of this tool, the curator examines the tradition and the contemporary with the contributions of ancient indigenous cultures in confrontation with the counterculture of the metropolis of ever changing values. “I have long wanted to do an exhibition of this nature.” She now realizes her desire by gathering a representative collection of 60 lithic pieces coming from several Brazilian museums. In the 80s, Aracy had the first contract with the French archaeologist André Prous, who lives in Brazil and researches coastal sambaquis, complexes formed by tons of shells. “He is also studying artefacts found in them, the zeolites, or stones in the shape of animals,” explains the curator. 
The visitors attending the exhibition on any Sunday had the opportunity to witness the reaction and misinformation of the public about the sambaquis, these mountains of shells amalgamated with debris of society. However, the Latin America where the history and memory speech manifests more clearly, grounded in a scientific basis whose works point to an unusual reflection on the individual and society.
Thousands of years separate two parts of the exhibition and Cao Guimarães is who best translated the analogy between these two times. Camera in hand, he headed to the Santa Catarina coast and directed Filme em Anexo, a video record of intricate relationships between internal bodies and operational structures of urban space, where there are still some of the last sambaquis that have been spared from depredation. The video addresses the permanence of shellfish farming in the region. The Wishful Thinking installation, of Miguel Rio Branco, shows us, subliminally, that he now wishes to spend time with nature, without entangling in the superficial environment that contaminates the art circuit, noticeable even before Aracy confesses her desire.
Environmental villains of the contemporary era, the tons of plastics disposed in nature are the central element of one of the works of Bern Reale. In the video performance Hábito she seeks to unmask the postmodern aesthetics of the environmental negotiations by sewing plastic bags that wrap suits of politicians and also involve bodies of victims of urban violence in a morgue.
Quoting Pasolini, there is no neutral file, every file is complicit, preceding a side-taking in relation to another hegemony at stake. Death, disposal and termination of life cycles are arranged on the floor in the work of the São Paulo artist Erika Verzutti, entitled Cemitério. The installation consists of sculptural pieces that did not work out and are disposed of – a striking analogy of the current migration process. The works of painter Pitágoras from Goias may be the watershed within this urban and rural environment configuration, carrying traces of cave paintings and the vigorous, underground, energetic effects of urban neo-expressionist brush strokes, which convey life meanings.
The highlight of the show is the expedition of Cildo Meireles to the summit of Pico da Neblina, sacred site of the Yanomami Indians. There is a game of movement, relays, junctions between the distant – out of reach of the viewer – and the images displayed. The Indians were involved in this endeavour, held by photographer Edouard Fraipont. In 1969, at the age of 21 years, Cildo Meireles designed a series of drawings on graph paper, which he called physical art, as their execution required traveling and interaction with geographic spaces. This is one of the projects in Mutações Geográficas: Fronteira Vertical, which is part of a performance held in expeditions in Yaripo (meaning the highest point, in the Yanomami language) or holy mountain, in Parque da Neblina, which raises over the maximum altitude of Brazil by a few centimetres. This project, now incorporated in the program of this exhibition, is documented in photo and video and is presented alongside other projects.
Time reconstructs itself over and over again in different points and brief pulses of temporality, which we call events. Often imperceptible, singular moments that come and go. It resembles the result of the contact with this variety of ecosystems in our lands: Amazon, caatinga, cerrado, the Atlantic forest, sandbanks, fields, woods of pines, Pantanal. Quoting the author Pierre Restany, with Sepp Baraneck and Frans Krakcberg of Manifesto do Rio Negro, “the future is our memory, it is what the stoics call destiny”. This enigmatic feature is made evident in the set of works of this Panorama, which establishes the substance of time and performs the trick of subtracting temporality from time. This is the purpose of each one of the works here, fortunately.
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