In the 2018 carnival, artist Raul Mourão bought a Brazilian flag on the street and cut out its central circle. Without asking permission from the city council, he hung the flag with holes in the Arcos da Lapa in Rio de Janeiro, in the middle of carnival blocks. “It was an assumed act of vandalism. The political climate was already very strange with the government of Michel Temer and that extreme right appropriating our flag in the streets,” says Raul Mourão in an interview with La Vanguardia.
The holey flag led to the work A nova bandeira brasileira
After the pandemic, Mourão's flags entered the viral phase. Caetano Veloso hung it in his house during the live that he did during confinement with his children, on August 7, 2021. The popular group Baiana System used an adaptation of the Mourão flag for their album Oxeaxeexu (2021 ). “Suddenly, we felt a desire to recover the flag and also to have other flags,” explains Mourão.
Flags in plural. The phenomenon of The new Brazilian flag
Desali's work, one of the four flags included in the exhibition Carolina Maria de Jesus: um Brasil para os brasileiros (Moreira Salles Institute in São Paulo in 2021), denounced the situation of domestic workers, a complete “inheritance of slavery.” ”. For his part, Jefferson Medeiros recreated flags on construction bricks in Embargoed Work (2020). “The bricks refer to the invasion of the Portuguese, who dominated the territory after the genocide,” says the artist.
From the Sambadrome to the museum. The Escola de Samba Estação Primeira da Mangueira surprised the world in 2019 by displaying a gigantic green and pink Brazilian flag at the Sambadrome in Rio de Janeiro. In the center, the motto Indians, blacks and poor replaced the order of progress, a motto inspired by the European positivism of the 19th century. In a parade titled História para ninar gente grande, the carnivalesque Leandro Vieira made visible the marginalized of history. And he won the title. In the midst of Jair Bolsonaro's government, Mangueira's flag became a symbol of resistance and ended up being part of the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art (MAM) in Rio de Janeiro. “The flag was the symbol of that carnival, it spoke of another Brazil that was in struggle. Leandro Vieira's flag arrived at the museum as part of the exhibition we did on Hélio Oiticica, in conjunction with the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP),” says the Basque Pablo Lafuente, artistic director of the MAM, in a video conference.
The Rio museum organized the Saberes da Mangueira cycle, to value the samba school as a space for learning and knowledge. Something that dialogues with Hélio Oiticica's own historical connection with Mangueira. If in 1965 the security guards prevented the artist and residents of the favela (members of the school) from entering the museum, in 2021 the MAM surrendered to the knowledge of the Mangueira. “Although the flag entered in the middle of the process, it ended up dominating the exhibition,” Lafuente clarifies. In turn, the MAM hosted a gigantic flag from the Beijaflor samba school, made by many hands in different places on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro and which worked, in the words of Lafuente, with diversity and multiplicity.
Deconstruct history. The reinvention of the Brazilian flag had a first boom during the dictatorship. In 1968, Antonio Henrique Amaral redesigned the Brazilian flag with American flavors in the piece Boa Vizinhança. In 1970, the black artist Abdias Nascimento subverted the flag by changing the order of progress to okê, okê, okê, okê, a salute to Oxossi, one of the orixás of Afro-Brazilian religions. It is no coincidence that Cildo Meirelles, one of the most active artists against the dictatorship, released a new Brazilian flag in the midst of Bolsonaro's government. The artist published a page in the Folha de São Paulo with a vertical flag with the phrase “the dictatorship is shit.” “All of these flags question which Brazil is the one that causes violence and exclusion, the Brazil that kills. Maybe that's why those who had a relationship with candomblé understand better how the symbol of the flag works," explains Pablo Lafuente, citing the artist Edival Ramosa (author of Uma outra bandeira) and the black and gay dancer Luiz de Abreu (author from the now classic piece O samba do crioulo doido, from 2004).
The motto order e progresso, linked to the flag since 1899, is at the epicenter of the dispute. During the pandemic, visual artist Paulinho Fluxus and Grupo de Ação took to the streets of São Paulo with a red Brazilian flag with the words “gorp” and “medro”, an allusion to an order and progress in reverse. The Afro-Brazilian Flag (2002) by Bruno Baptistelli, made in black, does not contain any words. The modernity and rationality that Brazilian positivists championed in the 19th century to defend the values of the new republic are more in question than ever. “What order is this that has always been bourgeois, exclusive, white, male, Eurocentric? What role do indigenous peoples, women, black people play?” Jefferson Medeiros asks.
