The students wrote a poem inspired by the Museu Bispo do Rosário – Arte Contemporânea, located within the historic Colônia Juliano Moreira, in Jacarepaguá. The space, which over the course of its history has borne different names, has officially paid tribute, since the year 2000, to the man who was its important artist: Arthur Bispo do Rosário. The story of Arthur Bispo do Rosário is, in itself, a powerful reflection on the mechanisms of social exclusion still present in our society. A Black, poor man who spent much of his life confined in an asylum. As a "madman" and an "inmate," he faced the marks of prejudice and marginalization and, even under these circumstances, produced a singular body of artistic work. Check out the poem below:
Museum of Screams
Bispo do Rosário, master of the unsaid He stitched his own scream with his fingers, thread by thread In a world that silences those who think too much He spoke through lines, fabrics, and touch It was art in the thread, it was pain on paper It was madness turning into a brushstroke maker He made the asylum a museum beyond compare Where silence became a spiritual prayer They called him crazy, shut the door tight But his work remained – alive and unright He didn't fit the world, it was too small a place So he built a universe to go further into space He wasn't sick, he was just different Intense, deep, sensitive, present He saw what many pretend they can't see Made an altar for dreaming out of abandonment's decree There where the street has voice and root He embroidered a Brazil no one gave a hoot A Brazil of wound, faith, and scar That screams on canvas what the soul's words are Now they call him genius, call him inspiration But back then they gave him only isolation History ignores until it hurts to bear And only after death does it start to care In the Museum the pulsing memory lives on In every corner truth's repulsion is drawn It's not just art, it's redemption whole It's a scream, it's blood, it's freedom for the soul Because there's beauty in what was left forgotten And there's truth in what was once repressed and rotten And whoever stops to truly feel and sense Knows: more than longing dwells there, immense With a needle of pain and a blessed line's thread It's the story of a man stitching infinity ahead
