SundaysofCreation

The Domingos da Criação were a watershed in biographies and marked Brazilian art in its specific way of relating to a city's population. An idea by the critic and art historian Frederico Morais, the events that took over MAM-RJ in the summer of 1971 may have originated from another action he had promoted (with support from the newspaper Diário de Notícias), back in July 1968. Called Arte no Aterro – Um mês de Arte Pública, a group of artists, Mangueira samba dancers, poets and performers occupied the area of the Japanese Pavilion. Hélio Oiticica, one of the invited artists, promoted, together with Rogério Duarte, the collective action titled Apocalipopótese, with collective performances that ranged from Lygia Pape's Ovos to Antônio Manuel's Urnas Quentes. With a large popular turnout, the event marked the period as one of the last public acts of art before the establishment of Institutional Act No. 5.

Image description: This is a photograph of a group of people in an outdoor setting. In the center, there is a male figure with short hair and sunglasses. He is wearing a white shirt with colorful details and a patterned scarf. In the background, several other people are present, some in light-colored clothing and others with accessories such as sunglasses. The scene appears to take place during the day, with a clear sky and leafless trees in the background.

This experience of occupying public spaces with artists and their works expanded when, in January 1971, Frederico de Morais proposed to MAM the series of events entitled Domingos da Criação (Sundays of Creation). The step forward compared to 1968 was the introduction of the public as co-creator of works and activities. For each day (the last Sunday of every month), Frederico proposed a theme. The first took place on January 24th, called "Um domingo de papel" ("A Sunday of Paper"), in which industries donated cardboard bags, rolls of newsprint, toilet paper, and other items scattered across the museum's gardens to be used by artists and the public. In the following months, with the same dynamic of publicly offered materials, there were "o domingo por um fio" ("Sunday by a Thread", thread of different materials), "Domingo de tecido" ("Sunday of Fabric"), "Domingo terra a terra" ("Down-to-Earth Sunday", in which trucks dumped tons of sand, lime, cement, gravel, crushed stone, clay, etc.), "O som do domingo" ("The Sound of Sunday"), and finally "Corpo a corpo do domingo" ("Sunday's Body to Body").

Image description: This is a photograph of an urban scene with several people gathered in an open space. On the left side, we see two women walking, one holding an object in her hands. In front of them, more people are walking toward the left. In the center, a woman is seen from behind, wearing yellow pants and a white blouse. On the right, a group of people is sitting on a concrete staircase, talking and interacting with one another. The background features a sloped concrete structure, which appears to be part of a building or construction. The image has a slightly faded color tone, suggesting it may have been taken in an earlier period.

Young artists, seasoned artists, visitors, people from all backgrounds and mindsets formed the mass that understood the idea of openness that the Sundays invoked. All together, with no hierarchies defining the creative process, they produced lasting marks of freedom in acute times of repression. The Sundays have the force of an experience, since, to this day, when speaking of those days in 1971 at the Museu de Arte Moderna, what resonates is that expanded field of life, art, and politics.