HélioOiticicainMangueira

Born in Rio de Janeiro in 1937, Hélio Oiticica was still a young artist when two of the leading avant-garde movements of the 1950s took place. In Grupo Frente, in 1954, Hélio was only 17 years old and was still one of the youngest students in Ivan Serpa's courses at MAM. By the time of Grupo Neoconcreto, in 1959, Oiticica was already past 20 and was beginning a trajectory in the city that would definitively mark the world stage of visual arts. While his work matured in the early 1960s with pieces such as the Relevos Espaciais, the Penetráveis, and the Bólides, it was in 1964 that an encounter with Rio's geography changed his life forever.

A resident of Jardim Botânico, Oiticica worked with his father, José Oiticica Filho, an entomologist scientist, at the Museu Nacional. His frequent trips to Quinta da Boa Vista, São Cristóvão, had already created in his life a closeness with Morro da Mangueira. In the 1964 carnival, Hélio Oiticica saw for the first time, in a Samba School warehouse, his own assembly-work for carnival. Amílcar de Castro, a visual artist who had worked with him during the neoconcrete movement, was at the time doing pioneering work creating the allegories for Estação Primeira de Mangueira. Jackson Ribeiro, Amílcar's assistant, called Hélio to come see the work.

Image description: This is a photograph of a carnival parade. In the foreground, three people are dancing. The central figure, dressed in a green and pink suit, stands out. To their left, there are two women wearing colorful outfits, including a pink jacket and green pants. To the right, a woman dances in a pink and green dress. In the background, a crowd of onlookers watches the event, seated or standing. The setting suggests a festive and lively atmosphere typical of carnival.

For Hélio Oiticica, the allegories and the universe of carnival are the beginning of the end of a reflective life, of a state of calm and certainties in Rio de Janeiro's bourgeois world. Starting with rehearsals at the former Companhia de Cerâmica Brasileira factory, the sophisticated artist dives headfirst into the world of the favela and samba. Unknown to the vast majority of the hillside community's residents, Oiticica earns the nickname "russo" and becomes a professional samba dancer, forming with friends the "trio do embalo maluco."

Image description: The image is a color photograph of a man smiling while carrying two large objects. On the left, he holds a rectangular light brown fabric object, and in front, he holds a red square object with black text. The background shows a green landscape with trees and a view of distant buildings.

Although he had always had a frank relationship with the popular universe of Brazilian culture – soccer, samba, Rádio Nacional, Emilinha and Marlene, etc. – visiting favelas was a practice that lay outside the universe of social references of Oiticica and other intellectuals of his generation. During this period, the relationship of Rio's middle class with the culture and daily life of the populations of the city's hills and favelas showed some clearly demarcated nuances between revolutionary utopias, class prejudices, and welfare policies on the part of the State. At the same time, the turn from the 1950s to the 1960s was a moment of transition in the representation of Rio's hills among the city's inhabitants and its rulers. Becoming increasingly complex, life in the hills came to hold other possibilities of representation beyond merely that of a “cradle of tradition,” a “breeding ground for criminals,” or a bucolic place inhabited by a humble and resigned population.

Image description: This is a photograph of an indoor setting with a person lying on the floor. The person is lying on their back, arms crossed above their head. Around them, there are various pieces of furniture and decorative objects. On the left, there is a small table with a blue surface and a white pedestal base. In the center, there are three red plastic containers with black lids. On the right, there is a glass vase with water and floating leaves inside it. In the background, there is a structure of metal bars with colorful fabric panels hanging from it, forming a kind of tent or camping structure. The predominant color in the image is red, combined with shades of yellow and beige in the panels of the structure.

The art of Hélio Oiticica, at this time, takes a definitive turn toward the radical questioning of the work/spectator relationship and its ramifications – creation/appropriation, authorship/consumption, etc. The Parangolés, works created out of direct contact with the Samba School and its dance, brought in their first movement the fusion between the collective and the individual. They were banners and capes in which the playful use of the body of whoever performs the work makes it a collective asset, shifting it from single authorship to a partnership with anyone.

Oiticica and Mangueira formed, just like the partners who wore his Parangolés, an "individual-collective," a contradiction in terms that says a lot about the trance-like state the artist lived through during this period. By dissolving himself into the everyday life of the samba school, the criminal underworld, and the dive bars of Buraco Quente, Oiticica reformulates his idea of collective and individual, becoming a foreigner in order to draw closer to the strange, renouncing the familiar in order to familiarize himself with the other. In a socially and racially divided city like Rio, this step was, and remains to this day, controversial and revolutionary.