Ancient Roman Coin (Augustus 19 AC) Courtesy British Museum © Trustees of the British Museum.
Crabs and Butterflies: Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro
Introduction and video
What holds on to us and what lifts us in life? Where can the butterfly take the crab?”
Janis Clémen, educator
The project Publicness in Art aimed to reflect on the esthetic and ethical complexities of what constitutes publicness in art and how to characterize, explore and think about public engagement with contemporary artistic production focusing on three distinct Brazilian contexts and regions: Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre and Juazeiro do Norte, Sertão.1
The first encounter in the series, entitled “Crabs and Butterflies”, was presented in collaboration with Casa Daros, Rio de Janeiro, in September 2013. Ancient Roman coins from the time of Augustus feature an enigmatic image of a crab holding the wings of a butterfly, interpreted by various scholars as a moral of “Festina Lente” or careful advance.2
G. Simeoni. “Le sententiose imprese”. Lyons, Rouillé, 1561. Courtesy of Warburg Institute Library
The image’s compelling, yet nearly impossible juxtaposition, converging delicacy and strength, offered, particularly in the context of the 2013 protests in Brazil, an enigmatic parallel to the presence on the streets – the lightness of youth and the threatening force of the police. Inspired by this recent history and Casa Daros’ commitment to the transformation of education for art and art for education, this image was used as a catalyst to question contemporary dichotomies such as art and public, art and market, and city and institution, and to explore new possibilities for rethinking the notion of the public in contemporary art and society.
Regional encounter, Publicness in Art: Crabs & Butterflies, September 28th, 2013, Casa Daros. Photos: Delmar Mavignier
Imagem 1:Anita Sobar. Chão no Ar (The Ground’s in the Air). Wheat paste poster intervention brough to Casa Daros for the encounter 2013. Photo: Delmar Mavignier
Imagem 2: Vivian Caccuri. Notebook drawing during the encounter Crabs & Butterflies, 2013
More than 30 artists, critics, educators, and researchers participated. The encounter was filmed and a video, approximately 25 minutes in duration, presented here, was edited comprising a brief compilation of the discussions and quotations from participants. [At present the video is only available in Portuguese].
Many thanks to Casa Daros and our collaborators Bia Jabor, Eugenio Valdés Figueroa and Roberta Condeixa and to all participants: Analu Cunha, Anita Sobar, Barbara Szaniecki, Bianca Bernardo, Beá Meira, Carlos Vergara, Daniel Whitaker, Davi Marcos, Eduardo Machado, Felipe Scovino, Flavia Oliveira, Giuseppe Cocco, Iole de Freitas, Janis Clémen, Joana Mazza, Kátia Maciel, Leandra Plaza, Lígia Dabul, Márcia Ferran, Pablo Ramoz, Pedro Duncan, Pedro Hussak, Ricardo Ventura, Ronaldo Lemos, Sérgio Martins, Tatiana Altberg, Teresa Gil, Sheila Geraldo, and Vivian Caccuri.
A special thank you to Elisa Pessoa for editing the video, Taisa Moreno for her research assistance and event production, and to Barbara Szaniecki, who contributed an essay reflecting on issues raised at the encounter.
We are also especially indebted to former director of art and education at Casa Daros, Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, whose dream of a vibrant, delicious and performative crab dinner combining art, good food and critical discourse was the initial impetus to thinking about crabs and contemporary debates that, in turn, led us to this enigmatic image of the crab and the butterfly. Eugenio also contributed a brief written reflection to Revista MESA on his initial idea reminding us of the critical role of enigma in art and education and of creating diverse, relaxed, informal, and lively contexts for critical conversations on contemporary themes.
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1 Publicness in Art was a series of regional seminars coordinated by Instituto MESA and funded by the 10th edition of the Brazilian National Art Foundation´s (Funarte) grant initiative, Networks of Encounters in the Visual Arts. The series aimed to reflect on the ethical and aesthetic complexity and public roles and possibilities of contemporary artistic production in three distinct national regions and contexts: a) city and periphery of Rio de Janeiro/State of Rio de Janeiro b) Porto Alegre/State of Rio Grande de Sul and c) Juazeiro do Norte, Cariri/Sertão region/State of Ceará. Each regional seminar assumed a distinctly different format and thematic focus and was planned in collaboration with local institutions, artists, curators, and educators: Rio de Janeiro with Casa Daros and the institution’s manager of art and education, Bia Jabor, former director of art and education Eugenio Valdés Figueroa, and Art is Education program coordinator, Roberta Condeixa; Porto Alegre with independent curator/educator Mônica Hoff, also former coordinator of the pedagogic project of the Mercosul Biennial Foundation and one of the curators of the 9th Mercosul Biennial and the artists/educators Diana Kolker and Rafa Éis, members of Coletivo E, who also participated in the pedagogic project programs in this and other biennials; Juazeiro do Norte with Cariri Cultural Center of the Bank of the North East and the manager of the Cultural Center of the Bank of the North East, Fortaleza, Jacqueline Medeiros, the artist José Rufino, the director of the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói (MAC) and Federal Fluminense University (UFF) art professor, Luiz Guilherme Vergara, researcher in popular culture focusing on the Sertão region and director of the Arts Center at UFF, Leonardo Guelman, and the curator and director of the Scottish Sculpture Workshop, Nuno Sacramento, as well as the participation and collaboration of Felipe Caixeta, researcher of the Sertão region and masters student at UFF and the videographer Daniel Leão. Subsequently, a national seminar was organized in collaboration with MAC that brought together regional perspectives and discussed questions arising from the debates in each locale. In addition to the institutional and regional collaborators other national seminar invitees included: researchers Sabrina Marques Parracho Sant’anna and Tania Rivera; critic/curator Frederico Morais, who spoke for the first time publicly on the 1997 inaugural edition of the Mercosul Biennial; the artist Katie Van Scherpenberg who performed 14+1: sal grosso sobre areia (14 + 1 sea salt on sand) an invention on the Boa Viagem beach next to the museum; and the collective ¡NoPasaran!, who presented their film É tudo mentira (Everything is a Lie).
2 W. Deonna.“The Crab and the Butterfly: A Study in Animal Symbolism”. Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, Vol. 17, No. 1/2 (1954), pp. 47-86. Published by: The Warburg Institute. (Accessed June 2013)
