MUSEUM OF CONTEMPORARY ART, NITERÓI
The dispute in the realm of the symbolic is fundamental to dispute the city. The symbolic institutes the real.
Jailson de Souza e Silva1 Carlos Vergara smiled. Generous, astute, at home amongst the group of botanists, environmentalists, health practitioners, researchers, and cultural producers, the artist suggested that an exhibition can be a “megaphone for contemporary concerns.”2 Vergara’s exhibition Sudário (Shroud), held at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Niterói (MAC) from December 14th 2013 to March 9th 2014 brought together decades of the artist’s travels in the form of photographs and abstract monotype prints made in-situ on handkerchiefs capturing the singularities of place.
As part of the exhibition, Farmácia Baldia de Boa Viagem proposed another type of journey, an experimental shroud-like retrieval via a tactile, curative and collective investigation of the medicinal plants growing in the “baldios” – abandoned land or empty lots - around us.3 Taking the name of Boa Viagem from the region directly surrounding the museum, an area that also includes the historic island of Boa Viagem, registered on Portuguese maps since the 1500s, and the favela community of Morro do Palácio, the project enacted a kind of poetic medicinal botany, drawing attention to the mostly unseen and unrecognized therapeutic resource on our doorstep.
1 [Author translation. Portuguese original: “A disputa no campo do simbolico é fundamental para disputar a cidade. O simbolico institui o real.”] Jailson de Souza e Silva, “The Authentic New Caricoca: Interview with Jailson de Souza e Silva, director Favela Observatory,” Revista MESA, no. 1: Territories and Practices in Process (March 2014) http://institutomesa.org/RevistaMesa/the-authentic-new-carioca/?lang=en Jailson de Souza e Silva is a professor of geography at the Universidade Federal Fluminense and director of the Observatório de Favelas (Favela Observatory) based in the Maré favela in Rio de Janeiro. He also discusses the “symbolic instituting the real” in Jailson de Souza e Silva, “As periferias roubam a cena cultural carioca,” in De baixo para cima eds. Eliane Costa e Gabriela Agustini (Rio de Janeiro: Aeroplano, 2014) 55-78, 55. Also see his presentation for “Zonas limites: arte, cultura e agenciamento”
(Limit Zones: Art, Culture and Agency) for the seminar Reconfiguring the Public: Art, Pedagogy, Participation organized by the Experimental Nucleus of Education and Art at MAM-RJ, November 2011. (Portuguese only https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BVtoaMOoqGo&index=7&list=PLO-GRBBoQZrjDOO0B7xSTsSu40BYBE48m
2 Farmácia Baldia project meeting November 4th, 2013.
3Translator Stephen Berg translates “terrenos baldios” as “empty lots” in his translation of Hélio Oiticica’s “Position and Program (July 1966)” where the artist describes “baldios” as “much more beautiful […] than Rio’s pathetic Aterro da Glória type parks.” Hélio Oiticica: The Body of Color ed. Mari Carmen Ramirez (Houston/London: Museum of Fine Arts Houston/Tate Publishing, 2007) 320-322, 321. The question of baldios will be explored later in the chapter.
What is art’s place here? British critic Adrian Rifkin, musing on the nature of the artistic profession, once remarked that being an artist is a sentence in making visible.4 Rifkin’s phrasing adroitly captures the internal and external creative compulsions and demands of the artistic process. For the Farmácia project Vergara opened up this process of making visible to collective possibility, chance and complicity. As a result, a curious kind of artistic contemporaneity began to transpire – a wholly processual, multifarious and collective engagement with place-making and medicinal plants where entirely different knowledge bases and autonomies were being played out and considered within the same network of questions and strategies. Art’s role here is modest, as Vergara suggests “something extra,” but it is also, arguably, newly radical.5 Promoting and occasionally achieving a third space – a poetic common ground – an in-between the fields of science, botany, medicine, and community health, art in this context is about “awakening the complicity to make.”6 It is a striving to connect worlds, where the artist no longer has the big picture. Indeed, no one does.
Vergara first conceived the Farmácia Baldia as an art installation for the Arte Cidade (City Art 3 Project) in São Paulo in 1997. Organized by Nelson Brissac Peixoto, City Art presented public art interventions along a five-kilometer stretch of an abandoned city railway line including the warehouses of the formerly prosperous Matarazzo Industries that dominated the economic history of São Paulo from the late 19th century until the 1970s.7 On an initial scouting of the area Vergara noted the presence of medicinal plants. So he invited a friend, landscape architect, Oscar Bressane, to map the plants in the vicinity, resulting in an impressive list of 52 species. In turn, botanists from the University of São Paulo identified an additional 30 species.8 This inspired the artist to poetically describe this therapeutic treasure trove of abandoned city wilderness as a Farmácia Balida. The resulting artwork combined large-scale drawings made directly onto the derelict factory walls with sculptural installations of dried plants, as well as bamboo standards with colored fabrics placed at plant locations categorized according to therapeutic use. Interestingly, most of the plants identified were not native to Brazil or the São Paulo region, but rather to Africa, Asia and Europe, the result of the area’s proximity to the railway.9 The Farmácia recovered these forgotten vestiges of transcontinental trade, industry and transport and pointed to the therapeutic presence growing unnoticed in the city’s midst.
4 Adrian Rifkin, “Artistic Education of the Public,” e-flux (February 2010) http://www.e-flux.com/journal/artistic-education-of-the-public/ [Sentence (my italics) making visible (Rifkin’s)].
5 Interview with the artist, February 5th, 2014.
6 Ibid.
7 Nelson Brissac Peixoto ed. Intervenções urbanas: arte, cidade (São Paulo: SESC, 2002) 297.
8 Celso Fioravante, “Carlos Vergara abre sua ‘farmácia baldia,’” Folha de São Paulo, October 25th, 1997 http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1997/10/25/ilustrada/9.html
9 Ibid.
More than sixteen years later, on the occasion of his exhibition at MAC, Vergara thought to (re) present the Pharmacy project. An initial meeting paralleling the first stages of the project in São Paulo was held in October 2013 with MAC’s director/curator Luiz Guilherme Vergara (no relation), the artist, myself and four botanists and pharmacologists specializing in medicinal plants.10 The discussion focused on a project of mapping medicinal plants in the area. Then, in a contagious wave of affectivity and opportune confluences, a month later, the project became the Farmácia Baldia de Boa Viagem, inaugurating a collective of botanists, educators, artists, cultural producers, doctors, pharmacologists, administrators, and community health agents. In the process critical networks in need of a new injection of energy were reinvigorated particularly between MAC’s Arte Ação Ambiental initiative, the city of Niterói’s Family Doctor Program (a Cuban inspired preventive health initiative of outpost clinics in low income communities), and the museum’s cultural community center satellite MACquinho (“little MAC”) in the Morro do Palácio favela, a short distance away.
The collective was vested in creating a kind of living clinical archive. This would draw on both scientific expertise and popular know-how in its mapping and identifying medicinal plants and their therapeutic uses in the Boa Viagem area and simultaneously seek to explore programmatic avenues to render visible, validate, exchange, and promote this knowledge. To begin, similar to the São Paulo project, two interrelated mappings took place; around the immediate area of museum and on Boa Viagem island led by the botanists Luiz Soares Pinto and Marcelo Guerra Santos who identified 27 species and in the Palácio community in collaboration with the health team at the “Posto de Palácio” (the outpost clinic of the Family Doctor Program in the Palácio favela). In particular, Dr. Erika Niches and the health agents Josan Domingues and Fabio Carlos identified 14 additional species of medicinal plants growing in various areas of the community. They created a banner highlighting the identified plants and a folder to be distributed amongst community members. Overall 41 plant species were identified. Twelve large bamboo standards with vibrant colored fabrics, catalogued according to therapeutic use, were placed in various locations in the Boa Viagem area where medicinal plants had been identified. A map noting the findings was included in a wall display as part of Vergara’s exhibition at MAC along with a vitrine featuring dried specimens of the identified plants and their names printed on newssheets – a curious serendipitous mix of news reports, advertisements and the medicinal. The research pharmacologist Bettina Monika Ruppelt completed an accompanying chart, outlining
10 Luiz Guilherme Vergara (director/curator MAC Niterói); Bettina Monika Ruppelt (medicinal plant specialist and professor of pharmacy at Universidade Federal Fluminense (UFF); Leandro Rocha (professor of pharmacy at UFF) Marcelo Guerra Santos and Luiz José Soares Pinto (professors of botany at Universidade Federal de Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ)
popular and scientific names and therapeutic uses of each species. These display components, while not the main drive of the project, were nevertheless extremely useful in that they gave the project visibility, anchoring, representing and validating the process.
In addition to mapping plants in the community and producing informative flyers, the health team at the Posto de Palácio were particularly interested in engaging some of the older community members to share their knowledge on the therapeutic use of plants. Complementary programs were developed with this in mind. “Chá das cinco” (Tea Conversations at Five) was first held at the Posto in December 2013 with a handful of elderly women from the community.
The following month’s “Chá” held at MACquinho welcomed more than forty people including Family Doctor and MAC teams. The banter about the plants people used or had in their yards, from boldo (native plant to Latin America) as a hangover cure to the calming effects of anise or lemon grass tea, suggested the affective and social potential of such sharing and also its therapeutic possibilities. Richly demonstrated by the observation of Dr. Erika Niches noting that
“we invited patients for the event and many showed up, including psychiatric patients that have phobias of enclosed space who stayed till the end without fits – incredible!”
Other programs included a how-to composting session, cultural outings to other gardens locally and a special tour of the medicinal plant section of Rio de Janeiro’s Botanic Gardens organized for Morro do Palácio residents as well as visits to MAC with Carlos Vergara. The
“Chás” continued for a few more sessions and a video of the encounters was edited by one of the Farmácia Baldia collective participants.11 This video was presented along with special teas at an opening reception for an exhibition of the project at MACquinho in April 2014 featuring photographs of the Farmácia process (meetings, outings, “chás” etc) and a selection of the medicinal plants identified along with a map identifying their locations in the Boa Viagem region.
Portraits of several of the elderly women were also featured presented together with their favorite medicinal “recipes” and “cures” using some of the identified plants – kebabs with mint, medicinal sherry with jurubeba, and cough syrup with guaco.
As part of these exchanges, a program of weekly conversations offered museum visitors an opportunity to learn about the project and Vergara’s art practice and to visit MACquinho. On a micro level this kind of encounter enables the circulation of the worlds of asphalt and favela.12 There, together with favela residents working at the center, visitors shared a medicinal tea and conversation about plants, checked out the organic medicinal indoor garden in process and toured
11 José Abreu, Chá das cinco. Video produced in collaboration with the Fundação de Saúde de Niterói (Niterói Health Foundation).
12 The term “asfalto e morro” literally asphalt and hill (also used to refer to favelas as many are built/emerge amidst Rio’s hillsides) refers to the contrasting worlds of the urban middle class city and favela life.
MACquinho’s long-standing artisanal paper workshop, likewise engaged as part of the Farmácia project, experimenting with creating artisanal paper using medicinal plants and seeds.
Artist/educator Eduardo Machado who led the process was amazed at how the subject of medicinal plants can act as a catalyst to bridge differences:
In these conversations there were students of biology (one who had recently come from Haiti to study in Brazil and I listened to an emotional statement of someone who in their native country, already emphasized the importance of the integration of man and nature), there were also health workers, pharmacists and visitors from Europe. I realized that the subject – plants and medicinal herbs evoke affective memories and make for great and interesting conversations.13
All these initiatives were small scale experiments intended to construct a future continuing program. However, even though the project never had much in the way of financial support, mostly relying on organizational and individual collaborations, post the initial evental synergies (October 2013 to April 2014), more or less coinciding with the duration of Vergara’s exhibition at MAC, this lack of resources coupled with organizational changes and shifting priorities constantly stymied each striving toward continuity. While renewed forces continue to attempt to seed possible futures from botantical/artistic/medicinal projects with community crèches developed by artist/educator Daniel Whitacker to the collective’s plans for a series of “how-to”
encounters including DIY gardens and cooking with medicinal plants and herbs, these attempts face an uphill battle. Even, in what one might call its honeymoon phase, the project mostly moved from the opening and closing of one contingent crack to another. Remarkably, drawing on theorist Yve Lomax’s explorations of Giorgio Agamben’s work on potentiality, understood as something to be valued for itself and not merely stepping-stone on the road to being actualized, the effort has been sustained primarily by “the potentiality of that which never happened.”14
Yet despite such highs and lows, stops and starts, the Farmácia Baldia project stands as affective potential, constructed in the links between the artist, MAC, MACquinho, the Family Doctor Program, and collective’s participants. While being constantly (re)tested and (re)affirmed, and, at the moment of this writing, are extremely fragile, these links have laid the groundwork for a kind of organic learning system of unfolding conversations, circulating between and connecting
13 [Author translation. Portuguese original: “Nessas conversas contei com a participação de estudantes de biologia, (de um deles que veio do Haiti para estudar aqui escutei um depoimento emocionado de alguém que na sua terra natal, já dava importância para esta integração entre o homem e a natureza), sanitaristas e de farmacêuticos, inclusive da Europa (Portugal). Percebi que o assunto – plantas e ervas medicinais evoca a memória afetiva das pessoas e que rende boas e interessantes conversas.”] Eduardo Machado, “Farmácia Baldia: Conversas,” Carlos Vergara. Sudário (Rio de Janeiro:
Automatica/Atelier Carlos Vergara, 2014) 241.
14 Lomax’s beautiful book draws on the work of Giorgio Agamben’s notion of potentiality not as reducible to a potential/actual binary but as a kind of potent living-on and perseverance in and for the actual world. Yve Lomax, Passionate Being: Language, Singularity, Perseverance (London: I.B.Tauris, 2009) 66.
fields of knowledge, communities, territories and practices. The process is somewhat akin to what curator Anthony Huberman suggests in his essay “Take Care,” that is a curatorial practice that is
“not about preparing explanations in advance, but about following the life of an idea, in public, with others.”15 This “caring” process is, of course, very different depending on cultural climates, political contexts and institutional wherewithal. In my experience in Brazil this “with others”
demands a mutually accepted (and resigned) openness to vulnerability and fragility. For the Farmácia project this has meant embracing what one might call site specific dysfunctionality, whether a failed attempt to mount a community garden or endlessly accumulating Excel budget charts, as being as much a part of the project as what has actually been achieved. What follows here is a rhizomatic cartography of the histories, contexts and collaborations that informed and shaped the project – MAC, Family Doctor Program, MACquinho, Carlos Vergara amongst others – and some of the seed thoughts to which it has given rise – complicities of care in art, health and curatorship, radical locality, homes and coalitions, and commonalities within the uncommon.