Inhotim, Day 5
The dauntless Bryan and Fabricio picked us up after a magnificent farm breakfast on the patio (banana bread, cheese breads, yogurt so fresh you poured it from a pitcher, mounds of fruit, a boiled egg if you were so inclined, and porridge -- a dish so delicious that I have a completely fresh understanding of several fairy tales). We arrived at Inhotim where we were met by Bryan’s dad, Chris, a highly enterprising man who’d lived many years in New York which was evident both in his excellent English and his salesmanship. On the short walk from the parking lot to the gate of the park, he managed to set the stage for several additional services we could engage from him or friends of his. But he was hard not to like despite the cheerful shamelessness.
And then we were handed over to Tiago, our guide for our first day at Inhotim. How to do justice to Tiago dos Santos. I’d had a long, entertaining e-mail discussion going with Tiago for about two months at this point. He’d arranged all our transportation for this stretch of the trip, as well as our tour of Inhotim and the use of a private golf cart to get around the massive park. I don’t know what I’d been picturing, but it was not a big huggable bear of a young guy about sporting elaborate tattoos of Darth Vader and Elvira, Mistress of the Night with a GoT dragon ring on one meaty hand and the most open, friendly smile in the world. Tiago is a movie fanatic (he learned his English from “school and Netflix”), a raconteur, and a man of deep sensitivity (he explained that in his family, people either inherited a talent for art or a talent for science. He inherited feelings). I won’t say it was love at first sight -- I think it took a full 5 minutes.
It’s hard to explain Inhotim in a way that even approximately conveys its effect. It’s just a big park, with gardens, galleries and free-standing artworks. Why is it so … well, whatever it is that makes you feel like you’re going to cry. Or that has you laughing out loud because there isn’t another reaction that conveys the bigness of what you’re feeling. Or forces you to stop and stare around you quite literally with your mouth hanging open. It was not just me -- six of us went there and all six of us were in the same state of blissful, overwhelmed amazement. Maybe it’s all the extra oxygen.
Because yes, Jack, we ARE bourgie colonizers, we had organized a private golf cart for the day to be at our beck and call except during the mandated 75 minute lunch break for the driver :) We hopped in and zipped along astonishingly lush paths to our first artwork -- a sound installation by Doug Aitken. This is just a simple, cylindrical building with a beautiful wood floor and plexiglass sides surrounding a very deep hole. The hole (600 feet deep, if I’m recalling correctly) is bored into an underground space and the movement of the air through myriad smaller holes and openings creates an erie, throbbing sound that varies in pitch and intensity, sometimes dropping to silence. The building amplifies this sound (and does interesting things to sounds we visitors made, as well) resulting in a hypnotic experience that perfectly launched our day of discovering that there was more to literally everything than there first appeared to be.
Tiago next took us to an impressive stone gallery built to house a large collection of photographs by Claudia Andujar, a photojournalist who documented the lives -- and the deeply distressing decline -- of the Yanomami people of the Amazon. Touring the gallery, you start among images of natural things -- river currents, tiny riparian plants, stones -- enlarged until they achieve a sort of calm abstraction. The initial images of the Yanomami -- almost entirely in black and white -- are sharply real, but share that sense of naturalistic serenity. Things get uglier as you wander the timeline through the gallery until you’re among scores of color photos of Yanomami people in ragged Western dress with small plaques displaying numbers around their necks. The purpose of the photos and the numbers is theoretically benign -- they identify people who have been vaccinated -- but the overall impression is utterly dehumanizing.
Next came a gallery dedicated to Miguel Rio Branco and more photographs, these of the Pelhourinho neighborhood of Salvador -- a place we’ll be staying in later in the trip. The pictures were taken in the 1970’s, when Pelhourinho was struggling with a profound crack epidemic. Picture the 8th Ward post-Katrina, only with all the people still in it. Hideous decay and dissolution, but with a weird veneer of colorful charm. Tiago pointed out a photo showing what appears to be an abandoned building, but with a hand-lettered sign in one window that heartbreakingly reads “family living here.” In another part of the gallery, photographs have been printed on big panels of sheer fabric and hung in overlapping, fluttering arrangements. One grouping is called “shark attack” and another is a repeating group of scenes from a street corner in Pelhourinho with a slide show changing the center images. Sad, creepy and yet very beautiful.
It would take a book to describe all the artworks and installations we experienced during our two days at Inhotim. An abbreviated list includes:
Pollution prints made by covering some parts of a canvas and exposing the rest to the air in Beijing for a few days.
A mid-century modern room in which the carpet, furniture, art, books, dishes, clothes in the closet, drinks in the fridge -- everything -- are all a deep lipstick red. At one end of the room, you turn a corner into an unlit space with a spill of red on the floor trailing into the darkness. Seemingly floating in the dark a good distance away is a sink with red (water? Paint? Blood?) pouring from the spigot.
A fantastically disturbing tapestry depicting a nobleman with the face literally eaten away by maggots.
A tile wall broken to reveal that it’s filled with meat (it’s ceramic meat, but it’s still super gross).
A big room lined floor to ceiling with canvases covered in plaster, painted with giddy exuberance to mimic blue Delft tiles, and then crackled and broken
A large, glass-enclosed room (overlooking a perfect lake) strung with a huge, complex mobile of nets containing abstract yet highly genital glass tubes, bulbs and cylinders. The glassware is partially filled with dark red liquid, red bottle brushes and rags. The work is called True Rouge, but we dubbed it “the menstrual room” (it was impossible not to) and found it even more fascinating once Tiago explained the hanging had been accomplished by a group of artists working naked.
A spectacular miniature stadium with a million seats (you heard me -- one million teeny tiny seats).
A 12-foot bronze spider by Louise Bourgeois that manages to be horrifying, funny and weirdly moving (the spider was only visiting so we were lucky(?) to see it).
A gallery consisting of a series of rooms intended to recreate the experience of using cocaine -- one had a weirdly undulating floor made by packing sand in waves under a canvas, one had big soft objects to hurl around in glee, one was filled with chaotic video images and loud music, another with little mats on the floor on which to lose consciousness, and one contained a deep pool to fall into and emerge from. It was a little goofy, but we appreciated the all-in approach.
A building with the asymmetrical, windowless shape of an alien spacecraft as portrayed in a super-pretentious sci-fi/horror movie housing a piece by Lygia Pape. You entered an absolutely dark space (this happens a lot at Inhotim) and turn a corner to discover what looked like broad, shimmering beams of light but is in fact extremely delicate metaled thread strung floor to ceiling in an irregular pattern that creates entirely new perspectives as you move around the room. (This is another one of those works that is impossible to describe -- or even convey in a photo -- but that leaves you laughing out loud with amazement.)
An outdoor sculpture called Fallen Beams which consists of a hundred steel beams dropped from a 40 foot crane into a pond of concrete. And it is fucking awesome.
A swimming pool designed to look like an open address book (that you can swim in).
A garden shed lined with shelves of terra cotta pots in the shapes of the letters of the alphabet, big containers of potting soil, gardening tools and little packets of seeds. The idea is to choose the letters you need to spell out a message then plant flowers in them and add them to a hillside covered with other messages. (Mary dropped some DC pride.)
Another dark room containing an immense table covered with a little town made out of white candles -- churches, houses, office buildings -- many of them lit and slowly melting. You can light the candles/buildings on the table, or add new ones. This was incredibly lovely and a bit melancholy.
A video installation titled “I Am Not Me, the Horse Is Not Mine” that’s eight 6-minute loops of film shown on eight giant screens in a huge, dark room. It manages to evoke Charlie Chaplin, Thai silhouette puppetry, The Death of Stalin, an old Grimm’s fairy tale called The Nose, Soviet propaganda, American propaganda, and about 20 other cultural references into something funny, strange, and extremely thought provoking. It’s a thing that shouldn’t work at all, but it was a favorite of everyone on the trip.
We’d been advised to wear sturdy shoes (and bathing suits -- this really is an insane experience). The visit to Galeria Cildo Meireles made it clear why. You enter a large rectangular room with a polished floor around the perimeter, and the entire center of the floor covered in broken glass. The glass has been tumbled a bit so the edges are not razor sharp, but it’s still a floor of freaking BROKEN GLASS -- the sound we made walked gingerly around it was unforgettable. Rising from the floor and hanging from the ceiling, creating a maze, are sections of chain link fence, white picket fence, prison bars, barbed wire, crowd control barriers, bamboo screens and even shower curtains. At the center of the maze is a huge ball of packing tape. And in two corners of the maze are free-standing aquariums holding tiny, almost completely transparent little fish. Tiago says one theory is that the work is recreating the surreal experience of being a refugee -- no place to rest, only hostility and barriers. It’s definitely a statement on barriers -- are they keeping people out or keeping people in? Is there a way to do one without the other? Without question, we were filled with admiration for the imagination behind Inhotim, the ambition it took to create a home for these strange and thought-provoking works of art. But I’m trying to imagine the job description for the guy who feeds the fish in the broken glass room.
We took a break at one point (for our golf cart driver’s mandated lunch) and discovered one weakness of the Inhotim experience -- there’s not a lot of handy food. After a bit of casting about we found enough interesting snacks and drinks to keep us going (including a big bag of Ham Crunchies, which Scotland trip veterans will recognize as the Brazilian version of haggis-flavored potato chips: snacks that you find yourself compulsively eating with every evidence of enjoyment, and then regreting bitterly when you realize you’re going to be tasting them for like four days). Several of us ordered acai bowls, which turned out to be big dishes of frozen purple deliciousness -- a little softer than sorbet -- with a flavor on the tart side of blueberry and topped with any number of fruits or granola. Acai definitely makes a better frozen treat than it makes guacamole.
And you can get beer at Inhotim. Basically you can get beer everywhere. Mary asked Tiago if there was anywhere you couldn’t get beer. He thought for a second and then said “probably you should not have beer at a school.” So Mary asked the obvious follow up question: what about church? Tiago made one of those scoffing snorts that implies incredulity and said “church? No problem.”
We also asked him about the political situation in Brazil and spent some time commiserating about our idiot national leaders. Trump and Bolsonaro had just gotten together (Trump in his inimitable style had promised to make a few calls and get Brazil into NATO. We heard NATO jokes several times on the trip). Tiago told us that during Carnivale, there had been huge crowds in Belo Horizonte chanting what amounted to “Hey! Ho! Bolsonaro go fuck yourself” (that’s probably more rhyme-y in Portuguese). The chief of police mandated no more of that kind of talk and threatened to arrest people if they kept it up. But the district attorney said any police who arrested citizens for exercising their right to free speech would find themselves arrested instead. Oh, 2019 -- you’re shaping up to be an awesome year everywhere.
We ended our visit to Inhotim at the Galeria Galpao -- another sound installation, this one by Janet Cardiff and George Bures Miller. This is a vast room, high ceilinged, white walled and with a wood floor. There are two large wooden benches in the center of the room, and around the perimeter are dozens of speakers on little stands, putting the speakers at about head height. Tiago took us to the center of the room -- a magnificent piece of choral music was filling the space. (For the true nerds among us, Tiago let us know the piece is Spem in Alium by Thomas Thallis, written in 1573 in an attempt to lure Queen Elizabeth back to Catholicism.) We listened for a few minutes and then Tiago quietly instructed us to walk to the speakers and circle the room. Each speaker was a single voice. I sincerely don’t know how to describe how moving this was. Standing in front of a silent speaker as its voice began to sing brought tears to my eyes over and over. Dave and Mary discovered that standing between speakers let you hear the music as the members of the chorus must have, which was inexpressibly beautiful. Every single one of us -- including Tiago, who must experience this ten times a week! -- was weepy as we finally (reluctantly) departed, vowing to come back the next day to listen again.
After much hugging and handshaking and exchanging of expressions of eternal devotion, we said goodbye to Tiago (who we’d be seeing in the morning anyway :) Bryan and Fabricio drove us back to Maria Carolina’s for another excellent dinner, this one not quite as idyllic as there were other guests so we all ate in the dining room. Still -- I skipped dessert in favor of a second helping of the absolute best bean soup I ever expect to eat accompanied by another drizzle of Willem’s homemade pepper oil. Willem really knows how to pack flavor into a vegan soup. We saw the Southern Cross for the second time and went to bed.
