“ORIGIN IS THE GOAL” Fernanda Pitta on “Ensaios para o Museu das Origens” at Instituto Tomie Ohtake and Itaú Cultural, São Paulo
In 1978, the politician and art critic Mário Pedrosa imagined the reconstruction of the partly burnt down Museu de Arte Moderna do Rio de Janeiro as the creation of a “Museum of Origins” that, besides presenting conventional modern and contemporary art, also gives representation to works by Indigenous and Afro-diasporic people as well as by self-taught artists and psychiatric clients. Under the title “Ensaios para o Museu das Origens” (Towards the Museum of Origins), the Instituto Itaú Cultural and Instituto Tomie Ohtake in São Paulo recently made an effort to actualize Pedrosa’s vision. However, while the tone of Pedrosa’s discourse was about acknowledging the influence of “peripheric” creativities on contemporary art, thus relying on a teleological trajectory of development, the recent exhibitions receive Fernanda Pitta’s praise for evoking what Françoise Vergès has called the “post-museum” by embracing a multiplicity of memories and cultural narratives, and for resisting the (eurocentric) tendency of propagating foundational myths or universal syntheses.
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