![]() ![]() In 1973, he organized an excursion with some friends into the subway system in order to invite riders to try out the parangolés. After winning a Guggenheim Fellowship the same year, he stayed in exile in the city for the next eight years. Oiticica came to New York in 1970 to participate in Information, a group exhibition of conceptual art at The Museum of Modern Art. He travelled to London to mount his solo exhibition The Whitechapel Experiment at Whitechapel Gallery in 1969. Many artists, including Oiticica, left Brazil due to the increasing oppression. More widespread censorship gained momentum only after 1968, when the dictatorship enacted the Institutional Act Number 5, leading to the imprisonment and torture of dissidents. Such statements went unobserved by authorities because state-sponsored censorship initially focused more on the press and pop music than on visual art. Some parangolés even included political statements such as “Of Adversity We Live” (1965) or “I Embody Revolt” (1967). A common interpretation of the parangolés is that they were intended to liberate their wearers from the repressive military regime by enabling them to become aware of their capacity to rebel. This approach to art engages the audience in the creative process so that they become collaborators in the work. It was against the backdrop of increasing political repression that Oiticica began engaging the spectator as a participant in his works, an approach known today as participatory art. support) launched a coup d’etat, initiating a twenty-one year military dictatorship. The same year that Oiticica developed the parangolé, the Brazilian military (with U.S. … From participatory art to political resistance Oiticica’s experience of the marginality of Rio de Janeiro’s most impoverished inhabitants awakened him to the social and ethical implications of art. Even the word “parangolé” (meaning a sudden agitation, an unexpected situation, or a dance party) was rooted in marginalization: he adopted the term when he saw a piece of cloth with the word on it hung by a beggar on the street. The dancers were refused entry into the building, revealing the institutionalized racism and classism pervading Rio de Janeiro at the time. ![]() This was thrown into sharp relief when Oiticica invited some friends from Mangueira to help him inaugurate the parangolés by dancing in them in their first public presentation at the Museum of Modern Art of Rio de Janeiro for the opening of the exhibition Opinião 65 (Opinion 65). He began to associate the marginalized position of the artist in society with the marginalization of favela communities. As a result, the concept of “marginalization” became fundamental to him, especially as a gay man. Oiticica asserted that the favela made him more aware of social inequities. He learned to samba and even became a passista (a highly skilled dancer who performs in Brazilian Carnival) in the Mangueira samba school (a club for dancing and playing samba in the annual Carnival parade). Despite the significance of this disparity, Oiticica developed friendships with a number of residents and was eventually accepted by the community. Oiticica was white, middle class, and educated, while the favela’s inhabitants were mainly Black, poor, and uneducated. He began visiting the favela in an attempt to escape what he perceived as the constraints of Rio de Janeiro’s art scene. He said that dancing freed him from art’s “excessive intellectualization.” He learned about samba through his contact with the community of Mangueira, a favela (Brazilian slum) located on the outskirts of his hometown of Rio de Janeiro. It was through learning to dance the samba that Oiticica developed the parangolé. They also sometimes took the form of flags, banners, or tents. Some contained political or poetic texts, photographs, or painted images, along with bags of pebbles, sand, straw, or shells. They were made of colored and painted fabrics, as well as nylon, burlap, and gauze. Parangolés are capes, or cloak-like layers of different materials that were intended to be worn by moving and dancing participants. “Oiticica’s most iconic artworks: p arangolés, or wearable, experiential garments that he initiated in 1964 and continued working with for the rest of his career. ![]()
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