Guerreiro do Divino Amor in conversation with Andrea Bellini
B.: Dear Guerreiro do Divino Amor, your dual Swiss-Brazilian citizenship, plus the fact that you also grew up in France, allowed you quite literally to inhabit “another place” and to view the issue of “national” identity as a fiction, a construct. I can see how this fed your delight in exposing and mocking the clichés on which the big national narratives are built. How did you develop your artistic work, which essentially relies on actual fieldwork?
G.: I started my research when I was studying architecture. The older I get, the more I realize how fundamentally important this architectural education has been for my work.
B.: So you’re a trained architect but a self-taught visual artist. How would you briefly describe the Superfictional World Atlas?
G.: Potentially it’s a never-ending project. When I started it in Brussels I didn’t yet know that I would be creating an atlas. But The Battle of Brussels already contains the allegory of the clash of two opposing civilizations, the Super Empire and the Super Galaxies, that you find in one form or another in all of the saga’s chapters. There are some issues that are present in all of the chapters, like national self-representations, corporate mythologies, the relationship between faith and capitalism, modernism and classicism, and so on. And each chapter sheds a different light on these issues, which are ultimately relevant to the world as a whole but more obviously prominent in some places than in others.
B.: You told Luis Camillo Osorio in an interview that your oeuvre deals in a way with the complexity of the apocalypse. Do you believe we’re really moving towards the apocalypse? What is your political stance on this? G.: I think we’ve long been caught up in it. For many peoples and civilizations, it’s already over. We’re in the post-apocalypse.
B.: I agree. Sometimes you hear somebody talk about the end of the world as if it were a trivial issue, ignoring the fact that for many people and civilizations the world has already ended.
G.: Yes, absolutely. I did the interview with Luis Camillo just after Jair Bolsonaro was elected. It was like the apotheosis of the apocalypse, its grotesque personification, a textbook illustration of the end of the world, with all of its possible aspects: the deliberate destruction of cultures and different biomes, the destruction of our LGBT families, the social state, even the bonds of love between people. It was the crystallization of the apocalypse, the peak of the colonial project in all its stark and unadorned reality, without even the trappings of an alleged racial democracy to mitigate its effects. From a distance, Switzerland can seem like the anti-apocalypse, a promised land that cannot be shaken. At the same time, Switzerland also plays a very active role in this apocalypse through the companies and financial markets that are based there. Many of the environmental crimes being committed in Brazil, for instance, are directly linked to decisions made in Switzerland. And I could clearly see the limits of Swiss benevolence particularly during the cynical campaign of the Council of States against the popular initiative for responsible businesses.
B.: Before we discuss the Pavilion, I’d like to ask you one last question about your work. It’s clear that your aesthetic is not based on an artist or an art movement but rather that it comes from popular culture – TV, soap operas, advertising and music clips. Is that true?
G.: Yes, in fact, I’m both fascinated and repulsed by this universe, because I grew up with these images and feel a strong emotional connection to them. The 1980s and 1990s, when I was a child, were the heyday of video clips, special effects and pop and dance music. There was no internet back then, so as a gay kid you were lonely and isolated, unlike today, when you can find many more communities and people are much more understanding (not in all families unfortunately, but still). This entire pop culture universe was a place of dreams and projections. The pop divas were like a fascinating mirror that allowed me to identify myself with them.
B.: That’s why I believe your work has the potential to be accessible to a wide audience that isn’t well-informed or particularly knowledgeable about art. And that’s what makes it so powerful. It uses aesthetic codes that are part of popular culture.
G.: Yes, I’ve been fascinated by this institutional language, this self-fictionalization of corporations, agribusiness and the Church [*1] ever since I started this research. And also by historical superfictions; all of these baroque elements in Rome were the pop culture of their day. It’s a way of being flashy. Pop speaks to people’s hearts. You said that I was working with clichés and parodies. It’s true that my work deals with the surface[*2] . It’s not investigative journalism. I explore what the country, companies and religious organizations project as their culture, their identity. I want to show how stereotypes are constructed and how they work. With these collages, I try to set these trivial elements in motion and also to give them a certain fragility, to shake up this construct a little by creating something strange and menacing in this familiar context.
B.: And also something funny …
G.: Yes, because laughter is also a weapon. If you don’t take anything seriously anymore, there’s no authority. After all, if somebody who arrogantly thinks he has authority makes you laugh, that is it—the respect is gone (laughs). At school, in the workplace, in politics, everywhere. That’s the logic of carnival, which has inspired me a lot.
B.: Absolutely. Irony is a great expression of freedom. It is also a form of wisdom. To paraphrase the motto of the Venice Biennale, at the Swiss Pavilion we’re inviting our visitors to become strangers to their own truths. Irony offers a way of taking the right action with regard to ourselves and the world. That, too, is the spirit of carnival, as you say. Carnival is a space of freedom, thought and independence.
G.: Yes, carnival is central to my work, both aesthetically and in giving narrative structure to the chapters. I take a keen interest in carnival parades, which take highly dramatic historical events and turn them into fantastic allegories that appeal to millions of people without doing away with their complexity.
B.: A couple of years ago you went to Geneva to add another chapter on Switzerland to your World Atlas. This resulted in the Miracle of Helvetia, which we exhibited at the Centre d’Art Contemporain de Genève as part of your first big retrospective. Here at the Swiss Pavilion, the Miracle of Helvetia is projected inside a dome. Tell us more about this installation.
G.: These superfictions of genealogical superiority are all created from abstract historical narratives and myths, but also from architecture, materials, symmetry. Banks, churches, court buildings and museums (including the pavilions of the Biennale) often feature a similar spatial design intended to inspire awe and deference. Interestingly, in the Giardini, there is a geopolitical aspect as well, which is given architectural expression through the presence of the different national pavilions. So when you leave the Swiss Pavilion, you’ll still see hundreds of columns the same day (laughs). The images and architectural elements I’ve worked with in the Pavilion are very familiar and classic, but their sheer volume makes them appear grotesque, an overdose of marble and columns.The Miracle of Helvetia is on display in a planetarium, a building I love. It references science museums, of course, but also market stalls and church domes. This dome will take you to the Mount Olympus of Switzerland and introduce you to the goddesses that make up the Helvetian pantheon. It’s a world of science fiction distilled from our everyday lives.
B.: For the Miracle of Helvetia and Roma Talismano – but also for your other projects – you worked with people who seem to be part of your extended family. Is that how you see them? Who are they and why do you work with them?
G.: Yes. Working with my “extended family”, as you put it, matters a lot to me. The Biennale gave me the opportunity to bring in and work with the people I love, whose work I value and who have had a profound influence on me. First among these is my long-standing artistic partner Ventura Profana, with her missionary pastoral work and her way of seeing the gospel from a new perspective, doing away with the Lord. I’ve learned a lot from her intellectually, spiritually and also through her approach to work. In this work as in everything I do, faith is very important. In the Miracle of Helvetia, Ventura plays the role of Calvina. She comes from a family of Baptist Protestants, so she has also inherited Calvinism in some way. When I came first to Rome, I sent her a message right away saying “We’ll come back here and you’ll be Lupa Capitolina”. I didn’t think this prophecy would become true so soon. This project was also the first time I worked together with my husband Diego Paulino, a science fiction filmmaker, which was wonderful. Roma Talismano also features Lyz Parayzo’s shield sculptures, beautiful but also dangerous weapons. There are many other artists and friends who are part of the story, like Sallisa Rosa, whose work about the memory of the Earth is wonderful and who plays the role of Seminatora, the goddess of raw materials and agribusiness.
B.: Tell me more about the song you wrote while you were in Rome.
G.: I wrote the song Roma Talismano together with Beà Aayoola, a Brazilian composer who grew up in Italy. It was fascinating to have this exchange with her about the music, because her experience in Italy has been totally different. I was there as part of an artist residency doing research, whereas she’d had a crazy life there as a teenager. And yet we were able to connect through musical and cultural references and to compose the song, and we laughed a lot. So it was obvious for me to revisit religious hymns, which are a form of trance, of meditation, and to add some pop-like elements, too – Brazilian funk, and other music that I listened to growing up. And because Rome is this holy place, this cultural epicentre, and because opera is the sacrosanct talisman of high culture, it had to be present in this song as well.
B.: Why did you choose Italy for the latest chapter of your Superfictional World Atlas? And what is the link between Roma Talismano and the Miracle of Helvetia? Why did you establish a dialogue between Ancient Rome and modern Switzerland?
G.: Quite apart from their existence in the physical world, Switzerland and Rome have become concepts that, in their own respective ways, serve the superfiction of the West’s cultural superiority. With its satisfied population, intact natural environment, and cutting-edge technology, Switzerland purports to be the apotheosis of civilization and supposedly proves that capitalism works. In Brazil, for instance, certain “perfect” mountain villages are competing for the title of “Brazilian Switzerland”. Similar battles are raging in India for which place will be declared the “Indian Switzerland”, and so forth.It was in Rome that Jesus was transformed into a white and pure god, thus justifying the idea of a divine superiority of the White, and hence colonialism, slavery and what still underlies the patriarchal and neo-colonialist structure in which we live today. So this eternally recycled fantasy of Ancient Rome, with its pale busts and columns, is a cornerstone of the construction of the White Being. It is the talisman for this imaginary world of power supported by a neoclassical aesthetic that submerges the West in a torrent of marble and columns. To return to Brazil, one of the first things installed when Brasília was founded was a replica of the Capitoline Wolf in front of district governor’s palace. It embodied Brazil’s intent to become a Western nation, a White civilization seized by the fever of mystical rationalism. Seeing that she-wolf in Brasília, I knew I would have to go to Rome one day – back to the roots of that superfiction – to understand its renaissance and revival in the fascist era as well as today.