OPAVIVARÁ! | UTUPYA
In the heat of the moment
Ever since I moved to Rio de Janeiro, I was taken by OPAVIVARÁ!'s small talk and muambas (popular expression for smuggled items). They are my Outlaw heros, beach companions with whom I share my worries and joy, and the ones I'm always thinking about, aiming to, perhaps someday, understand their constitution, which ultimate purposes move their actions or justify their tenacious and burlesque means. Someday…
The decoration of my personal office in the sands of Arpoador consists of a triple beach chair and a pair of Brazilian cangas to alert my enemies and protect the good nature of this curator's plans and "business" - aware that the OPAS! might show up without a warning I keep their places ready for the conversations that rather soon become action-plans. And with this dynamic, we work, or play or celebrate.
Rio de Janeiro is the chosen Holy Land of OPAVIVARÁ! collective, where their most powerful practices takes place with the "bless" of this realm. If largely apart from these grounds and beaches, the color of their skin turns pale, along with the development of an aura as mythical as unrealistic. But here they grow lively as they articulate the most beautiful of the games, the most powerful of the art languages. Just as in guerilla warfare, there is an army to defeat, a territory to be occupied and a revolution to be made.
It bothers me the idea of a global village and of an endless mirrored world - anemic platitude of the thought. I like the taste of soil, the flavor of saliva that reminds me of childhood, the ancestral spirituality of a people that is ours and nothing else. It doesn't concern the ownership of oil, but the ownership of the cafuçu, the miscegenation and the indigenous woman that eats a man to revenge her son killed in the war; it concerns, above all, redeeming something that was never lost, a caboclo latency that emerges from the jungle, giving different tones and ranges to the discourse as it relativizes the world and ideas that have long been incorporated to our culture. All of this was not lost; it is in the soul of our people and in the vigorous brown skin, in the nature that eases the rage, in the dream world that betrays the reality.
The opposites coexist in OPAVIVARÁ!'s bonfire, the light bathes the theory, the sea dissolves markets and the heat blurs the vision. No, it's not a product of virtual reality! It's the politics of here and now, it's the pleasure and the power of a godless herd, in which sex is part of routine, food is feijão, a shade on a sunny day is oca, when you need refreshment you ask for a popsicle and conversations lead to exchange of thoughts - or just become excuses to cut down words, creating an communion of men and women, transsexuals and widows, children and gangsters, indigenous and all kind of people that you can sight from this privileged point of view that is the Brazil of the XXI century.
On this global village called Saara, under satan's sun while we sweat our labor out, the land of Carnival and of the friction of the bodys on beds or hammocks, there's a tent that trades unfathomable artefacts and spices, localized on Gonçalves Lêdo st., number 11 and 17. A gentle carioca lady greets the people from behind a balcony, people that come from all the corners of Brazil and overseas, looking for paint, dyes, gambiarras (improvised solutions) and technologies unknown ever for the Chinese.
It is in this crossroad, place of all deities, that a door that cannot be closed was open, a path that leads to a peculiar tribe, a mix of the carioca, tupinambá and cruz-credo: here are the OPAVIVARÁS!
– Bernardo José de Souza, 2017
