ELKE

17 May to 19 November 2022

ELKE – sacred, profane, holy, devil

“The important thing is to be born and die, the rest is a sausage that we fill up, taking care not to fill an indigestible sausage.”
Elke Wonder

Who knows that he will die, would deceive death in life. Wave, say good morning and see you tomorrow. The meeting is inevitable. It imposes the fate of choice, of freedom and of the naked body. There are those who dance with her during lightning moments that put us in contact with the world and with ourselves. At the exact and congruent point of the possible shock, the maximum experience arises: it is when the unfathomable part of life emerges, vertical axis in the face of the horizontality of the stopwatch. We dance with death when we make art to invent and twist everyday life, when we play, when we dress, when we put on makeup, when we sacralize and profane altars, when we organize the lines of everyday life and delimit the outline of the arena in which the tragic crisis of the revelation that one dies every day little.

In order to deny the lifeless body, it is necessary to find this point of tangency between things, aim at the reflection and accept the “revealing facts”, which, as Michel Leiris says, “clarify obscure parts of ourselves, insofar as they act out of a kind of sympathy or similarity, and whose emotional force derives from being mirrors that hold (…) the very image of our emotion”. Accepting the dark part that reaches us is the only possibility of real awareness about our place in the balance of renewal that exists between opposites – life and death, good and evil, good and bad, sacred and profane, male and female. This balance maintains the flow necessary for the creation of meanings and gives those who know about death the power of ethical judgment over things. The gap between the extremes is like a battlefield, where we intend and signify life; where we commute from our conception.

This is how the girl born in Leningrad, in the war year, on February 22, 1945, came into existence: Elke Georgievna Grunupp, Elke Grunupp, Melissa Vassiliki, Elke Evremidis… Elke Wonder. She was Russian, German, Mongolian, Minas Gerais, white, black, red, purple, smooth, curly, beaded, blonde, brunette from everywhere and nowhere. Each day, a new Elke, another, an unknown, but always Elke, tragic; only Elke – unique, for sure. Impermanence, and not indefinition, generated love and hatred from those who watched it on TV; or on the street, from those who were confronted with their own desires. Elke proposed the meeting and, face to face, revealed what we are in the unfathomable.

He received spit in his face. She was called a man, a woman, a transvestite, a witch, a queen, a curse, excessive, extravagant, rebellious. It chose the things it was, accepted the balance of various worlds and thus escaped the restricted definitions. He found the tangency, the mirror of the other. He rejected wealth. She was godmother of the poor and oppressed, children to whom she always gave full marks. Feel kissed and devastated, I said. She was a saint of the street sweepers, the Hansen’s, the sex workers, the prisoners, the homosexuals, the elderly. He chose wholeheartedly the causes he supported knowing that, from the heart, in practice, the effort for good becomes political, out of the sea of ideologies and pamphlets. Who is in the world is the world where everything fits. We are all everything, Elke said, saints, hell, good, bad… what we choose is what is revealed. In a great step as a master, Elke danced with death and instituted an innovative aesthetic, present in everything he created, from the house to the stage. He gave precise and aware form to the ethics he proposed – an incomplete Elke way of thinking and being in the universe, precisely to make room for the necessary polysemy that the ballet of affections demands.

Elke toured the world and herself. He practiced the eternal “bullfighting beauty pass”, about which Leiris talks [1]: Dionysian, antagonistic, deviant, ambiguous, cunning, serious for himself and for the other. He went further: now bull, sometimes bullfighter, he instilled the tragic in everything he did. It carried within itself the burden of danger essential for the experience to be consolidated as such. He found the gap and filled it – here the movement is possible. Whether at fashion shows, when she was the only one to smile gorgonically on the catwalks (whoever smiles knows of death), vivifying the walking of a mannequin; whether by the honks emitted by the Chacrinha duck, or the controversial 10 marks presented to the worst freshmen for the fury and lack of control of Silvio Santos; in dress, in the cinema, in the theater, in the risk taken on the streets, in nightclubs, in relationships, in laughter, where the gap passed opened like lips open: being from another time, another world, another.

And what constitutes this loophole? What defines the Elke ethic of being? What is bequeathed to us? Elke chose the priesthood of friendship, turning everything upside down. He recited his wish at four corners, through several mouths. He ate, swallowed, and regurgitated an entire set table. In a poem dear to the artist, Álvaro de Campos, one of Fernando Pessoa’s heteronyms, said:

Feel everything in every way
To experience everything from everywhere,
To be the same thing in every possible way at the same time,
Realize in yourself the whole of humanity at all times
In a single diffuse, profuse, complete and distant moment

In these verses, there is the dimension of the impossible, and in front of it, the sacrifice. The appeal to the joyful breadth of life carries with it the need to make the things we touch sacred – to understand the dimension that must be set aside, to understand the flaw as a religion, in the sense of rereading to delimit separation, giving the other, space to enter and take possession, since through circumspect, the other gives us property and reveals our being. Just as the son is the one who characterizes the father, even though he is never the father, the other is the one who allows us to be in the world. We die so that the other will be born and, by revelation, we will come to light together. We sacrificed to appease the neighbor/inner god, and return to the profane use of relationships. “Friendship”, says Agamben when analyzing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, is “the de-subjectivation at the heart of even the most intimate sense of self” [2], in other words, the friend, for this purpose, must be a sacrificed part of our own being within the field of the co-division of one’s own existence. “And it is this objectless sharing”, Agamben continues, “that original consent that constitutes politics” at its origin. For this reason, Elke was the guardian of the good politics of living; she understood the importance of friendship as a weapon and never tired of prophesying: To live is not enough, the important thing is to live with; to live with.

Elke preached love. He put love into everything he did. He distributed love to everyone he met. Aware that we are only ready to die, because there is no escape, he distilled his maxim as an instrument to fill the sausage of life: Eros Anikate Mahan, love is invincible in battle – a verse stolen from the choir of Sophocles’s Antigone, which sentences those who love what is most alive [1], uncertain, risky, and humane.

The exhibition that we offer the visitor is not biographical. Elke stated that biographies should be intended only for great men – Alexander the Great said. Thus, he accepted the sun on his forehead, evading the categorizations intended for the common, revealing what it seems but is not. She lived all things from the concrete of life and symbolized them through the thought that was the fruit of experience – she masterfully controlled the field of representations. Thus, the ensemble is a homage and a thank you for what Elke Maravilha bequeathed to us in various fields of human creation: in fashion, in clothing, in mass and popular culture, in theater, in everyday life, but mainly for teaching us how to transform gold into straw, despite any certainty.


[1] LEIRIS, Michel. Bullfighting Mirror. São Paulo: Cosac and Naify, 2001. “In the bullfighting pass, in short, the bullfighter, with his calculated evolutions, his science, his technique, represents the superhuman geometric figure, the archetype, the Platonic idea. This entirely ideal, timeless beauty, comparable only to the harmony of the stars, is related to contact, friction, and constant threat with the catastrophe of the bull, a kind of monster or a foreign body, which tends to rush, in spite of all the rules, like a dog knocking down a bowling game so aligned with platonic ideas. But even so, we would have only contrast, opposition, if the pass itself were not a kind of tangency, an immediate controversy, followed by a divergence (rapprochement of the bull and the bullfighter; then the separation of man and animal, for which the cloth indicates the “way out”). Except that contact, at the very moment in which it is going to take place, is avoided by a hint, a deviation imposed on the bull’s trajectory, or an avoidance: a slight detachment from the man, a simple torsion of the body, a kind of commitment to which he forces his coldly geometric beauty, as if there were no way to avoid the harm of the bull, other than by partially incorporating it, by imprinting on the person himself something slightly sinister or, to play with words, to misrepresent himself

.”

[2] AGAMBEN, George. Nudity. Belo Horizonte: Authentic, 2015

.

[3] Elke drew attention several times to one of the etymologies intended for the word love, from the Latin a-mors, absence of death. It is also linked to other prefixes (lat. amma) linked to the condition of motherhood, that is, to the origin

of life.

Virtual Tour

Elke Maravilha | Brazil, 1970s | Photographer David Zingg | Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) Collection



David Zingg recorded the most beautiful images of Elke Wonder. The photographer, the artist of the Ordinary-Extraordinary as much as Elke, was able to accurately capture the poetic proposal of Elke's performance, shaping, together with the artist, what we can call synthesis images of the propositions of Elke Maravilha thought. The result affirms the invigorating meeting between Elke and Zingg. It wasn't just living together. Rather, it was living together.

Creation and salvation: the mirror altar

“I raise an altar to a different god in every corner of my soul.”

Paraphrase by Elke Maravilha from the poem Feeling Everything in Every Way, by Álvaro de Campos

The world is made up of senses and things, words and objects that, in amalgam, are the raw material for the ordering, coherence, and stability necessary for human affections. When faced with objects, what is not us stands before us, but representation. The objects throw their precariousness and inertia on our faces, qualities of the emptiness that is imposed so that the represented can make sense, when we outline them as our own reflection. We see, in objects, parts of ourselves. We stick together our desires, aim at the image and from it we establish what belongs to us, what does not belong to us or what we fix, in an attempt to deceive time and stabilize our passage through it. For this reason, we imprison the favorite saint, an image in itself and for which we often pray, or we carefully highlight photos from magazines to paste in a hidden place. We frame images of distant worlds, which ensure that we are not from there, as well as images of ourselves, in places where we would like to belong. And in this game of hiding, highlighting, diluting, classifying, we determine, by the act of exposing, the set of things that, like a mirror, are the certification of control over our place in the world in recognition of oneself.

During his lifetime, Elke maintained several altars. In its aesthetic conception, everything was an altar as a chosen way of exhibiting – between ideas and words, between gestures and clothing, between space and objects. The character, mounted from head to toe with makeup, wig, clothes, props, movements, features and words, was an altar, construction of the exhibition image.

The altar is a reflection of who we are and how we see ourselves and present ourselves to the world. In it, we make everything that at some point means sacred. At the same time, by contact (contagion), we profaned what was once sacred, and by doing so, we change our reflection, accepting new affections that transform us, always based on what we receive at the hands of the other. The altar thus delineates the place of belonging, and therefore, we can say that it, like a mirror, is part of the mask we wear as people: Christians, Jews, Muslims, children of father and mother, bearers of the name that was bequeathed or created to us, elements that we transmit by the ways we choose to say, talk, move. It is at the altar that we feed the saints, raise our prayers to solve and formulate riddles. Before the gates of big cities, we are devoured by the Sphinx.

Those who penetrated the apartment located in Leme, Rio de Janeiro, found themselves inside a large living being. The flesh-red painted walls already said: you were swallowed and here is everything that confirms my thought of being mythological. Like a mouth, a hell hole that devours, chews and returns everything, Elke’s altar united incongruous objects and images, which in networks were in solidarity to express the artist’s worldview. The baroque profusion of objects diluted the possibility of rigid classification, further intensifying the purpose of eloquence, rhetoric, and persuasion, presenting the wonder of a world open to the other and to public life.

Without a doubt, Elke combined his experiences from childhood. In that corner of the room, there are orthodox polyptychs, the intricate design of the Minas Gerais rocks, the Carioca carnival, the slump of Chacrinha. The ultimate goal: to communicate. From the gnomes to the necklaces that now adorned her chest, from the little deer of various kinds, from Jesus Christ to the grandmother’s kettle, from Chacrinha to Buddha, from the doll Emília to Eshu, each object was the material that fed and constituted the artist’s gene [1]. Aesthetic coagulation of the incongruity of accumulation, Elke’s altar shaped the synthesis of his affections: everything or nothing, concept without concept, neither man nor woman – people.


[1] Gene, genius, people are words that share the same etymology linked to the meaning of origin, to give birth, from the Latin: genius, gens.
Elke Maravilha | Brazil, 1970s | Photographer David Zingg | Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) Collection

The stateless person of Itabira

Elke Wonder Woman

A black German woman, a radar

A sea, a pile

Elke Wonder Woman

A white apple, an avatar

A moonlight on an island

Elke Wonder Woman

A pagan goddess, a sonar

An altar, a trail

Elke Wonder Woman

An Ogã stone, a pillar

The mother and daughter air

Elke Wonder Woman

Russian, Greek, Afghan from Dakar,

diamond and sapphire

Elke Wonder Woman

India, Ninja, Titan,

nectar, lychee, guavira,

Iara, Curupira, nettle, vampire

Elke Wonder Woman

Orisha of Iran,

honey, custard,

lucid how delusional,

Elke Wonder Woman

albina, Catalan, pop-star, Syrian miner

Curió, Curruíra, Vanilla Orchid

Elke Wonder Woman

Galician, talisman, odd-even,

shine when it boils

Elke Wonder Woman

Pisces, bamboo, verb to love,

cultured muse, hillbilly

Clementina da Vila, Ziquezira antidote

Elke Wonder Woman

wolf, chan-tchan-tchan-tchan,

millennial, mile beacon light,

Elke Wonder Woman

Pomba-Gira, Iansã, Iemanjá, Maria Padilha,

Spider, Trap, Witch Who Fairy Turns

Elke Wonder Woman

magnet, elo, single wool,

Oxum versus a lie,

Elke Wonder Woman

Prussian in the eagerness to donate,

stateless person of Brasília, Guaira, Altamira,

to finish,

stateless person from Itabira.

Itamar Assumpcao

clothing | Atibaia, São Paulo, 1957 | Unknown photographer | Elke Maravilha Institute Collection | When asked about when he became aware of the importance of clothes for his expression, Elke Maravilha replied that it was at the moment of his confirmation, the first time he was mounted from head to toe. With great affection, she remembers that the dress was completely sewn by her grandmother.

The acting and the clothes

In the prefiguration of the expulsion from paradise, Adam and Eve immediately found themselves naked. They recognized the face of death. They understood that, due to the contagion of what was previously reserved for the divine, they lost their own divinity and, as humans, were destined to mismatch with the world and time. There is, in the knowledge of nudity, the recognition of the limits between our desires and the concrete of the world, between the artificial human and the natural savage, between the disharmony of recognizing oneself as a failure in time and the harmony of following infinite. As compensation and symbology, God offered the original couple two cloaks of stitched coats, marking the new marginal condition: neither God nor animal, but crisis and disagreement. On the other hand, the cloak appeased everyday wounds, offered contouring and some sanity in meeting the time.

Although we are lonely, through costumes (from lat. trahere, bring to yourself), we surpass our short period of life, uniting ourselves, as historical agents, with the collective values of time. The fantasy of costume, clothing and fashion, forms the intermediary of contact between our existence and the world, occupying the prophetic place of union of times. It throws into the future, the burden of the past from which we cannot escape, turning us into a useful springboard between generations. It marks the break and the union.

The fantasy that involves the universe of clothing always places us in the field of suspension and paradox. Clothing uniforms and distinguishes, approaches and separates, clarifies and deceives, camouflages and reveals, liberates and imprisones, redeems, and punishes. The appearance is uncertainty, premeditation, acting: a coat for praying for the saint, horn and sequin for the festival of the ox, high heels for the catwalk, uniform for the military parade. It is the bullfighter’s crutch [1], which in every form of human creation, serves for ethical and moral judgment. On the one hand, clothes throw us into the abyss of self-betrayal and, like masks, reveal everything we want to hide, which allows us to recognize ourselves between the intersection of glances on the streets. Clothing is language and communication.

Elke masterfully used the appearance crutch. He stuck his sword in doubt and was able, from an early age, to communicate through his clothes. The technical mastery to which he raised his relationship with the costumes made its existence possible and conformed. Like a precise razor cut, the performance shaped by all the paraphernalia – from boots to cat makeup -, supported the gestures, mouths, lines, desires, not only his own, but of all those of whom Elke came between: neither sender nor receiver, just Elke! It was channel, sonar, radar, stack, as Itamar Assumpção said in the song she dedicated to the artist. His skin was also the skin of the other, straining the relations between the arena and the audience. It chose to act in a way that stretches the limits of the instituted/annulled binomial. More than a judge, Elke was a priestess, as she mediated unsolvable universes. To the husky call of Chacrinha: Ellllllkkkkkeeeeee Maaaaarrraaaaavviiiilllhhaaaaa, the audience responded to the screams: Elke, Elke, Elke – triumphal entrances that for the duckling ended in a kiss; for Pedro de Lara, his great partner, comical ladder and eternal suitor mambembe, in interrupted coitus; for Silvio Santos, in dodging. From each apparition, the revelation with subject, verb, predicate and period was awaited, which, not by chance, marked the right and left with a lipstick mouth.

Elected from the public, she fulfilled and dismantled all desires, especially the most secret and rejected. Elke educated the old, led the young. Dressed as a geisha, she took us to Portugal; from Portuguese to the Arabians; as a cinematographic diva, to the noblest cabarets. With his image, Elke mythicized and ritualized things, situations, and thoughts, in the eternal profanatory movement so necessary for the construction of a landscape. Farol, the artist inspired creators from around the world and created her own aesthetic lexicon, imbued with a diverse and broad conception of Brazil. His greatest inspirations were carnival, transvestites and drag queens, the kingdom of children and animals, the circus, distant cultures, whatever it could mean. Generations of stylists, makeup artists, hairdressers, stylists and suppliers collaborated with the artist in an intimate relationship of friendship and exchange: Zuzu Angel, Clodovil, Markito, Fernando Pires, Silvinho, Breno Beauty, Walério Araújo and many others.

Finally, with his creation, Elke outlined a well-defined arc. Over the years, the layers consolidated, the forms were purified, the intention became more and more explicit. The necklace of her death, which the artist put together for 40 years and which, according to her, would only be ready when she was going to play something else, is a synthesis of her affections. It preserves qualities of the artist’s creative gesture: the accumulation, the incongruity, the reorganization of the senses by the objects, the sincerity behind the form, the value of perpetual construction – of what changes and is never finished. Elke used to say that the animals are born ready, and he gave an example: the tiger, my God, how beautiful, with its coat; the gorilla, how wonderful! Even an earthworm was born ready!” And he concluded: the human being does not know what he came for.


[1] On the clothes of the killer who conducts a bullfight, Michel de Leiris places the crutch in the field of deception that establishes the desire that pendulates between attraction and death. He says: “Everything happens, on the one hand, as if human actors should concatenate as rhythmically as possible a series of positions, harmoniously move the romantic folds of the cover, gently handle the crutch – red cloth, which, together with the sword, is an instrument of sacrifice”, all this coated with the a sparkling “costume of lights” (which places the torero in a separate world, as the tragic actor’s mask or priestly garments do), in the effort, thanks to the play of cloths, to integrate the bull into his dance (…) economy of movements; role of rhythm; of the disentanglement with which they give themselves to technical problems “elegant solutions”; notions of sincerity, of justification of all acts, of their necessity in view of the end pursued; mastery of danger, both for the creator (who, at every moment, must risk being lost) and for the work (at each committed moment, constantly done and undone).

“In the bullfighting pass, in short, the torero, with its calculated evolutions, its science, its technique, represents the superhuman geometric figure, the archetype, the Platonic idea. This entirely ideal, timeless beauty, comparable only to the harmony of the stars, is in relation of contact, of friction, of constant threat with the catastrophe of the bull, a kind of monster or of a foreign body, which tends to rush, by default of all the rules, like a dog knocking down a bowling game so aligned with Platonic ideas.

But we would still have only contrast, opposition, if the pass itself were not a kind of tangency, an immediate controversy, followed by a divergence (approximation of the bull and the torero; then separation of man and animal, for which the cloth indicates the “exit”). Except that contact, at the same moment in which it takes place, is avoided by a close call, a deviation imposed on the bull’s trajectory, or an avoidance: slight detachment from man, simple torsion of the body, a kind of warpage to which he obliges his coldly geometrical beauty, as if there was no way to avoid the harm of bull, unless partially incorporating it, by the act of imprinting something slightly sinister to the person himself or, to play with words, of quieting.”

Michel Leiris in Bullfighting Mirror, p. 33
Elke Maravilha | Brazil, 1970s | Photographer David Zingg | Moreira Salles Institute (IMS) Collection

Hands on your head!

Historically, we strive to be recognized by the other in the public sphere. The focal point has always been the face and head, nuclei of the senses and the maximum expression of emotions. In the same way that Romans kept, at the entrance of their homes, a wax mask representing the ancestor who gave their name to the patrician family, kings and queens, during the centuries, commissioned portraits to spread their divine image to the limits of the kingdoms and bequeath their crowns; sultans created sumptuous images of themselves and guaranteed the heritage of their jewelled turbans. While Delilah cut off Samson’s hair, John the Baptist’s head went to the plate.

Within the same register, the devotee wears a hood to pass the procession anonymously, the player puts on the mask to suspend his identity, the marginal covers his face, so as not to be captured. To be recognized is always two sides of the same coin: one of light, the other of shadow. The Latin word persona, from the Greek prosopon or the Etruscan phersu, refers, in its origin, to the theatrical mask, which is nothing more than the caricature synthesis, recognition in vitro, of the face we choose to put on the streets, our social person. Hence: character, personality.

It’s no wonder that Elke chose the head as the pinnacle of his artistic creation. In an act free of innocence, she knew that recovering the original value of the persona, assuming the dubiety of the mask, was the most forceful way of communicating with the receiver. Carmen Miranda used the same device, establishing a type that identified her. However, Elke went further. By recovering the instability and mutation of the images under the sign of the mask, the gap between recognition and surprise deepened. He deceived the screens through the constant mutation of his image. He united the two sides of the coin, proposing exhibition and disguise in one head, almost a virtuality. In this way, it created the chaos of recognition. More than that, it made the head a synthesis altar, explicit makeup, where several gods landed. The possibility of exchanging people multiplied: sometimes panther, sometimes unwary bride, sometimes Arab queen, sometimes farrucha peasant. Each wig a flash! The novelty and self-citation, characteristics he inherited from fashion, made it possible for Elke, a bust on the judges’ table, close up on the eyes painted like a cat, to convey his mythical qualities. The result: stony spectators’ eyes over her jellyfish head.

Accomplices of the semblant, the hands are its servants: they hold the scepter, bless and adjust the crown, make up, fasten an earring, adjust a ring and, for the photo, they join the face in the shape of wings, framing the most expensive asset to the image. Hands also cover their faces, hide crying, trenches for those who peer through their fingers. Hands speak when the actor, under the mask, points out the culprit or the beloved. When they get angry, they maneuver the guillotine that makes their heads roll. Hands also have masks, they keep fingerprints. A handless bust is an image of dead people.

Elke’s hands also spoke and were adorned just as much as his head. With nails always painted, the fingers were decorated with rings that in scale matched the capillary adornments. Head and hands composed the image that, from the navel upwards, reached us on the television, most of the time. The artist’s liveliness was such that she designed and produced rings in the shape of a head, talismans that she carried to melt the cold blade of the microphone: from Itamar Assumpção to the African mask, from the eagle’s beak to the hippopotamus snout, to the artist’s own face framed in the shape of a sun and moon. Hands touched the boundaries of the screen. It was all part of the acting game.

Elke granted complete control over his creation: from the altar, to the clothes, to the heads, boots and props, he did not stumble. He brushed off death with layers that reveal how naked we are all, just don’t see who believes in the king. With clothes, a divine gift, he underlined the injunction of the sacred and the profane that plagues us. By hands and heads, he embodied several worlds in himself. He took seriously the maxim: those who do not communicate squint, and more, beyond any cold control, he surrounded communication as a propelling device to other possible places, new horizons. Nothing is the end, everything is kind of it, kids!

“if eroticism and depravity carry in their very essence an intention to mislead or to transgress (at least: to act excessively, with fright, disproportionately), the original trace of this sin, of this break with the established limits, is found in the loving act, however simple it may be consummated, were it not otherwise because it represents a return to pure asocial nudity.”

Michel Leiris in Bullfighting Mirror, p. 55

Among Elke’s most precious possessions were his friends. There were many of them, they were family members, they were caregivers, they were scene partners, they were often friends of one date. Despite everything, there are always those who count on our fingers, who occupy a part of us, who we want to have as a brother, son, husband, or just what we want to be.

This selection of images is dedicated to those with heart: Francisca, Frederico, Natacha, Alex, Rubens, Brenno, Wilson, Evinha, Maurílio, João, Marilene, Victor, Gandia, Father Beto, Konstantino, Abdon, Raíssa, Vera, Wagner, Adriano, Marcio, Pedra de Cordoba, Rogéria, Mariana, Daspu in weight and many others! In the end, we took all Elke in us, transformed by what he bequeathed to us.

Necklace of life

Elke wore a necklace for 40 years, until her death. She said that this piece, the synthesis of her entire creative act, would only be ready when she died. The necklace carries memories that Elke inherited, earned, and mined in her years of life. It contains the mother’s cake shovel, the father’s freemasonry medal, reliquaries with family photos, ancient Greek coins, metal symbols dear to the artist, objects from all over the world. More than just an adornment, the necklace materializes the artist’s universe based on the worldview she invented for herself: a particular way of understanding this relationship with the world. The necklace of life is thus a personification of Elke, since it is at the heart of her symbolic choices.

Curatorship and Expography

Gabriel Gutierrez

Ubirata Trindade

Artistic coordination and texts

Gabriel Gutierrez

Artistic coordination assistance, research, and coordination of video content

Deyla Rabelo

Technical Drawings

Raimundo Chaves

Lighting

Calu Zabel

Scenery and Props

Fabio Pinheiro

Joao Almeida

Clothing restoration

Alex Dario

Vitor Carpe

Organization and Production Instituto Elke Maravilha

Francisca Grunupp

Maurilio Domitian

Visual Communication

Fábio Prata, Flávia Nalon (PS.2)

Text Proofreading

Ana Cintia Guazzelli

Executive production

Marcelo Comparini

Maira Silvestre

Local production

Alex de Oliveira

Pablo Adriano

Samara Regina

Digitization and Cataloging Images

Daniela Bonamico, Luiz Aureliano (Printing Workshop)

printout

Daniel Renault (Fine Art Giclee)

Collections used

Elke Maravilha Institute Collection

Moreira Salles Institute Collection

Instituto Zuzu Angel Collection

Gabriel Gutierrez Collection

montage

Diones Caldas

Erika Almeida

Fabio Nunes Pereira

Fabio Pinheiro

Joao Almeida

Luty Barteix

Nebraska Diamond

Rafael Vasconcelos

Renan Jose

Roberta Santos

CENOTECHNICS

Painting

Cleiton Pinto Chaves

Francivaldo Santos Silva

Gilvan Brito

Pablo Victor Cutrim Brito

Locksmiths

Jose de Souza Cantanhede

Electric

Jozenilson Leal

joinery

Dyomarcos Frazão Ribeiro

Edson Diniz Moraes

Lécio Reis Ferreira da Silva

Nerilton Fontoura Barbosa

mouldings

Fast Frame

Direction
Gabriel Gutierrez
Steering Assistance
Deyla Rabelo

Coordination of the Educational Program
Ubirata Trindade

Educators
Alcenilton Reis Junior
Maeleide Moraes Lopes

Educational Program Interns
Amanda Everton
Carlos Eduardo Carvalho

Communication Coordination
Edizio Moura

Photography, Design, and Communication Assistance
Clarissa Vieira

Production Coordination
Alex de Oliveira

Producers
Pablo Adriano Silva Santos
Samara Regina

Financial Coordination
Ana Beatris Silva (In Account)

Financial
Tayane Inojosa

Administrative
Ana Celia Freitas Santos

Reception
Adiel Lopes
Jaqueline Ponçadilha

Janitorial
Fabio Rabelo
Kaciane Costa Marques
Luzineth Nascimento Rodrigues

maintenance
Yves Motta (general supervision)
Gilvan Britto
Jozenilson Leal

security
Charles Rodrigues
Izaias Souza Silva
Raimundo Bastos
Raimundo Vilaca

Chairman of the Board of Directors

Luiz Eduardo Osorio

President of the Fiscal Council

Rodrigo Lauria

EXECUTIVE BOARD

Chief Executive Officer

Hugo Guimaraes Barreto Filho

Executive Director

Flavia Martins Constant

Management Team

Gisela Rosa

Luciana Gondim

Marize Mattos