Seven years have passed since the first edition of the Ocupa CCVM public notice was created, launched and produced in the spaces of the Vale Maranhão Cultural Center. During this time, artists who proposed the most diverse experiences passed through the exhibition rooms. If the languages, themes, and subjects varied, one thing is certain: the approaches, even when formulated from local experiences, addressed and made them reflect on problems and solutions of the human order, placing visitors in the perspectives of the world that we occupy. For the second time in a row, we will hear the voices that are speaking from the center of a special setting: the Amazon.

The first experience showed us a mosaic of productions that pointed to the social portrait of the territory. Between audiovisual documentaries, video art and photographs, the program was able to map productions that, in movement, converged to trace the profile of the Amazonian subject in its complex relationship with the home, with the urbanity, with the natural dimension, with the weight of the artificial aspect of life, that is, an attempt to outline and give a face to those who live daily the limits that are beyond the political design of the Legal Amazon.

The current cutout, the result of the selection of the 2024 selection committee, reveals other perceptions about the same subjects and territory, in addition to the portrait. Now, the selected works say a little more about the seen and the unseen of the places and corners touched by Amazonian beings. Enchantment is present, not as an extra-everyday dimension, but rather, as an authentic characteristic as part of people’s daily lives. Relations with the unknown, with the divine and with the uncontrollable appear as a fundamental and necessary element for those who set foot and live on this earth. Matter is uncertainty. The impression is that forces direct and modify places, such as the side of the coin’s crown that sometimes reveals, sometimes hides. Everything seems to belong to the other’s field.

Thiago Fonseca proposes new syncretisms based on elements of culture and popular work that, in a certain way, embody and demarcate sacred territories. Using the flag buoy, a common instrument of the rivers and seas of Maranhão, and the Cazumbá do Bumba Meu Boi, the artist expands the painting space, creating the immersive installation in the shape of an altar, which is presented as a result of times and stories that we have not mastered, but which are present.

Francelino Moraes Mesquita transgresses the use of the material of Miriti, so well known and used in the making of toys and devotional objects for the Nazaré Círio festival, as well as boxes and other food continents, giving shape to sculptures that, when representing animals, people and elements from the Amazon, rise to the abstract-neoconcrete-Amazonian, taking up avant-garde narratives from another prism.

In “on the ground floor, close to (i) memories”, Cuiabana artist Paty Wolff delves into family memories and archives to trace paths that go beyond her own identity. In the confrontation between human and natural representations, the artist outlines hybrid times, forms, and beings, indicating social and historical interactions, migrations and ruptures, and the reconstitution of memories and fantasies that are both personal and communal.

Fabiano Carvalho, on the other hand, challenges our perception by proposing photographs of absurd montages made with computer parts in the natural environment. On the one hand, it reaffirms the unknown complexity of nature while tracing fictional narratives from a time that we may not reach.

Son of Seringal, as Clementino Almeida (Tino Txai) calls himself, an indigenous artist from Xapuri, Acre, takes us on a journey through the universe of shamanic aesthetics on canvases painted with the urban graffiti technique. Throughout his career, Tino practiced activism in defense of the forest, remembering the importance of native peoples, and figures such as Chico Mendes, in the fight for the standing forest.

The diversity of the artistic proposals presented here enclose and document what is being produced in the currently most important region in the country. As stated before, the expressions open up to the dimension of the other, understanding that there is no other possibility of vitality without this openness. May the visit to the exhibition resignify in each of us the senses of the complex network that the Amazon embodies, allowing us to become more and more part of it. Have a nice visit!

Gabriel Gutierrez

São Luís, July 2024

Travessias da Encantaria

Between Maranhão and Pará, we find many buoys with their flags, which mark the tips of fishing nets such as pitíuzeira, serreira, fishing, whatever. They can be yellow, red or white and they – the nets – are below the tide, so they can fish properly. Halfway through the boat, Thiago Fonseca reveals to us, in his work “Travessias da Encantaria”, about the one who sings on the edge: a fish from the waist down, a woman from the waist up.

There’s a rock in the middle of the same bay that doesn’t sink. The one sitting on it is Mãe D`Água Preta. With her headband, her armbands and her Amazonite muiraquitã, hanging from the gold trancelin, she gives the river to drink to the sea, there at the headwaters, in the brackish, between the fresh and salty waters of a lost tide. Dona Florinda, the enchanted woman portrayed here, brings the aura of a red velvet ribbed nimbus embroidered with straws and beads. Thiago carries crowns of hooves on his head, features of horses, alligators and other animals, a doll, shotgun and machete in a fist, in addition to a Father Francisco.

Many elements make up his work. Keel, mirror, cave of vessels carried away by time and which appear here as the framework of a biana that once transported people and fish, living between Maranhão and Pará. It uses fabrics, paints, leather, applies sewing, painting, astrakhan, holographic sequins — all in a frame shaped like a Bumba Meu Boi loin embroidery.

The work Travessias da Encantaria is a flag, a buoy that signals fishing nets, emerges like a cazumba or cazumbá next to a set of floating banners, connecting the salty to the floodable fields and flickering here for our eyes.

Jandir Gonçalves

WHOSE MOTHER

Now, you will say, listening to particles is a sign of microscopic intelligence. Because some consider the dialogue between lithium and carbon interrupted, for some reason that led them to organize themselves into antagonistic groups. As if there were some rhythm in the chaos dance. As if the loose pieces of a watch could come together to create time. As if loose words made sense. And I will tell you, however, that there is only what has a mother.

Natural intelligence is based on the green foundation of the world and against it there are no devices. Between fungi and leaves, the idea is communicated and the feeling is transmitted in the optical fibers. What organism generated the first information, in which beat was the bit born? What strange paths did the little primate take until it reached the illusion that it is the only one that produces meaning – and that it creates a new world every time it presses a button? More life springs from stones than from artifacts, air whispers more songs, water penetrates secrets unknown to human science.

When the lens constructed with ingenuity expands the view of the details of the world, the magician who drives it can delude himself into the feeling of being on the side of the barren end of the machine. If you hear the mother’s voice, you’ll wake up, in spite of yourself. And you will recognize the womb in which you live in the company of everything: stone and slime, metal and flower, blood and art, glass and color.

Reenchanted, the artist will know that everything he creates is recreated in the land where he himself is created and recreated. He will contemplate the beauty that precedes and completes every image, and he will exclaim with ecstasy: my Mother, you are a master of beauty. And you will hear the answer: it’s your eyes, my son.

Antonio Alves

Eduardo Bartolomeo (President)

Malu Paiva (Executive VP of Sustainability)

Alexandre D’Ambrosio (Executive VP of Corporate and Institutional Affairs)

Gustavo Pimenta (Executive VP of Finance and Investor Relations)

Carlos Medeiros (Executive VP of Operations)

Marina Quental (Executive VP of People)

Alexandre Pereira (Executive VP of Projects)

Marcello Spinelli (Executive VP of Iron Ore Solutions)

Rafael Bittar (VP Technical Executive)

STRATEGIC ADVICE

Malu Paiva (President)

Flávia Constant (Vice President)

Hugo Barreto

Octavio Bulcano

EXECUTIVE BOARD

Hugo Barreto (CEO)

Luciana Gondim

Gisela Rosa

PROJECTS AND SPONSORSHIPS

Marize Mattos

Team: Ana Beatriz Abreu; Barbara Alves; Elizabete Moreira; Eunice Silva; Fabianne Herrera; Flávia Dratovsky; Jessica Morais; Joana Martins; Luciana Vieira; Maristella Medeiros; Michelle Amorim; Neila Souza; Nihara Pereira; Renata Mello

Gabriel Gutierrez (Direction)

Deyla Rabelo (Steering Assistant)

Ubiratã Trindade (Educational Program Coordination)

Alcenilton Reis Junior; Amanda Everton and Maeleide Moraes Lopes (Educators)

Ana Camilly Ferreira, Dianna Serra and Lyssia Santos (Educational Program Interns)

Edízio Moura (Communication Coordination)

Aiara Dália (Communication Assistance)

Nat Maciel (Production Coordination)

Fabio Pinheiro; Luty Barteix; Mayara Sucupira; Pablo Adriano Silva Santos and Samara Regina (Producers)

Ana Beatris Silva (Financial Coordination – In Account)

Tayane Inojosa (Financial)

Ana Célia Freitas Santos (Administrative)

Isabella Alves (Administrative Intern)

Adiel Lopes and Jaqueline Ponçadilha (Reception)

Fábio Rabelo; Kaciane Costa Marques and Luzineth Nascimento Rodrigues (Janitorial Office)

Yves Motta (General Maintenance Supervision); Gilvan Brito and Jozenilson Leal (Maintenance)

Charles Rodrigues; Izaías Souza Silva; Raimundo Bastos and Raimundo Vilaça (Security)

OCCUPY CCVM

Amazon in focus 2024

Clementino Almeida (Tino Txai), Fabiano Carvalho, Francelino Moraes Mesquita, Paty Wolff, Thiago Fonseca

Curatorship

Camila Fialho

Deyla Rabelo

Larissa Anchieta

Rose de Lima

Artistic Coordination

Deyla Dayane

Gabriel Gutierrez

Expography

Gabriel Gutierrez

Raimundo Tavares

Texts

Antonio Alves

Gabriel Gutierrez

Jandir Gonçalves

Lighting

Luis Zabel

Visual Communication

Fábio Prata, Flávia Nalon, Yugo Borges (PS.2)

Text Revision

Aiara Dahlia

Moura Building

printout

Daniel Renault (Fine Art Giclee)

Executive Production

Maria Silvestre, Marcelo Comparini (MC²)

production

Fábio Pinheiro

Luty Barteix

Mayara Sucupira

Nat Maciel

Pablo Adriano

Samara Regina

montage

Diones Caldas

Fábio Nunes Pereira

Marlyson Nunes

Monique Vitória

Rafael Vasconcelos

Renan José

Vanessa Serejo

CENOTECHNICS

Painting

Francivaldo Santos

Gilvan Brito

Electric

Jozenilson Leal

joinery

Edson Diniz Moraes

Dyoene Frazão Ribeiro

Francisco Diniz

José de Ribamar Pereira da Silva

Locksmith

José Cantanhede