Samba Exaltação
by Alexandre Sá, 2021
Samba Exaltação – Solo Exhibition
MAC Niterói
“I can’t go on anymore, oh, how I miss Brazil
Oh, how I long to return
Goodbye, America, this is a wonderful land
But I can’t stay because
Samba called me home”
(free translations)
(Geraldo Jacques/Haroldo Barbosa)
“Sooner or later in life, each of us comes to realize that complete happiness is unattainable; few, however, consider the opposite: that complete unhappiness is equally unattainable.” (free translation)
Primo Levi
Neon was discovered at the end of the 19th century and, with considerable speed, became an emblem of modernity, of progress, and of the social and urban transformations that would follow in the years to come. If its emergence and use are structural to thinking of the city as an imaginary in transit, it is not uncommon to come across another, no less imaginary, image of its presence: the loneliness of its flickering, faltering light in an empty shop window within a fast-moving night.
Samba Exaltação is a series of works in which Felippe Moraes highlights emotionally charged excerpts from popular songs and brings them into material form, as if proposing an interwoven relationship between visuality and the symbolic memory of so many songs etched into our experience over time. These excerpts, drawn mostly from well-known sambas, allow the sway of their rhythm to find, in the instability of neon, a new rhythm — admittedly uncertain and vivid, like an act of resistance in times of devastation.
It’s worth noting that these works were initially suspended in the window of his apartment near the Santa Efigênia viaduct, in downtown São Paulo. And this originary experience of the inside and outside of his particular infinity provoked new rhythms in the verses — perhaps already ghostly ones — in the face of an inevitable, oppressive pause brought on by a public health crisis, COVID-19, compounded by a lack of collective responsibility, steeped in a necrophiliac approach.
The solitude of confinement we’ve been living through, still imminent in 2021, resurfaced with new intensity within the interwoven relationship between public and private. The knot between self and other, perhaps as the result of a clumsy process of construction that insists on disregarding its own past, comes undone. What remains is a nostalgic longing for a future time. In eternal becoming. To be lit and extinguished. As if on the invisible wall of an intimate cave where the pure expression of living still urges to be.
This series now takes on new airs. We find ourselves in another moment which, though no less risky, holds some slight measure of security brought by vaccination. Cities, still destabilized by inevitable trauma, begin an attempt to relearn their rhythms, their pulses, and a new time signature we do not yet know.
Felippe Moraes’s second solo exhibition at MAC-Niterói, besides being part of this museum’s return, in full force, to the city of Niterói, reflects a shift in rhythm within his production, reinforcing everyday elements drawn from the world of things and betting on a dialogue with the wider public through samba and its inescapable bodily memory. Cadence emerges as an element of communion and conviviality, of the ordinary joy and melancholy of the sway of survival, at times forgotten. The phrases that look back at us are exactly what they are: a forceful reminder of the joy that structures the very foundation of what it means to be Brazilian.
The excerpts drawn from popular songs gain, through the electricity of neon, the intensity they deserve, in a powerful union between word and image. Arranged now within the architecture-landscape, they hold an atmospheric doubt as to whether we will truly be able, after the inevitable devastation of the pandemic, to rediscover such vibrations and reinvent this charge of sensations that had to be silenced throughout this time. In this sense, this exhibition is, beyond an affirmation, a plea for all of us to have enough courage so that our samba, always situated between the public and the private, may never die again.
Alexandre Sá
2021