Introduction: Land That Seemed to Us Quite Vast 1

Notes Introduction: Land That Seemed to Us Quite Vast 1 . Translations from the original Portuguese throughout are mine, unless otherwise indicated. 2 . P á dua cites a letter of instructions to Brazilian diplomats in London: “An empire so expansive and extensive, given the best ports in the world by nature ( . ) and so many varied and rich natural products, must be a separate and independent power” (123). Clearly, in the reference to ports and products, here the relationship between nature and nation is articulated in the terms of commerce. 3 . In addition to the already cited Holanda, Bosi, and Zilberman, the relationship between nature, nation, and regional imaginaries in Brazil has been explored by Wasserman (1994), Maliga (1998), Schwarcz (2003, 2008), S á (2004), Carvalho (2005), and Murari (2009). 4 . In a more precisely detailed rendering of the vast, biotic richness of Brazil, biologist F á bio Scarano (2009) writes: “Brazil has the greatest biodiversity on Earth, comprising fifty thousand plant species that represent approximately 20% of the documented flora known to man. It is also one of 17 countries on the planet that together give shelter to about 70% of the Earth’s fauna and flora species” (69). 5 . Brazilwood or Pernambuco wood has retained both its threatened status and its value as an international commodity, no longer for the red dye for which it was originally harvested for European markets, but as the source wood for the production of violin and cello bows. As Russ Rymer (2004) details, the very sound of Western classical music as we have known it for centuries, plus an industry of instrument mak- ers, is reliant on the singular resonance of this wood and the unique and increasingly fragile ecological conditions that produce it. 6 . In addition to the deforestation related to the continued expansion of Brazil’s agricultural frontier for the production of soybeans, bio- fuels, and cattle, major environmental debates and movements in recent years have been largely centered on large hydroelectric and fluvial canal-building projects. These include the Belo Monte dam proposal on the Xingu river, which has been stalled by the intensive mobilization of environmentalist and Indigenous opposition and, 158 Notes recently, actual physical occupation of the construction site. See Avelar’s (2011, 2012) two-part annotated bibliography on the Belo Monte controversy. Another ongoing signature development project of the PT-led Federal Government in recent years has been the “Transposition” of the S ã o Francisco River, a series of canals that would address issues of water shortage and distribution in the arid, interior Northeastern sert ã o region, though opponents argue that it threatens the ecological health of the river system and is designed to divert water toward expanded, large-scale export-oriented agri- culture. I will refer further to this project in regard to the work and activism of the visual artist Bené Fonteles. For an excellent reflection on development issues related to the Sã o Francisco River, com- bining travel memoir, conservation biology, and social ecology, see Harvey (2008). 7 . Medeiros’s Vegetal Sex (2010) is described in translator Raymond Bianchi’s introduction as encapsulating Brazil in poetry, and in a back-cover note by the poet Philip Jenks as “radically renegotiat[ing] deep ecology.” Astrid Cabral’s Cage (2008) is summarized as an “insightful and irreverent guide to the natural world,” and in translator Alexis Levitin’s introduction, Cabral is quoted as describing her poetry as “breath[ing] a love for nature and an accompanying ecological concern . all deeply planted in the Amazonian regions of my unconscious” (iii). In back-cover notes for Birds for a Demolition (2010), a collection of poems by Manoel de Barros selected and translated by Idra Novey, poet Edward Hirsch writes of “lyrics that stick close to the natural world” and Novey introduces his poetry as environmentally situated: “Barros writes of the vast rest of the country—the wetlands and rivers . the poverty and solitude of rural life, but also its sensuality and its wealth of geckos, open spaces and butterflies” (7). Baptista is a relative outlier in terms of this expressly environmentalist framing. A collection of her early poems was pub- lished in English translation as On the Shining Screen of the Eyelids (2003), with emphasis in its introduction given to its intertextual- ity with the colonial Latin American baroque and concretist formal experimentation. However, as is the case of her 1992 collection, Corpografia , her poems are combined with artist Francisco Faria’s drawings of riverscapes, dense tangles of tropical foliage, and, in a series called “ 4 vezes ar ” (4 times air), bent human backs X-rayed to reveal vegetal forms within. 1 Ecopoetry and Earth Art: Theoretical Orientations and Brazilian Inflections 1 . Á vila (2011) reads Machado among a number of contemporary Brazilian poets concerned with the impurifying gaze upon the Notes 159 landscape and its elements, and with the extent to which these are reduced to a reflection of the subject that looks upon them: The most frequent case is that of a certain interaction between the mind—and/or the body—and landscape. A sequence of four poems by Ronald Polito, for example, presents different degrees of involvement with the scene, culminating with its autonomy in “Antediluviano”: “waters / a flash of lightning awaits / the sky / of precise air.” “Material and landscape,” of Julio Castañ on Guimar ã es, places emphasis on the discipline of the gaze and the consequent erasure of the self. Donizete Galv ã o explains this tendency: “the body needs objects / so that they confirm / its fleeting existence.” (n pag.) 2 . Borges’s desconstructive study of these natural history dioramas, all of which depict iconic North American landscapes—from the Rocky Mountain West, the Southeast Canyonlands, the Florida Everglades, and so on—also seems to historicize ideas of the environment and environmental representation, locating them, and thus provincializ- ing them, in the particular context of US frontier expansion and its romantic aesthetics of wilderness sublime. These images, along with her other series, are available to view on the artists website: http:// sofiaborges.carbonmade.com . 3 . Another example of “post-landscape” art in Brazil today is the 2010 series “ Paisagens poss í veis ” (Possible Landscapes), by the Rio de Janeiro artist Deborah Engel. Engel, like Borges, destabilizes the documentary impulse and expectations of landscape depictions, simi- larly appropriating and resignifying already existing landscape imag- ery. In her photographs, a magazine photograph of a landscape is seen to be held up against a real, present landscape as framed and captured by Engel’s camera. The appropriated images, from popular anthropology, travel, and natural history magazines such as National Geographic , are carefully aligned up against the foreign background, with the lines of a house, a horizon, a riverbank, or a roadway meet- ing, and the two landscapes thus blending into a third, hybrid, invented one. Engel thus establishes a thread of common signification between distant places and elements: a lion now stands among cattle in the cerrado , a woman draped in a bright turquoise sari bends over a dry-land crop in the sert ã o , elephants bathe in a pond with south- ern Brazil’s iconic araucaria pine trees towering in the background. In some cases, there is very little sense of disjuncture or strangeness between the overlapped landscapes: a caboclo -looking farmer is placed beside someone else’s chicken coop; a freshly cut road through a tropical forest landscape is placed upon another road freshly cut through a tropical forest landscape. Engel’s series, emanating senses of sameness, anywhereness, and nowhereness, unsettles the search for exotic difference and unique discovery that is typical of the practice of documentary landscape photography. Mimicking the subjectivity 160 Notes and gaze of the National Geographic –type documentary photogra- pher, the outsider scanning the landscape for visible difference, Engel scans “foreign,” interior landscapes of Brazil for visible congruencies with the images of exotic rurality she consumes through global media sources. A selection of images from this series can be viewed through the Galeria Artur Fidalgo website, at http://www.arturfidalgo.com .br/acervo_deborah.html . 4 . While Earth art and environmental art are largely interchangeable and expansive designations, land art generally refers to the site-specific, often monumental interventions into landscapes and environments by US-based artists such as Walter de Maria, Robert Smithson, Nancy Holt, and Dennis Oppenheim, among others who came to promi- nence in the late 1960s and 1970s. For the purpose of this study, I have opted to use Boetzkes’s preferred term, Earth art, as that which most broadly encompasses the confluence of aesthetic experimentation and environmental reflection and ethics. 5 . Brazil is represented in Kastner’s survey by Cildo Meireles’s 1969– 1970 series, “Geographical Mutations: Rio-Sã o Paulo Border,” for which the artist fabricated objects to register the performance/ intervention he undertook at the border between those two states, for which he dug holes on each side of the border and exchanged soil and plants between them. 6 . These include works by the American artist Mark Dion and the Swiss artist/scientific illustrator Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, as well as a series of Macêdo’s own works. Dion, whom I discuss a bit further below in relation to the work of Frans Krajcberg, is known for work that appropriates and reframes the collecting, documentation, and dis- playing practices of the natural sciences, incorporating into his work collaboration with scientists, fieldwork, and the ideas and forms from the modern natural history museum and the sixteenth-century cabi- net of curiosities. Hesse-Honegger, trained as a scientific illustrator, began collecting, studying, and painting “morphologically disturbed” insects following the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986.

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