Photo: Gê Viana

FILMOGRAPHY

Clube da Criança - (2008, 9min)
De repente, Bárbara - (2013, 12min) 
SuperRio Superficções - (2016, 9min)
Supercomplexo Metropolitano Expandido - (2018, 7min) 
A Cristalização de Brasília - (2019, 7min)

SITE 

***

COMPLEMENTARY MATERIAL 

Preface from the SuperRio Superfictions Magazine

by Bernardo Jose De Souza

The world is moved by dark forces.

Existing right alongside what we call reality, there is a supernatural level with connected symbolic figures, a dimension that is just as deceitful and insidious as it is effective in manipulating the political arena governing our planet in the early decades of the 21st century.

Beyond the sociological spectrum based on scientific models which owe much to the theoretical legacy of the 20th-century, a fictional landscape comes into view that defies the most basic laws of nature, the wicked and evil economic practices and the established but imaginary political, spiritual and even geographical order of the world.

Superficções (“superfictions”) is a cosmogony developed by Antoine Guerreiro do Divino Amor to explore a reality that lies beneath our – artificial and camouflaged – mainstream existence. It is a map of rare beauty and acuteness. It may appear paradoxical, but giving a short summary of that other world – which is actually our own world – requires a clear head and some rational thinking, which might help us, even if only a little, to understand the artist’s motives for dreaming up such madness that is brimming with insights and visionary talent. (If I were to claim that it wasn’t a challenge to figure out the meaning of the artist’s work, I would also be talking fiction; and although I take my inspiration from him, his fiction would take precedence over mine in exposing the crude and banal reality of life.)

Antoine Guerreiro do Divino Amor holds a degree in architecture from the École Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture de Grenoble. As the child of a Swiss father and a Brazilian mother from Rio de Janeiro, he is a half-breed in the best postcolonial sense of the word. The name Guerreiro (meaning “warrior”) comes from his mother’s side, while the name Divino Amor (“divine love”) was taken from one of his stepmothers, a pastor in an evangelical church in Rio de Janeiro. In his early investigations of the underlying reality of the world, he had recourse to the philosophers and masters who construed the universe according to the perspective and mindset of Western civilisation. But the canon of works that conquered the world after the unfortunate advent of modernity forced the artist to perform a radical shift in his thinking to be able to challenge the traditional power structures, which are unstable and ineffective despite their apparent robustness and are directly linked to the vertical hierarchies of academia and science.

Interested at first in the powers that conspire to determine the course of our epic misfortunes on this planet, the artist ultimaltely abandoned the global perspective and, as a consequence, the project of developing a new sociopolitical and symbolic theory of megalomaniac proportions. Instead, he headed south in an iconoclastic return to the maternal tropics, which inspired him to explore the complex reality of the New World – following the example set by Lévi-Strauss almost a century earlier.

Bathed in the sunlight and the warm equatorial waters of this new environment, Antoine Guerreiro do Divino Amor rediscovered not only the scents and memories of his childhood, but also the fears, adventures and fantasies that had marked his adolescence: sex and religion wrapped in a euphoric haze, transgression and authoritarianism. And because tensions dominate the world, and advances are possible only because of them, the revolution in his theoretical thinking in Brazil gave fresh impetus to his seminal explorations of the social dynamics and political upheavals of humanity.

With the aim of finally capturing the superreality that keeps us going as we wearily go about our business day in day out, he focused on the local sins and crimes as well as on the unscrupulous façades of a country that insists on making a clean sweep of its history and always refers to a promising future which it has never actually experienced. This is why the author Stefan Zweig came up with the slogan “Brazil, country of the future!” and why the former Brazilian president Juscelino Kubitscheck coined the phrase “50 years in 5 years” (under Kubitscheck, it took only such a short period of time to build the city of Brasília, which the architect Paulo Mendes da Rocha described as a blatant “historical blunder” for a variety of reasons, such as shutting the people out of the centres of power).

Now, well into the new millenium, we know that our representative democracy is a sham – just like many others around the globe, incidentally. We know that we are still governed by the oligarchs who ruled our country for much of history, and by the dominant media outlets and their cunning advocacy of reactionary ideas that are currently stirring up the country. Therefore, it is imperative that we look for semantic and symbolic alternatives that can make sense of the inferno created by a fascist and secretive political elite, which is activating the same old mechanisms of corruption that come attached with power – not to mention the prominent role played by the evangelical church in the process of imposing outrageous tax laws on people in the name of the “divine” power.

Superficções takes a closer look at Rio de Janeiro, the place that represents the quintessence of the Brazilian way of life, where racism, prejudice and government brutality are swept under the carpet, a tableau presented to the masses, painted in tropical colours with a sublime, fictional beauty which it scatters over the world as an antidote against their ranting. The “sociological” categories conceived by Antoine Guerreiro do Divino Amor undermine the maintenance plans of the traditional echelons of power, replacing them with a new order that operates above and beneath the realm of us mere mortals.

Its gassy, poisonous effects can no longer be sublimated and rise to the surface like lava from volcanoes, an allegorical reflection of the horrific underworld that might even blind the dull eyes of the dignitaries who look down on the rabble from their golden governmental palaces.

While we insist on living within the matrix of the artificial reality without asking any questions, the superfictions reveal a new universe that is as productive as the workers who are generating our mystical wealth, always promised but never attained. Everything is political, as the artist would have us know.

Like a sort of sphinx on LSD, he asks a riddle: “Open your eyes and tell me, what is it that flows in the open veins of the Brazilian people – mud or glitter?”

***

CRITIC by Helena Frade - Zagaia em Revista

***

Superfictions by Guerreiro do Divino Amor – Whiteness, Superhibernation and Supermessianism

By Clarissa Diniz

(Text originally published in the PIPA Prize 2019 catalogue)

Despite the obligation to think about colonialism in Brazil – dismantling invisibilities and historically repairing its genocides and epistemicides – there is an increasingly clear need to address not only the other of European ethnocentrism but also those who, by dint of their privileges, occupy positions contiguous to it. To problematize and deconstruct the colonial supremacy of whiteness is inseparable from the need to protect the protagonisms and centralities of non-whites. In art, the monopolization of the regimes of representation in the hands of the few inevitably implies the maintenance of the political impossibility of self-representation in general and, as a corollary, the bankruptcy of any representativeness. In this regard, the exercise of the right to self-representation by those who have historically been prevented from accessing it requires, of those who occupy representation as a point of view, the duty to represent these others and their perspectives. In light of the despotism of having established as universal a single point of view, canonizing it as the very idea of representation, demanding that we represent ourselves seems eminently more ethical than authoritarian. However, the Brazilian artists who are producing self-representations outside the spectrum of those subjects whose images had been looted from them can be counted on the fingers of one hand. While struggles are being fought for the presence of black or indigenous artists and their self-representations – or any issues that interest them beyond approaches based on identity – in the realm of art, most non-black artists and non-indigenous people choose to stay strategically and comfortably clear of the political duty to represent themselves without fictionalizing the conflation of our white, Judaeo-Christian, patriarchal images etc. with the idea of representation in itself. Frankly, even today, the art produced in “miscegenated” Brazil has not confronted the whiteness that is one of its constitutive element s. It is in this context that the work of Guerreiro do Divino Amor is located.

Superfictions

Since 2005, Guerreiro do Divino Amor has been working on his Superfictions project which, beginning with urban complexes, addresses forms of the social, political, economic, religious, moral and cultural organization of cities. A child of globalization and the internet, he has combined the experience of living in the places he has fictionalized with the work of a digital archaeologist who excavates the iconographies and imaginaries that he appropriates from the tangle of information available on the internet.

In an open process of creation that is continually permeated by new data, he produces endless narratives presented in chapters. Brussels, Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brasília and Belo Horizonte have thus provided different ports of entry for this superfiction which is set against the backdrop of the adventure of civilization. Not the reiteration of the imperialist messianism that yearns for economic, political and symbolic hegemony, but its problematization and satirizing: the mapa mundi is the stage curtain from which Guerreiro do Divino Amor has elaborated his dramaturgy of conflicts between different peoples, nations, classes, groups, individuals and the cosmopolitics that collide with and derive from them. Colonized by the utopian horizons of social harmony during the advance of imperialism, in the hope of finding a lost paradise, this fictionalization became a hostage both to a mythical past and a futuristic imaginative world. It has been decolonized, however, since the Edens proved elusive; in addition, the “barbarians” who occupied the lands originally intended for it rebelled against the European ethnocentric “civilizational” project, exposing its fictionality. To consider the epistemic, ontological and legal bases of a world that is clearly heading towards disaster to be fictional is, of course, to liberate the fiction from the prison of peace and creatively face the war, the apocalypse and other processes already underway, fictionalizing the real so that it becomes amenable to thought.

War

Superfictions is based on a primordial war: the Superempire versus the Supergalaxy. However, by taking on specific characteristics with each chapter, it is, in a general sense, a war between “dichotomous civilizations which fight for control of space and the minds of humans”. While the Supergalaxy is moved by “uncoordinated impulses”, the Superempire “is a rational battle machine, commanded by Superconsortiums”, as the Supercomplexo Metropolitano Expandido (Expanded Metropolitan Supercomplex) (2018) reveals, which presents the megacity of São Paulo as a machine along its dimensions of power, careers, meritocracy and money. In the conflicts at play in Pauliceia, the social subjects excluded from its project of success are obliterated and obscured: for this reason, the film’s protagonists are the myth of the bandeirantes – Brazil’s pioneers – as well as slavery, religion, gambling, banks, the media and São Paulo’s mayor João Dória. They make up the landscape of this Supercomplex that is held together and propelled by superducts and supervortices. Alert to the depictions of his own social position, Guerreiro do Divino Amor is interested not only in scrutinizing, but also in naming the subjects and organizations that produce and maintain the power structures that are the protagonists of his films. The individuals oppressed by the Superempire are both the victims and mainstay of these power structures, as is also evident in SuperRio (2015).

Aesthetic

Far from simply appropriating images extracted from their original media and rearranging them together with other elements in the films, panels and publications that make up Superfictions, Guerreiro do Divino Amor focuses on the treatment to which his images are subjected, evoking in us a simultaneous sense of familiarity and alienation that is the critical foundation of his project.

Through this strategy of assemblage – on objective and unconscious levels – one of the central territories of the civilizational battle between the Superempire and the Supercolony is constituted: the aesthetic. As Guerreiro do Divino Amor warns, the domination of rational civilization seeks to “create comfort zones [...] in a world in its own image: smooth and clean” by sanitizing everything.

The social targeting addressed by Superfictions – and which in A cristalização de Brasília (The Crystallization of Brasília) (2019) is metaphorized by the volcanoes of bleach erupting all over the Brazilian capital, whitening both the earthly and the spiritual dimensions of life – is in contrast with the aesthetic antieconomics of the collages that structure the narrative of the films and that throw the aesthetic conflicts of the different classes, races and genres into relief. Just as the war between the Superempire and the Supergalaxy is cast as a class struggle, “bourgeois taste” is continuously pitted against the iconographic vocabulary of the films and the backlit panels with their Chinese contraptions, whose fragmented and asymmetric totality does not annul, but rather accentuates the symbolic domination and cultural war between the civilizational projects. In his Supercomplexo Metropolitano Expandido, the rationalist and ordering perspective embodied by the offstage voice

that mechanically and dissubjectively drives the narrative is in stark contrast with the apparently anachronistic special effects and the disobedient, excessive, garish visual presentation which negates the progressive and hygienic character of its rhetoric. In A cristalização de Brasília, the stark contrast between the smoothness of the subject and the critical undertones of the film is encapsulated by the Goiânian accent and indigenous looks of the presenter, Sallisa Rosa, who saunters through the National Congress, Brazil’s parliament, in a shocking pink outfit; and, in SuperRio, by the image of a black woman, Pahtchy, acting as a sort of “weather girl”, a historical fetishization of sexist whiteness.

By casting itself as a work of art, Superfictions highlights the conflicts inherent in symbolic hegemony, since it occupies the white cube and the elitist social field of “contemporary art”, while its imaginary universe – characterized by references to the 1980s such as neon spandex, the Brazilian children’s TV show presenter Xuxa and the tacky aerobic exercises of the street carnival group Bunytos de Corpo – is clearly set apart from the lofty art world on a social, moral, cultural and political level.

Messianism

In his most recent film, Guerreiro do Divino Amor addresses the history of the Brazilian capital as an icon of messianic whiteness. In A cristalização de Brasília, the war between the Superempire and the Supergalaxy gives way to a reflection on the modus operandi of modernity as a form of colonialism which came to a head in Brazil in the 1950s. “The primordial superfiction of the supernation is superemptiness”, announces the film as the voice of Vinícius de Morais recites the first embarrassing lines of the Sinfonia da Alvorada (1961), composed at the request of Juscelino Kubitschek: “In the beginning was the desert”. The film links the founding and construction of Brasília to the invasion of the indigenous territory later baptized Brazil by the Portuguese colonizers. Squirting jets of bleach

onto the place considered superempty, the colonial gesture fictionalizes as a desert what historically was to lead to desertification: “there was no one/The solitude seemed more like a non-existent people saying things about nothing”, muses Vinícius while regarding himself as “taking possession” of the place with the help of “two axes that intersect at right angles – which is to say, the sign of the cross itself”. The Jesuit venture and its catechesis, its  developmentalist reincarnation in the 1950s and its messianic resurgence in the form of neo-Pentecostalism, and the election of a self-proclaimed Messiah to the presidency of the country, is what the film diagnoses as a “Bandeirante fever that multiplies and hypnotizes, propagating itself in people in the form of a Stockholm Syndrome epidemic”. Perhaps because we believe in a desert, we have developed sympathy even for what hurts us. It is thus urgent that life forms flourish which hibernate due to the fear of waking up.