Canoas
2010 - Film & Video (Film & Video)
13:30 minutes
Tamar Guimarães
Canoas by Tamar Guimarães is a film made for the 2010 São Paulo biennial as an exercise in the projection of national identity. The main subject and setting of the film is Casa das Canoas, the home that architect Oscar Niemeyer built for himself in the early 1950s. Overlooking the bay on the outskirts of Rio de Janeiro, the building has achieved iconic status in Brazil. Although a private residence, it served as an important site for cultural gatherings of Brazil’s elite and international guests. Canoas restages a glamorous cocktail party with actors and non-actors at the residence in which dancing and drinking punctuate conversations about modernity, social housing, political dictatorship, and artistic exile. Framing the festivities is the movement and interaction of servants as they prepare for the party and then leave for their own homes in the morning. And it is in these small transitional moments that Guimarães’s work is most critical. The film speaks directly to the contradictions inherent in the famed architect’s creation and the failed promise of modernity as expressed by the disparity between the labor and leisure classes. Intended as a space that was for the people and a better future, the conditions and context that produced Niemeyer’s building also further entrenched the social and class divisions in Brazil.
Tamar Guimarães explores the history of modernism, colonialism, and shamanism in Latin America through a manifold practice of film, video, sound, sculpture, and installation work. Using ethno-fiction and collectivist models, often working with non-actors and employing discursive forms of research, her films call into question political histories as they concern the real and the present.
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