Post by Admin on Sept 13, 2022 22:01:35 GMT
The problems with superstar environmentalist photographer Sebastião Salgado
abeautifulresistance.org/site/2022/9/8/the-problems-with-superstar-environmentalist-photographer-sebastio-salgado
It is difficult to bring a critical eye to such a respected figure in the world of artistic, political and environmental activism. People are complex and therefore so are their artistic productions. I believe that Sebastião Salgado's work exists somewhere between the beneficial and the harmful.
A selection of Sebastião Salgado's work is now on display at the 'Museum of Tomorrow' in Rio de Janeiro — black and white photos of the Amazon and indigenous peoples of the region, in a museum dedicated to sustainability financed by Shell. The photographer's artistic and professional skill is undeniable, as is the curatorship of his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, reasons why the overwhelming majority of public reaction to this exhibition is positive. As an icon of environmental protection, and a leftist activist since the Brazilian dictatorship, Salgado is admired around the world. But, when I saw the exhibition, I couldn't contain the discomfort with the exoticization and, in some cases, eroticization of indigenous people, with inappropriate texts, full of half-truths that try to contextualize these photos. All of this made me wish he had invested strictly in recording the landscapes, which are magnificent, and avoided merging native people with plants, birds, and monkeys.
For a while I thought I was the only one feeling this discomfort, until I found a 2018 research by Marcelo Messina and Teresa Di Somma that reports exactly the problem—“the unnerving logic of colonialism.”
“In addition to silencing the stories of violence perpetrated by European colonizers against indigenous people, camouflaging them under friendly exchanges between utensils and women, Salgado visually connects to these stories of violence, symbolically reproducing them.”
The explanatory texts in the exhibition misrepresent reality through silencing. Military officer Cândido Rondon is described as the “greatest protector of indigenous people in Brazil”, silencing countless indigenous people who have fought for generations to protect themselves. When speaking of the marshal in this way, the truth is also silenced not only about the violence against indigenous people perpetrated by the military institution of which he was a part, but also the corruption and abuse in the indigenous protection institutions that he founded himself. Many say that he was a protector of indigenous people, but they must also recognize that protection for him meant assimilation into neocolonial Brazilian society.
In that same paragraph about Rondon, the indigenous way of life is described as “bucolic”, and I believe this word represents the kind of romanticism we confuse with respect. ‘In relation to the countryside’ places indigenous peoples in contrast to urban, industrialized life. When we glorify the native connection to nature, we confuse exoticization with appreciation, for we simplify by romanticizing, and we also infantilize by reducing these civilizations to categories of 'pure' and 'naive'.
There is nothing naive about the cultural legacy of the Amazonian indigenous peoples, there is naivety in us when we create this dichotomy between life in connection with nature and industrialized Christian life. Religion is silenced in the texts when indigenous spirituality is narrated as an anecdote, while the Christian gaze implicitly permeates all readings. In the text about the Suruwahá, it is said that there are high rates of suicide there as a symptom of mythology. They believe in “three heavens”, the best of which is for those who die at the most vigorous moment in life. The use of the word “suicide” alone is already a Western and Christian reading of the practice of “ritual death”. According to Kariny Teixeira De Souza and Márcio Martins Dos Santos, in the 2009 research “Ritual death: Reflections on the suruwaha 'suicide'", “cultural practices, such as the ritual death discussed here, misunderstood by 'Western' and, in a certain sense, Christian, conceptions prevailing in our society, feed our imagination, and so we think we see, right in front of us, beings devoid of humanity and meaning”.
abeautifulresistance.org/site/2022/9/8/the-problems-with-superstar-environmentalist-photographer-sebastio-salgado
It is difficult to bring a critical eye to such a respected figure in the world of artistic, political and environmental activism. People are complex and therefore so are their artistic productions. I believe that Sebastião Salgado's work exists somewhere between the beneficial and the harmful.
A selection of Sebastião Salgado's work is now on display at the 'Museum of Tomorrow' in Rio de Janeiro — black and white photos of the Amazon and indigenous peoples of the region, in a museum dedicated to sustainability financed by Shell. The photographer's artistic and professional skill is undeniable, as is the curatorship of his wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado, reasons why the overwhelming majority of public reaction to this exhibition is positive. As an icon of environmental protection, and a leftist activist since the Brazilian dictatorship, Salgado is admired around the world. But, when I saw the exhibition, I couldn't contain the discomfort with the exoticization and, in some cases, eroticization of indigenous people, with inappropriate texts, full of half-truths that try to contextualize these photos. All of this made me wish he had invested strictly in recording the landscapes, which are magnificent, and avoided merging native people with plants, birds, and monkeys.
For a while I thought I was the only one feeling this discomfort, until I found a 2018 research by Marcelo Messina and Teresa Di Somma that reports exactly the problem—“the unnerving logic of colonialism.”
“In addition to silencing the stories of violence perpetrated by European colonizers against indigenous people, camouflaging them under friendly exchanges between utensils and women, Salgado visually connects to these stories of violence, symbolically reproducing them.”
The explanatory texts in the exhibition misrepresent reality through silencing. Military officer Cândido Rondon is described as the “greatest protector of indigenous people in Brazil”, silencing countless indigenous people who have fought for generations to protect themselves. When speaking of the marshal in this way, the truth is also silenced not only about the violence against indigenous people perpetrated by the military institution of which he was a part, but also the corruption and abuse in the indigenous protection institutions that he founded himself. Many say that he was a protector of indigenous people, but they must also recognize that protection for him meant assimilation into neocolonial Brazilian society.
In that same paragraph about Rondon, the indigenous way of life is described as “bucolic”, and I believe this word represents the kind of romanticism we confuse with respect. ‘In relation to the countryside’ places indigenous peoples in contrast to urban, industrialized life. When we glorify the native connection to nature, we confuse exoticization with appreciation, for we simplify by romanticizing, and we also infantilize by reducing these civilizations to categories of 'pure' and 'naive'.
There is nothing naive about the cultural legacy of the Amazonian indigenous peoples, there is naivety in us when we create this dichotomy between life in connection with nature and industrialized Christian life. Religion is silenced in the texts when indigenous spirituality is narrated as an anecdote, while the Christian gaze implicitly permeates all readings. In the text about the Suruwahá, it is said that there are high rates of suicide there as a symptom of mythology. They believe in “three heavens”, the best of which is for those who die at the most vigorous moment in life. The use of the word “suicide” alone is already a Western and Christian reading of the practice of “ritual death”. According to Kariny Teixeira De Souza and Márcio Martins Dos Santos, in the 2009 research “Ritual death: Reflections on the suruwaha 'suicide'", “cultural practices, such as the ritual death discussed here, misunderstood by 'Western' and, in a certain sense, Christian, conceptions prevailing in our society, feed our imagination, and so we think we see, right in front of us, beings devoid of humanity and meaning”.