STOTHART, Anna. Adriana Varejão. Massachusetts: Institute of Contemporary Art/Boston, 2014.

Adriana Varejão: A Cannibalist Revision of History

 

Only anthropophagy unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically. The unique law of the world. Masked expression of all individualisms, of all collectivisms. Of all religions. Of all peace treaties. Tupi, or not Tupi that is the question.

–Oswald de Andrade, “Anthropophagic Manifesto”

 

In 1928, Oswald de Andrade (1890–1950), poet and pioneer of Brazilian modernism, wrote the “Manifesto antropófago” (Anthropophagic Manifesto), which calls for the celebration of Brazil’s diverse cultural make-up and its defining paradoxes: modern/primitive, industry/idleness, center/region, Europe/America. Adopting the term anthropophagy—the custom and practice of eating human flesh, or cannibalism—the poet urged his fellow Brazilians to “devour” rather than resist the ideals and cultural norms of the European colonizers, and transform their virtues and dominance into a new, more powerful cultural synthesis.[i] He thus reclaimed the cannibal, which had long represented the paradigm of the indigenous savage, and transformed the taboo of eating human flesh into a symbolic totem of cultural absorption. The manifesto became the foundational document for the Brazilian modernists, and its premise has continued to influence contemporary artists, who have responded by developing alternative modes of art making that disrupt oversimplifying, Eurocentric dichotomies such as traditional/contemporary, realist/abstract, and modernist/postmodernist.

Contemporary Brazilian artist Adriana Varejão uses the notion of anthropophagy to illustrate the intricacies and multidimensionality of Brazilian history, culture, and racial identity. The concept serves as a tool with which she can develop an alternative aesthetic that rejects formal harmony and embraces the multihistorical, the asymmetrical, the heterogeneous, and the miscegenated. Though maintaining a commitment to the medium of paint, Varejão makes highly visceral works that are trompe l’oeil tiles, book pages, architectural fragments, and oversized decorative plates. To visualize and literalize the concept of anthropophagy, she weaves together multiple modes of artistic expression that range from appropriation to abstraction, and realism to surrealism. According to Varejão, “I’m interested in the historical, anthropological, and symbolic aspect of anthropophagy. Anthropophagy is present in all of my works whenever several issues are involved: cultural absorption, dismemberment, deconstruction, transculturalism, the devouring power of eroticism. . . . Modernity in Brazil is based on this notion of anthropophagy, on the capacity to incorporate foreign ideas and transform them into your own.”[ii] The exhibition Adriana Varejão examines the ways in which the artist has repurposed the trope of anthropophagy to investigate the historical and contemporary reality of postcolonial Brazil.

            Cannibalism played a significant role in the warring culture of the indigenous populations of Brazil, particularly the Tupi people. As a ritualistic consequence of war, captives from the losing tribe would be fed to the members of the victorious tribe; the ingestion of the enemy was a symbol of both control and respect. While the Tupi have been described in accounts written by colonizers as openly receptive to European cultural and religious indoctrination, it is clear that they were also highly selective about which new principles they would adhere to and often continued their own practices—including ritual cannibalism.[iii] For colonists whose objective was complete conversion, this behavior was perplexing and frustrating. However, for the Tupi, cultural and religious belief was somewhat fluid, and conversion was not incompatible with the preservation of their most valued traditions. These drastically disparate historical ways of thinking about cultural difference and assimilation can inform a contemporary investigation into the relationship between the so-called Third and First Worlds as exemplified by Brazil and the United States. In Brazil, anthropophagy might be seen as a way of defining and accepting the absorption of colonizing cultures. In the U.S., while the concept of the homogenizing melting pot long defined the country’s diverse cultural make-up, it has now been supplanted by that of the ethnic stew, in which cultural boundaries and differences between populations are observed and maintained. These are important distinctions to identify at the outset of a discussion of Varejão’s work.

 

 

Historical Reinterpretation: Anthropophagy

 

Narrative does not belong to a time or a place. It is characterized by discontinuity. It is a tissue of histories. Histories of the body, of architecture, of Brazil, of tattooing, of ceramics, of old Portuguese azulejos, or modern ordinary ones, of maps, of books, of painting.

–Adriana Varejão, interviewed by Hélène Kelmachter

 

Varejão uses historical texts, illustrations, maps, and literature to reconstruct the colonization of Brazil. Blending historical, ethnographic, and anthropological references, she creates fictitious versions of Brazilian history, calling into question the “truth” established by historical documentation. During the sixteenth century, accounts of early encounters between Europeans and the indigenous population were riddled with contradictions, misinterpretations, misunderstandings, and prejudice. Indigenous people were portrayed solely as primitive savages who needed to be indoctrinated and controlled. The images of cannibalistic violence that were circulated became validation for forced catechism and cultural oppression. Varejão’s early works confront this fact of history by turning colonial imagery back on itself to expose its own fiction and biases.

            The painting Entrance Figure I, 1997 (fig. XX), represents a segment of a colonial blue-and-white tiled wall that depicts a figure standing in front of a balustrade. Such life-size “entrance figures”—typically noblemen—were markers of courtly sociability and etiquette in eighteenth-century tile decoration of Portuguese and Brazilian palaces, convents, and gardens.[iv] Varejão replicates the form, but replaces the traditional figure with a life-size nude female warrior covered with floral tattoos. Like the male entrance figure from the Church of Santo Antão do Tojal in Portugal that informed this work (fig. XX), the female warrior holds a spear in her left hand and makes a welcoming gesture with her right. However, rather than gesturing toward the entrance as her male counterpart does, she directs the viewer’s gaze to a scene of dismemberment and cannibalism in the countryside behind her. The contradiction between courtly greeting and cannibal feast symbolizes the cultural conflict that developed after the colonial encounter. By manipulating and combining these two historical images, Varejão presents literal and symbolic anthropophagy, and challenges the validity of both historical signifiers—European civility and indigenous barbarity.

            The background scene of the indigenous tribe savagely cutting up, cooking, and devouring European colonists and missionaries in Entrance Figure 1 is borrowed from a work by Flemish printmaker Theodorus de Bry (1528–1598), who documented the colonization of the Americas during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Never having traveled to the Americas, de Bry based his illustrations on the written reports of English geographer Richard Hakluyt (ca. 1552–1616). This secondhand testimony inspired representations that, though grossly exaggerated and often entirely false, had a profound impact on the European perception of colonial America. By appropriating de Bry’s imagery, Varejão reconstructs his allegory of the indigenous figure as a violent warrior in a multilayered portrait that exposes a historical narrative rife with sexism, racism, and Eurocentric power.

            Varejão’s use of appropriation to alter historical and colonial narratives became most recognizable in 1992 when she transformed a sixteenth-century map into a large-scale oval painting. Map of Lopo Homem II, 1992/2004 (fig. XX), depicts a map of the world copied exactly from the 1519 world atlas of Portuguese cartographer and cosmographer Lopo Homem (life dates unknown). In Homem’s map, America is identified as Mundus Novus Brasil and is linked to Asia by an imaginary continent labeled Mundus Novus. The only intervention Varejão makes is a surgical incision down the center and along the lower left edge of the painting that exposes a blood-red “interior.” As a symbol of corporeal mending and healing, she has sutured portions of the cuts with black surgical thread. The act of cutting into a painting to expose bloody innards is a gesture that recurs throughout Varejão’s oeuvre. She treats the surface of the painting (like the representation of history) as a body that is vulnerable to penetration and transformation. Its rupture also alludes to the violence enacted on the indigenous populations and their land, as well as to the enduring impact of inaccurate historical records.

            While artists and scribes disseminated information and misinformation about the Americas throughout Europe, missionaries were sent to convert the population and instill European ideologies. In Proposal for a Catechesis–Part II Diptych: Apparition and Relics, 1993 (fig. XX), Varejão reinterprets religious iconography that was used for indoctrination, and merges it with indigenous imagery. Proposal for a Catechesis is a trompe l’oeil representation of blue, white, and yellow Portuguese tiling and Baroque architectural motifs presented as if reproduced on aged book pages. On the left, a nude man lies peacefully on the grass, arms folded across his chest, within a fecund Brazilian landscape. In what is presumably a vision, a large vinelike plant rises from his mouth toward a bloody hole in the picture plane that is partially covered with indecipherable image fragments. The reference image for the scene depicts a robed saint reclining in the same position, in the same verdant landscape (fig. XX). The saint’s vision, which also appears in the form of a plant growing from his mouth, clearly shows the Virgin and Christ Child. In the background of Varejão’s revision, a woman roasts a human leg, an allusion to the propagated image of cannibalism. To the right, three relics—a leg reliquary, a decorative plate depicting a resurrected Christ rising above worshipping indigenous figures, and a silver arm reliquary of Saint Benedict—are displayed on a tiled floor, with a similarly fertile and tropical landscape in the background. Portions of this scene have been similarly cut away and haphazardly replaced in order to reveal the fleshy interior. In Proposal for a Catechesis and Map of Lopo Homem II, the act of cutting into the built-up painted surface of the canvas suggests that representation, which plays a significant role in documenting historical “fact,” is a socially constructed, permeable skin that should be questioned, investigated, and, when necessary, revised.

            Interlacing representations of tile, architecture, paper, and historical/religious narratives, Varejão elucidates how the merging of people and cultures as a product of colonization, and now globalization, results in a kind of contamination that can be seen in the alteration of aesthetic standards and the presence of discontinuities in perceived identities.[v] Her use of and reference to anthropophagy allow her to deconstruct these old historical narratives while constructing a new history that is alive and constantly shifting. According to cultural theorists Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, “Anthropophagy assumes the inevitability of cultural interchange between center and periphery, and the consequent impossibility of any nostalgic return to a type of purity. Since there can be no unproblematic recovery of national origins undefiled by alien influences, the artist in the dominated culture should not ignore the foreign presence but must swallow it, cannibalize it, and recycle it for national ends, always from a position of cultural self-confidence.”[vi] In these early works, Varejão practices cannibalism as the “Anthropophagic Manifesto” instructs, devouring the cultural and artistic practices of the colonizer, but she also acknowledges the incomplete and prejudicial account of the indigenous culture’s history through depictions of cannibalism and dismemberment.

Colonial Decoration: Tiles

 

I cannot see tile painting without tiles, which lend it material density. This is what gives it the character of a cold, difficult, aseptic, brittle, portable and fragmented painting, a sort of tattoo, as an indelible image printed inside a body.

–Adriana Varejão, quoted by Paulo Herkenhoff

 

The incorporation of the decorative tiled surfaces found in Brazil is as central to Varejão’s work as her reference to historical motifs. During colonization, the architectural character of Brazil was transformed by this Portuguese tradition: the primary style was the blue-and-white azulejo, an imperial form used to decorate the walls of Portuguese palaces, temples, convents, and gardens. In Varejão’s Carpet-Style Tilework in Live Flesh and Carpet-Style Tilework on Canvases, both 1999, an ornate motif appropriated from the nave of the church Nossa Senhora dos Prazeres in Montes Guararapes, Brazil, appears in two different forms. In Tilework in Live Flesh, the decorative pattern is interrupted by a large vertical incision that causes the surface to peel away––drooping, bulging, and curling like a tongue. Beneath the surface is a red mass of what appears to be organic matter—blood, flesh, tendons, and organs—made entirely of paint and polyurethane. In Tilework on Canvases, the ornamental pattern floats across the surface of a series of stark-white canvases that are stacked and leaning against the wall. These two works exemplify Varejão’s scrupulous replication of extant tile motifs as well as her exploration of the various ways paint can be applied to canvas. They blur the boundary between painting and sculpture, and illustrate the variations in meaning a single painterly motif can evoke.

            Varejão’s use of the azulejo reflects the subtle and enduring role of decoration in cultural colonialism. Traveling to Portugal, Eastern Europe, Turkey, China, and Japan, the artist has conducted extensive research into the origins, uses, and iconography of the tiles that decorate the cities of Brazil. She is interested in the connections between the azulejos and other ceramic techniques that found their way into Brazilian decorative practice, such as the cracked surface of porcelain of the Chinese Song Dynasty. This technique was introduced in the fourteenth century to Europe, where it evolved, particularly in Portugal and Holland, before appearing in the Brazilian coastal regions. While Varejão recreates a European decorative system that was based on order, duplication, and serialization, the Asian sources disrupt its integrity, as well as, by implication, that of the human body.[vii] Cracking, incising, peeling, or bisecting the painted surface, she exposes the deception beneath the beautiful surfaces that typically promote European religious and cultural practices.

            In Azulejo (Horn), 2013, Varejão has transformed a single tile into a large-scale painting of a vivid blue, crashing wave. As a fragment of a larger narrative, the image can readily be seen as a series of abstract, undulating lines. The surface is cracked, emphasizing the illusion of a tile that has suffered the repercussions of time and use. The large scale dramatizes the details that would normally be invisible. This work also brings to mind the sea as the route of the colonial diaspora. Meaty Song Ceramics, 2000, is a striking sculptural painting depicting cuts of meat, in trompe l’oeil white ceramic, dangling from the top of a white monochrome canvas. The cracks in the surface, which directly associate the azulejo with the cracked ceramic technique of the Song Dynasty, expose a red interior. Though the work alludes to the prepared meat often on display in the kitchens and butcher shops of Brazil, at a formal level it is also links Varejão’s narrative multi-tiled works with her single-tile paintings. In both Azulejo (Horn) and Meaty Song Ceramics, the cracked surface testifies to Varejão’s interest in the material possibility of the painted surface, evoking, on the one hand, ruins, decomposition, and fragmentation, and on the other, reconstruction, recomposition, and collage.

 

The Colonized Body: Flesh, Meat, and Saunas

 

For the real and the imagined, the past and the future only come together in the experience of the uncanny.

–Hal Foster, Compulsive Beauty

 

Varejão’s application of paint to canvas produces results that are sculptural, mimetic, abstract, grotesque, alluring, and uncanny. The body of works often referred to as her “meat paintings” are allover paintings that recall the physicality of works by Jackson Pollock or Helen Frankenthaler. However, rather than simply referring to the bodily gesture of applying paint to canvas, Varejão makes work that literally resembles flesh. Meat, tendons, blood, and organs made of painted polyurethane and masses of oil paint spill from inside her paintings, subverting our assumptions about the distance between viewer and painting, the characteristics of the human body, and the dimensionality of painting. Carol Armstrong describes her own highly visceral reaction to the work: “I myself feel a sort of shocked revulsion, not only at the unleashing of the abject but also at what appears to be a spectacular sensationalizing of the blood and guts, the sheer violence, that phenomena such as colonization, the actions of cleansing and transcending, and maybe also the sphere of the aesthetic all hide beneath their surfaces.”[viii]

            In many of Varejão’s meat works, a pristine monochrome tiled surface is dramatically interrupted by bursts of flesh. Folds 2, 2003, is a white tiled painting that has been ruptured in three places to reveal a chaotic and meaty interior of tendons, flesh, and blood. The confrontation of the protruding innards, curling a foot out from the support, demands a new way of looking and understanding the power of representation and surface. We often take for granted the dominance of representation as a means of constructing cultural and symbolic meaning. Here, Varejão has frozen a violent act, allowing us to take in its grotesque and disturbing message. It is unclear what it is inviting us to do, perhaps simply to gain knowledge by being attentive—to our histories, our culture, and our own bodies. Similarly, in Corner Jerked-Beef Ruin, 2003, Varejão takes the tile painting off the wall completely, transforming it into a freestanding architectural ruin. Composed of paint, polyurethane, and wood, the interior of the pristine monochrome blue or white walls resembles layers of marbled meat. While the flesh is visible, it is not exploding from the surface as in Folds 2, but wedged between the walls as though trapped and contained by the tiles that adorn their surfaces. Both works create an emotional and sensorial environment that transforms the traditional act of viewing work in a gallery, simultaneously beckoning and repelling the viewer.

            In the early 2000s, Varejão deviated from her meat and historical paintings with a series titled Saunas. While her other series either represent bodies or become bodies, the Sauna paintings stand out for the absence they reify. We are left to question its significance or cause––was there a loss, or is this simply an empty space? The monochrome tiled surfaces create the illusion of recession, while dramatic shadows limit visibility. Varejão explains: “My painting, in the Sauna series, departs from the conceptual field of references to historical iconography and enters the field of the sensorial. These are timeless environments. But they are figurative works that combine figuration with geometry. They work on questions intrinsic to painting, such as color, composition, perspective. . . . They are works that converse with architecture and space but in a virtual way.”[ix]

            The Sauna paintings depict empty tiled bathhouses and saunas whose inherent grids waver and whirlpool, multiply and vanish in impossible perspectival systems. Virtual Environment II, 2001, is a blue monochrome painting that exemplifies Varejão’s exploration of imagined space in the series. Though referring to the flat, rationalist grid that permeates modernist art, the works more powerfully radiate missing content. On prolonged viewing, their perspectival effects become almost nauseating. Hinting at violence that has already occurred or is yet to come, the vanishing points—the places of disappearance—induce creeping discomfort and dismay. Though the paintings are the inverse of the meat series, in their often life-size scale they elicit similar sensations of both pleasure and unease.

            While the body is absent in these works, there is often the suggestion of something lurking in the hidden corners. The Guest, 2005, is a large-scale white monochrome painting that shows a large pillar behind which spreads a puddle of what appears to be blood. By obscuring the view, Varejão invites us to use our imagination to fill in the missing narrative. The title alludes to the colonization of Brazil, an unwelcome guest who has committed a violent act, or succumbed to one. The blood in The Guest is Varejão’s only literal reference to a body in the Sauna paintings; the work marked the beginning of a new series of Saunas, in which light and water, in addition to blood, invade the aseptic space. In a catalogue text, Philippe Sollers poetically expresses the cultural significance of Varejão’s Sauna paintings: “Our globalized society evacuates bodies, turns them into images, into roles, into absences. We are becoming mirrors that, in a dream, are reflected in mirrors. In the saunas, all illusions have vanished, everything evaporates. Saunas are perfectly democratic. Impeccable. Terminal.”[x]

 

Miscegenation as Counterconquest: Portraiture

 

Hybridity, impurity, intermingling, the transformation that comes of new and unexpected combinations of human beings, ideas, politics, movies, songs (and which) rejoices in mongrelization and fears the absolutism of the Pure.

–Salman Rushdie, “In Good Faith: A Pen Against the Sword”

 

In her figurative work, Varejão has utilized portraiture, particularly historical casta paintings, to investigate history. Casta is a Spanish and Portuguese term that was used during the seventeenth to the eighteenth centuries to refer to the racial intermixing that became prevalent during the colonial period. The term is derived from the Latin castus, which literally means “pure.” A rigid hierarchical taxonomy of the increasingly diversified races was developed, based on the belief that the character and quality of a person could be determined from skin color, race, and ethnic type. Those considered closer to “pure” were recognized as part of the nobility, and held greater economic and social power, while those of black and mixed-race heritage occupied less privileged positions. To affirm this racial hierarchy, artists were commissioned by the nobility to make family portraits that showed the races of mothers and fathers, and, when they diverged, the new “mixed” race of the offspring (fig. XX). The portraits were accompanied by descriptive titles identifying the race, and were organized in a grid, with the highest class (most fair-skinned) in the upper left register and the lowest at the bottom right.

            Using portraiture, self-portraiture, and casta painting, Varejão engages anthropophagy through the portrayal of racial diversity and hybridity. Votive offering and skins, 1993, is one of her earliest conceptual investigations into racial mixing—miscegenation—in Brazil. In this mixed-media work, the traditional casta portraits are replaced with fragments of flesh that hang on the canvas, numbered and arranged in a darkening gradient. This organization highlights the historical correlation between invented categories and skin color, and the socioeconomic consequences that maintained European (white) supremacy. To the right, a disembodied human head with excised eyes appears with a cut-off human hand and dismembered human abdomen, recalling Brazilian ex-votos, which, as in Proposal for a Catechesis, often take the form of body fragments. These elements, together with the title, also allude to the ritual sacrifice that was judged barbaric by outsiders: porcelain plates below offer the excised features to viewers, inviting them to partake.

            For centuries, the racialized body has been subjected not only to the trauma of slavery, rape, branding, lynching, whipping, and other kinds of physical and psychological abuse, but also to the cultural erasure entailed in aesthetic stigmatization.[xi] Varejão draws attention to these indignities by revisualizing the “types” whose histories were misconstrued, misrecorded, or entirely obliterated. Eye Witness X, Y, and Z, 1997, is a triptych of casta self-portraits in which she alters her own skin tone, features, and dress in order to make herself appear Chinese, Arabic, or of indigenous origin. One of each figure’s eyes has been removed, leaving a bloody hole. In front of each painting, a small tray displays the missing “eye,” accompanied by a magnifying glass. The eyeballs are sliced and hinged to display tiny photographs inside that depict nude actors engaged in cannibalistic rituals. The removal of the eye represents physical violence to both the body and the painting, the surface of which holds this history. In recreating the “original” racial types that comprise the Brazilian population, Varejão reclaims the bodies that were devalued in casta paintings, and paints them in a style typically reserved for the elite.

            In her most recent portrait series Polvo, Varejão updates racial classification to reflect the results of a 1976 census conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) that was motivated by the limitation of existing racial categories—black, white, red, brown, and yellow. Citizens were asked to self-identify their race, inserting a unique descriptor if they felt they did not fit into the standard categories. The resulting list included 136 descriptions of skin colors that ranged from the humorous (“runaway donkey”) and the descriptive (“coffee with milk”) to the aspirational (“pulls to white”).[xii] Varejão selected thirty-three of the most poetic names and transformed them into a line of flesh-toned oil paints. The paints (and the series) are branded “Polvo,” named after the Portuguese word for “octopus”—a creature whose ink contains melanin, the substance that gives human skin and hair its color. In Polvo Portraits 1 (China Series) and Polvo Portraits 1 (Seascape Series), both 2014, Varejão commissioned an academic painter from China to create multiple copies of two types of portraits, using her as the sitter. Varejão then intervened to alter her own racial or ethnic appearance. In the China Series, while her skin remains a neutral beige, she inscribes geometric tattoos of indigenous origin onto her face. In the Seascape Series, Varejão alters her complexion entirely in order to bring to life the Polvo flesh-tone paints. Stylistically, the China Series portraits are more formal and classical, and the Seascape Series portraits more contemporary and casual.

            Alongside each set of portraits are color charts and wheels that address the ambiguous nature of racial identity in Brazil (or anywhere else, for that matter): they either directly depict the range of “flesh” tones or act as a key to the individual pigments that make up each figure’s complexion. Accompanied by a set of paint tubes embossed with the identifying labels, Polvo Portraits 1 (Seascape Series) expands, refracts, and shifts the meaning of both color and language.[xiii] By demonstrating how skin color acts as a lexicon, Varejão invites us to examine our own systems of chromatic classification and the social processes they reflect.

 

Rethinking Cultural Difference: Conclusion

 

One cannot change the world, one can change the people who make, control, and undo the world. A material “revolution” without decolonization of knowledge and subjectivity only leads to changes in content, but not in the organization of the world.

–Walter Mignolo, interviewed in Deutsche Welle

 

Varejão’s anthropophagic depiction of Brazilian identity highlights the disparity between the views of cultural difference in the First World and countries considered Third World. In the United States, many citizens pride themselves on being able to trace their heritage back to a different country of origin. Most Brazilians, however, consider themselves as originating in Brazil: Varejão herself has said that she cannot identify her own heritage beyond its borders. Her work, particularly her portraiture, calls into question the relevance or viability of defining one’s identity, interpreting it as something that is constructed and thus malleable.

            In Varejão’s work, the colonial enterprise appears as an exploration of bodies and the history that is imprinted on them. Countries that are considered Third World are commonly viewed as untouched by the avant-garde movements of modernism and postmodernism, implanting the notion that they are underdeveloped or still in development.[xiv] It is as though Third World residents lived in another time zone, separate from the global, late-capitalist world. Shohat and Stam, however, posit a theory––not dissimilar to anthropophagy––that describes such cultures as not behind the times, but as the product of multifaceted and intermittent transactions with other cultures. Rather than delayed, countries like Brazil can be viewed as inherently postmodernist. A more encompassing interpretation would see time as scrambled, with the premodern, the modern, the postmodern, and the paramodern coexisting globally.[xv] Cultural and artistic exchange is always reciprocal, and it can no longer be assumed that there is a pure form of anything. As Varejão’s work shows us, everything exists within an alternative logic of perpetual contradiction and nonexclusive opposition that declines the socially and historically constructed dichotomies of black and white or true and false.

 

Notes



[i] Dawn Ades, Art in Latin America: The Modern Era, 1920–1980 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1993), 133.

[ii] Adriana Varejão, interview by Hélène Kelmachter (2004), reprinted in Philippe Sollers, Chambre d’écho = Echo Chamber (Paris: Fondation Cartier pour l’art contemporain/Actes Sud, 2005), 95.

[iii] Eduardo Viveiros de Castro, The Inconstancy of the Indian Soul: The Encounter of Catholics and Cannibals in 16th-century Brazil, trans. Gregory Duff Morton (Chicago: Prickly Paradigm Press, 2011), 10.

[iv] Adriana Varejão and Adriano Pedrosa, Adriana Varejão: Trabalhos e referências 1992–1999 (São Paulo: Galeria Camargo Vilaça, 1999), 1.

[v] Paulo Herkenhoff, “Empire of Painting Signs: The Japanese Gaze of Adriana Varejão,” in Adriana Varejão (Tokyo: Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, 2007), n.p.

[vi] Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (New York: Routledge, 1994), 307.

[vii] Varejão and Pedrosa, Adriana Varejão, 23.

[viii] Carol Armstrong, “Fluid Dynamics: The Art of Adriana Varejão,” Artforum International 50, no. 5 (January 2012): 200.

[ix] Varejão, interview by Kelmachter, 89.

[x] Sollers, Chambre d’écho, 13.

[xi] Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 323.

[xii] Jennifer Lange, “Adriana Varejão’s Polvo Portraits,” in Adriana Varejão: Polvo (New York: Lehmann Maupin Gallery, 2014), n.p.

[xiii] Ibid.

[xiv] Shohat and Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism, 292.

[xv] Ibid., 302.