COMPORTA.- Fortes D’Aloia & Gabriel collaborates with Nara Roesler for the fourth edition of the summer exhibition at Comporta, Portugal. Throughout July and August, the former rice barn and once cinema Casa da Cultura da Comporta hosts a group show curated by art historian Nancy Dantas featuring works by five contemporary artists from different parts of the globe, whose practices trace pathways through Brazil, South Africa, and the United States.
Through works by Alberto Pitta (Salvador, Brazil, 1961), Efrain Almeida (Boa Viagem, Brazil, 1964), Igshaan Adams (Cape Town, South Africa, 1982), Leonardo Drew (Tallahassee, USA, 1961) and Marina Rheingantz (Araraquara, Brasil, 1983), the curator, herself a scholar working between Johannesburg, Cape Town and Almada, poses a reflection on the paths and knowledge systems that accompany the rice crop, a dietary staple in countless cultures and a common plantation in the fields surrounding Comporta. An ancestral and contemporary summoning, Stirring the Pot, as cooking, disrupting and celebrating, takes place when work is over, and tools are stored away, opening a circle for dance, liberation and communication across realms and times. While the sculptures of Igshaan Adams and Leonardo Drew embody historical contexts in South Africa and the United States in sculptural objects, the wildlife sculptures of Efrain Almeida and Alberto Pitta’s textile prints reference specific Brazilian cultures and rituals, and Marina Rheingantz’s painting translates an outdoor sensory experience in abstract materiality.
“Stirring the Pot temporarily transforms the Casa da Cultura, a former rice barn and once cinema, into a staging of scenes and entwinements between the material and the ethereal, the overt and latent, inside and outside, past and present, the historically distant and poetically close”, writes the curator.
Igshaan Adams’s practice coalesces performance, weaving, sculpture and installation. Adams draws upon his background to contest racial, sexual and religious boundaries. This intersectional topography remains visible throughout his practice and serves as a palimpsest upon which traces of personal histories are inscribed and reinscribed. Often, cultural and religious references are used in conjunction with surfaces that have always been present throughout his life; thread, beads, wire, linoleum, cotton twine, fabric. His interest in material oscillates between the intuitive process of handling different substances and a formal inquiry into how various materials behave in different contexts and how they transfigure or evolve. Likening the material’s potential for transformation to his own potential for evolution, Adams is engaged in broadening his ideas of selfhood in an ongoing process of covering and uncovering, doing and undoing.
“In chorus with the summoning, Igshaan Adams’ Gebedswolke ii or Prayer Clouds contain unanswered, suspended prayers that have risen, but not enough, giving form to waiting, and the mystical and credence. Looking at these diaphanous, translucent sculptures, delicately weaved and suspended in space, whose unanswered prayers might we be witnessing? Whose breath has congealed and taken form before our eyes? Could these prayers be directed to us?”
In wooden sculptures, watercolors and occasional stamps and drawings, Efrain Almeida's work combines elements of Northeastern Brazilian popular culture with autobiographical aspects in lyrical compositions. His practice employs the techniques and formal vocabulary of carvers from the sertão and popular Catholic imagery, in reference to his childhood in Boa Viagem, in the interior of Ceará, before his arrival in Rio de Janeiro in 1976. Almeida’s sculptures of bodies or body parts recall votive objects found in Brazilian catholic circumstances, imbued with a symbolic, confessional dimension, as the artist represents himself in this visual language.
“Carried on the wings of Efrain Almeida’s magical life-like Lavadeira birds perched throughout the gallery, the small sculptures of delicate Fluvicola nengeta, from the Latin fluvius or river, and Tupi, nheengetá, also known as “papa arroz”, bring their cultural significance to bear to this gathering. Recognized in Africa for their role as messengers and acknowledged as a visual expression of the link between the intangible and the visible reality, birds are vehicles that allow observers to cross the senses, carrying with them the presence of forebears and seeds literally sown in the fields outside.”
For over three decades, Leonardo Drew has become known for creating contemplative abstract sculptural works that play upon a tension between order and chaos. At once
monumental and intimate in scale, his work recalls post-minimalist sculpture that alludes to America’s industrial past. Drew transforms accumulations of raw materials such as wood, scrap metal, and cotton to articulate various overlapping themes with emotional gravitas: from the cyclical nature of life and decay to the erosion of time. His surfaces often approach a language of their own, embodying the labored process of writing oneself into history.
“Another cycle of harvest is evoked by Leonardo Drew, the practice of burning to revitalize the land. Also known as low-intensity or cultural burns, these are purposely lit and timed to rebalance eco-systems. Banned by settler colonialists in places like Australia in the late 1800s, wildfires have since seen an increase across the territory. Or could Number 276, with its mangled anthropomorphic, arm-like and begging branches be a reference to the earlier trade that carried with it the grains of African rice?”
The central element in Alberto Pitta’s work is textile prints and screenprinting, though he has also dedicated himself to painting and sculptural objects over the last years. With a career spanning over four decades, Pitta’s production is strongly attached to popular festivities and dialogs with other languages, such as clothing. His work has a strong public dimension, as the artist produces prints for Carnaval pageants with African heritage, or in connection with African religion. Finding visual references as much in the city streets as in Candomblé terreiros, Pitta traces connections between the ancestral and the contemporary.
“In a cadence of movements or scenes, the exhibitions opens with symbols, signs, forms and attributes drawn from Alberto Pitta’s profound knowledge of the world of Candomblé, a religion, conception of life and philosophy of the universe brought by the enslaved peoples of Africa to Brazil. The three figures that dominate the entrance represent Ogum, the Orixá or god of protection and labor, who stands before us, defiant, ready, and at the vanguard, followed by those who are summoned to this assembly and celebration of Alcácer of Sal’s diasporic ancestors.”
Marina Rheingantz reprocesses landscape painting in compositions that combine the formal ordering of patterns and color fields with gestural, instinctive markings, informed by an archive of meteorological events, memories, photographs and places. Her canvasses produce ample imaginary spaces, dissolving topology into minimal, allusive elements. These expansive works privilege surface incident over image clarity, giving way to the perception of a vaporous, oscillating spatiality. Observing her paintings from up close or afar causes the agitated atmosphere to shift; what seemed like the outline of a lake, a mountain or a rural view becomes a blotch of paint and impasto accumulations with no identifiable referent. The artist unravels issues of her painting into embroidery and tapestry, whose rhythmic, iterative technique gives form to a body of work that is both dense and delicate.
“Further gesturing to the outdoors, the painting of Marina Rheingantz offers another instance of transportation and transmogrification. Through her use of painterly application to create variations of light, from raking and shimmering to glowing on a flat surface, we are offered an abstract work that is at once flat and surfaced, but also a visual sensation of a blazing day. Her vibrant painting, which changes with the quality of attention and gaze lent to it, presents an abstraction, as well as well as the deeply sensorial: a horizon of fields ready for harvest.”
The journeys and tracks of rice, today considered a staple of Portuguese diet, serve to lift certain social and cultural connections that might not be immediately available or recognizable to contemporary audiences. Like sugar, coffee, maize, and bananas, rice is a historied crop, and the specific genus oryza glaberrima — the inspiration and seed of this exhibition — was introduced to Europe and the Americas as the result of transoceanic travel, likely to have been cultivated in the surrounding fields of Comporta and the wider region of Alcácer do Sal as early as the fifteenth century. There are deep histories embedded in what we eat, and this side or main is no exception!
Given that the long history of rice remains largely unwritten in the Portuguese annals, a consortium of historians has sought to attend to this gap, occupying itself with the historical study of the genus oryza glaberrima, placing it, through their scholarship, squarely in the line of sight of Portuguese historiography, positing it as an avenue for understanding a long and slow history of cultural transfers. According to their research, oryza glaberrima, with origins in West Africa, is likely to have been purchased by Portuguese sailors who had settled on Cape Verde, sending it to Lisbon where it was used in dishes in noble houses as early as the 16th and 17th centuries, in manjares, prepared with milk or served with lamb, chicken or fish. Today, rice is the second largest of all national crops, after maize, with an average per capita consumption of 17kg/year, the highest in Europe.
By stirring the proverbial pot, this exhibition poetically lifts the “Black rice” that has settled at the bottom of the potjie, evoking the men, women and children who brought grains in their hair and knowledge systems to bear on its cultivation in marshes along the Portuguese coast, in South Carolina, Brazil and as far as Suriname. In places like Maranhão, Brazil, the technique of rice cultivation follows those long used in Africa: fields are cleared of bush and burned prior to cultivation, followed by their readying for sowing with a long-handled hoe. Puncturing the ground with a stick, the grains of rice are be dropped into a hole and covered by foot, a method also identified on Carolina rice plantations. Would this technique also have been adopted in Alcácer do Sal? Are the rice paddies that surround us, the ways they have been cultivated, is this staple of the contemporary Portuguese diet, a legacy of expert African planters and farmers?
A commemoration of the long African presence in the Vale do Sado, Stirring the Pot temporarily transforms the Casa da Cultura, a former rice barn and once cinema, into a staging of scenes and entwinements between the material and the ethereal, the overt and latent, inside and outside, past and present, the historically distant and poetically close.
Interlacing artworks and historical threads from regions across the Atlantic—from Salvador da Bahia, São Paulo, Cape Town and Brooklyn—Stirring the Pot evokes the diaspora of enslaved people and their seeds, compelling us to remember and honour those who have toiled the land, fed its people, shared their knowledge systems and held to their aspirations. An ancestral and contemporary convening, Stirring the Pot, as cooking, disrupting, interlude and feasting, happens as labour is suspended and tools downed, opening a circle for dance, release and communication across realms and time.
In a cadence of movements or scenes, the exhibitions opens with symbols, signs, forms and attributes drawn from Alberto Pitta’s profound knowledge of the world of Candomblé, a religion, conception of life and philosophy of the universe brought by the enslaved peoples of Africa to Brazil. The three figures that dominate the entrance represent Ogun, the Orixá or god of protection and labour, who stand before us, defiant, ready, and at the vanguard, followed by those who are summoned to this assembly and celebration of Alcácer of Sal’s diasporic ancestors.
Carried on the wings of Efrain Almeida’s magical life-like Lavadeira birds, perched throughout the gallery, the small sculptures of delicate birds, Fluvicola nengeta, from the Latin fluvius or river, and Tupi, nheengetá, also known as “papa arroz”, bring their cultural significance to bear to this gathering. Recognized in Africa for their role as messengers, and acknowledged as a visual expression of the link between the intangible and the visible reality, birds are vehicles that allow observers to cross the senses, carrying with them the presence of forebears and seeds literally sown in the fields outside.
Further gesturing to the outdoors, the painting of Marina Rheingantz offers another instance of transportation and transmogrification. Through her use of painterly application to create variations of light, from raking and shimmering to glowing on a flat surface, we are offered an abstract work that is at once flat and surfaced, but also a visual sensation of a blazing day. Her vibrant painting, which changes with the quality of attention and gaze lent to it, presents an abstraction, as well as well as the deeply sensorial: a horizon of fields ready for harvest.
Another cycle of harvest is evoked by Leonardo Drew, the practice of burning to revitalize the land. Also known as low-intensity or cultural burns, these are purposely lit and timed to rebalance eco-systems. Banned by settler colonialists in places like Australia in the late 1800s, wildfires have since seen an increase across the territory. Or could Number 276, with its mangled anthropomorphic, arm-like and begging branches be a reference to the earlier trade that carried with it the grains of African rice?
In chorus with the summoning, Igshaan Adams’ Gebedswolke ii or Prayer Clouds contain unanswered, suspended prayers that have risen, but not enough, giving form to waiting, and the mystical and credence. Looking at these diaphanous, translucent sculptures, delicately weaved and suspended in space, whose unanswered prayers might we be witnessing? Whose breath has congealed and taken form before our eyes? Could these prayers be directed to us? - Nancy Dantas
1. These historians are Miguel Carmo, Joana Sousa, Pedro Varela, Ricardo Venture and Manuel Bivar, to whom I owe a dept of acknowledgement for their illuminating scholarship of which only an imperfect sliver is reflected here.
2. Miguel Carmo, Joana Sousa, Pedro Varela, Ricardo Venture and Manuel Bivar, “African knowledge transfer in Early Modern Portugal: Enslaved people and rice cultivation the Tagus and Sado rivers,” Diacronie, 44, 4 (2020, 50.
3. Carlos Manuel Faísca, Dulce Freire and Cláudia M. Viana, “The State of Natural Resources: 250 years of rice production in Portugal, 18th-21st centuries,” Ler História 79 (2021), http://journals.openedition.org/lerhistoria/9542
4. A heavy cast-iron pot used for cooking on open fire.
5. This is a reference to an African mother who lost her child to bondage. She placed seeds in her child’s hair so that she would have food to eat once she arrived at her destination. Judith A. Carney, “With grains in her hair: Rice in Colonial Brazil” Slavery & Abolition 25:1, 21.
6. Carney, “Grains in her hair”, 15.
7. Jaap Gijsberts, “Birds in the AmaXhosa World: An ethno-ornithological exploration of the cultural signi ficance of birds, and its potential for conservation in South Africa” (MA thesis, Wageningen University, 2012).
