We write samba on the wild asphalt: Malandragem as practice of resistance in the work of Heitor dos Prazeres and Hélio Oiticica

Abstract

The importance of Hélio Oiticica’s ascension to the Morro of Mangueira to his career has been extensively studied and mythicized, and the indebtedness of his work to Afro-Brazilian culture has recently started receiving attention. Nevertheless, his oeuvre has not been explored with sufficient attention through the lens of malandragem, the use of tricks to outwit people in positions of power and restore a temporary sense of justice. I interpret malandragem as a legacy of the resistance enacted by enslaved Africans and their descendants against colonialism, slavery, and oppression. In this paper I analyze the work of an Afro-Brazilian artist from a previous generation, Heitor dos Prazeres, whose work was labeled “naïf” and “primitive” and, thus, ostracized from the history of modern art. Although it might seem unusual to pair the work of a figurative painter like dos Prazeres with that of Oiticica, an artist who not only never produced representational art, but even declared the death of traditional painting and dedicated his career to transposing the medium into space and time, in fact the culture of malandragem brings the two oeuvres together. Painter and samba composer, dos Prazeres was profoundly consequential in establishing the foundations of the cultural environment that Oiticica would draw from in the 1960s, where samba is just one aspect. Heitor dos Prazeres used malandragem to bend social barriers and infiltrate a hostile cultural world during the Estado Novo (1937-1945) and the following decades. His tactics should be considered precursors to the strategies that artists working under the military dictatorship (1964-1985) would enact to express dissent, as in the case of Hélio Oiticica.