Tropical Intelligence

Just like on the streets and beaches of Rio, the borders between public and private dissolve in the universe of Capacete Entretenimentos. In this way, space is achieved for the continuously changing Capacete community.PABLO LÉON DE LA BARRA on HELMUT BATISTA's art project.

»Tropical countries, as it seemed to me, must be the exact opposite of our own…« – Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques

It’s 36°C in Rio de Janeiro. It’s hot, very hot, and I’m sweating to the point of feeling that I will melt and disappear. The sweat and the temperature make me aware of the presence of my body, abolishing the distinction between inside and outside, putting me in contact with what Gaston Bachelard called the »intimate immensity«¹. My mind has stopped thinking. I’ve been walking through the city centre, finding shade every 10 minutes or entering air-conditioned spaces to drink a beer »chop« and refresh. It’s Saturday and quite empty. I can’t stand the idea of the half hour walk up the steep hill to Santa Teresa, where I’m staying. Thankfully, an informal motorcycle service has been implemented that takes you up hill for 2 reales. This is »Tropical Intelligence«! The drivers wait outside the Gloria Metro station, where you approach the controller and he assigns you a driver. The driver puts his helmet on, but doesn’t offer you one. You get on the motorbike, and try to decide if you should hold him around the waist or at the shoulders. He drives fast uphill, all the while smoking a cigarette and speaking on his mobile through a mike and earphones. He glides the curves while the motorcycle inclines and our knees almost touch the stoned pavement. I clutch to the driver’s waist, holding him hard with my knees. It’s all a very erotic experience. My driver leaves me in Largo do Guimarães, in the centre of Santa Teresa. I enter a Portuguese shop, covered with blue tiles, and ask the old Portuguese couple that runs it for a very cold coconut. The coconut also costs 2 reales (it seems the best things in Rio cost 2 reales). Cold coconuts are also a »Tropical Intelligence« strategy, a way of surviving the heat! The husband opens the coconut with a round knife that looks more like a prisoner’s invention. Meanwhile the wife shouts aggressively at some French tourists who are attempting to take photos of the shop. She tells me, »You wouldn’t like them taking photos in the interior of your house, would you?«

Santa Teresa is an old neighbourhood in the hills above Rio’s centre. It looks like a European village from the end of the 19th century; many of the houses are semi-run down, but most of them have survived total destruction. A bit of a hippie hang out, more recently it has become the neighbourhood favoured by Rio’s artists and intellectuals, as well as foreigners who have slowly been buying and refurbishing the houses. Now, there’s even a small design hotel in the neighbourhood. The old tram, called the »bonde«, comes up from the centre, crossing over the Lapa Aqueduct and charging 65 cents for the ride. The tram usually has mechanical failures during the ride and sometimes doesn’t complete the journey (the local inhabitants have protested against a plan for its privatisation, which would improve the service but also raise the price of the ride). Everyone gets off the tram when it stops working, and the tourists, both Brazilian and international, use this as a photo opportunity. Maybe, as Lévi-Strauss said »the tropics are not so much exotic as out of date. It’s not the vegetation which confirms that you are ›really there‹, but certain trifling architectural details and the hint of a way of life which would suggest that you had gone backwards in time rather than forwards across a great part of the earth’s surface«. But if this is true, Rio de Janeiro’s reality quickly plays fast forward to insert you into the city’s present. Like in most of Rio, the houses in Santa Teresa coexist with the »favelas«, which are located within the neighbourhood. Every time I’ve visited Santa Teresa there seems to be a crime or death related to drug violence. This time was no different; somebody told me a dancer had just been murdered. I asked if it had been because of drug violence, and ironically I soon found out that he had been killed by his brother and the brother’s boyfriend with a sledgehammer. Brazilian soap opera. 

Santa Teresa is also the headquarters of Capacete Entretenimentos, the art project run by Helmut Batista in Rio de Janeiro. The name is full of humour, as »capacete« in Portuguese means helmet, a pun on the name Helmut, the captain of Microstate Capacete Village. It’s also interesting to note that the project has the surname »Entreteniminetos«: not gallery, not project, but entertainment. »Capacete’s activities are part of a long-term interdisciplinary presence in Rio de Janeiro, which aims to research and document aesthetic, social and political processes in Brazil. The historic, urban, topographic, environmental and social context of Rio de Janeiro is an important laboratory that (re)actualises Brazilian complexities. Rio de Janeiro is a strategic tool to identify, articulate and give visibility to these processes, reaching very heterogeneous audiences.«²

My first contact with Capacete was in 2001. At the time it shared an exhibition space with Agora (run by Ricardo Basbaum and other artists) in a building in Cinelândia, which had artists studios above. Since then, Capacete has continuously reinvented itself and adapted to the times while contributing to Rio’s cultural life and acting as mediator between foreign art people arriving in Rio and the city. As such, Capacete has had different incarnations. For example Cinema Capacete existed in the Darcy Ribeiro Cinema School and organized artists’ film programs from 2001 to 2006; or the journal Capacete Planet, which existed from 2001 to 2004 (before the www made information so accessible for all) where artists were invited to conceptualise the idea of a budget printed publication, while providing information for and from the local art scene. Capacete has also participated in different editions of the São Paulo Bienal, where it has presented artists’ projects that expand Capacete’s work to the biennale public.

Capacete also hosts an international artists and curators residence. Some of the artists in residence are sponsored by cultural institutions in their European countries of origin, as part of agreements with Capacete. Others arrive of their own free will in their desire to experience tropicalization. There’s always a resident from Brazil and one from Latin America, important components of Capacete’s concept. Some of the residents stay at Casa da Denise, others at the bungalows located between the two houses, while others stay in the apartment located downhill in Glória, where the documentation centre and offices are located. Recently Capacete expanded to São Paulo, where it has given continuity to the project first initiated by Ligia Nobre and Cécile Zoonens with Exo São Paulo, providing a place to stay within Edifício Copan, the curvy Modernist building designed by Niemeyer in the centre of the city. Guest artists are invited to give a talk to the local art community, and these talks are always given in an open dialogue together with a local artist who also presents his/her work. 

Other projects have taken Capacete out of the borders of its microstate, while exploring Latin American contexts: Road which has been happening on and off for the last 5 years, takes the form of a road trip, and began in 2004 as a trip from Rio to Santiago de Chile with the artist Ducha, continued to Valparaíso, Chile, with Carla Zaccagnini’s Museo das Vistas, drove up to La Paz, Bolivia, with Olivier Poujade, continued to Lima, Peru, with João Modé, from there to Quito, Ecuador, where Gabriel Lester performed a pantomime where he pulled a rabbit out of a hat against the background of the Andes Cordillera. Then it went on to Medellín, Colombia, with Julia Rometti and Victor Costales where the artists exchanged landscape posters during the trip. The next trip is going to be from Medellín to Caracas, Venezuela, with Sebastián Ramírez and José Tomás Giraldo and has yet to take place. On the occasion of its 10th anniversary, Capacete also published Livro para Ler with contributions by 11 artists or curators that have been involved with Capacete. The book follows a methodology developed by artist Carla Zaccagnini, where she published mini catalogues (Capacete produced the first one in 2003 in Portuguese) in which she invites artists or writers to write not about her work, but about ideas that are present or relate to the works presented. 

Helmut takes panoramic photos of Rio de Janeiro, which are printed in postcards and coffee table books, the sale of which contribute to Capacete’s running cost. Denise, Helmut’s amazing partner and mother of their son Otto, is an ex soap opera actress. She also runs Casa da Denise, a bed and breakfast in Santa Teresa that also supports Capacete. Denise and Helmut live in the house next door to Casa da Denise, which they share with friend, artist Dominique Gonzalez-Foerster. Gonzalez-Foerster calls the place »SET – Sitio de Experimentación Tropical«. The house has a black and white stone floor mosaic floor inspired by Burle Marx’s pattern for Copacabana. A pink balustrade meets the green grass, echoing the colours of the Mangueira school of samba. The view looks to Guanabara Bay, the Pao de Azúcar, the city below, »favelas« and vegetation. In Dominique’s words, »a place to observe, enjoy and describe the effects of ›tropicalization‹… the panorama in front of the terrace is a permanent unwritten novel about urban tropical life and sugarloaf, birds, airplanes …«³ Residents and artists commute between the residence in Glória, Casa da Denise and Sitio de Eperimentación Tropical: working in the office, having breakfast at Casa da Denise, partaking in intellectual conversations and drinking caipirinhas at the swimming pool at SET. In the same way that the streets and beaches in Rio dissolve the borders between the public and the private, here there is space for Capacete’s changing community.

In his trip to Brazil in 1982, philosopher Félix Guattari identified and advocated for self organized, trickle up, hands on strategies as a way in which Brazilian society, then under a military dictatorship (1964–1985), could strengthen itself: »Just as I think it is illusory to aim at a step-by-step transformation of society, so I think that microscopic attempts of the community… play an absolutely crucial role.«⁴ This is what during the late 90s curator Carlos Basualdo and art critic Reinaldo Laddaga have called, within art practices, »experimental communities«: »temporary but durable associations composed of artists and non-artists united in their mutual endeavour … The concern is to facilitate the creation of exchange networks between groups of people in order to produce new representational forms and community identities. In turn, these circuits come to intervene in traditional art spaces, thereby effecting a ›globalization from below‹.«⁵

Capacete’s formation of a mobile international community is very close to artist Hélio Oiticica’s idea of the »Suprasensorial« commune: »I feel that the idea grows into a necessity of a new community, based on creative affinities, despite cultural or intellectual differences, or social and individual ones. Not a community to ›make works of art‹, but something as the experience in real life – all sorts of experiences that could grow out in a new sense of life and society – kind of constructing an environment for life itself based on the premise that creative energy is inherent in everyone … where this group of mine would come to do things, to talk, to meet people – of course many disagreeable things would have to be controlled, for destructive opinions and uninterested people would come – but this always happens in everything one wants to do – on the whole this idea would be that of a kind of open space, environment, for experience, for creative experience of every imaginable sort ….«⁶

Capacete’s way of operating, the possibility of producing or not, and its resistance to the art market economy, also approximates Oiticica’s concept of »creleisure« a word made up by Oiticica eliding the words »create« and »leisure«: »Not to occupy a specific place, in space and in time, as well as to live pleasure or not to know the time of laziness, is and can be the activity to which a ›creator‹ may dedicate himself.« In this, »creleisure« is close to the idea of the »Tropical Intelligence« that guides Capacete’s work. I borrowed the term »Tropical Intelligence« from a conversation between Helmut Batista and Paulo Vivacqua regarding their experience in the Puerto Rico 04 Art Community Experience Marathon in which they participated, and where they decided not to produce anything, and of which Paulo Vivacqua expressed: »I think that we were super sincere in not doing anything … Not doing anything is, many times, doing a lot. We found a balance in the whole thing, if not I would have turned schizophrenic. Tropical Intelligence.« This, in the end, is »Tropical Intelligence«, resisting the urge to do things just because of doing and doing only what is needed, while reacting to a context, not only being flexible enough to produce what is demanded while creating new possibilities of action. But also to disconnect from the machines of production, become conscious again of one’s own body and of the body of the other, and allowing oneself to have a conversation in the »intimate immensity« while discovering the other without the weight of the pressures of the every-day art world …

¹ Although Bachelard in his Poetics of Space refers to experiences in the desert and to underwater exploration, the same could be applied to the phenomena of tropicalization: »To descend into water or to wander in the desert is to change spaces. And through changing location in space, abandoning the realm of common sensibilities, one comes into contact with a space that is psychically innovative … One not only changes places, one changes one’s own nature.«
² www.capacete.net
³ Dominique Gonzalez Foerster. »Sitio de Experimentacion Tropical«, in Case Study Houses, a special edition of Pablo Internacional Magazine, 2008.
⁴ Felix Guattari, Molecular Revolution, Penguin, London, 1984, quoted in Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, Les Presses Du Réel, Paris, 2002.
⁵ Carlos Basualdo and Reinaldo Laddaga, »Rules of Engagement: From Toilets in Caracas to New Media in New Delhi«, in Artforum, March 2004.
⁶ Hélio Oiticica, »Letter to Guy Brett, April 2, 1968«, in Guy Brett, Catherine David, and Chris Dercon (Curators), Hélio Oiticica, Centro De Arte Hélio Oiticica/Witte De With, Rio De Janeiro/Rotterdam, 1992. 


PABLO LÉON DE LA BARRA is an artist and curator. He lives in London.