nhen_nhen_nhen: genealogy of tropical leisure

by beano de borba

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The artist's work is a traditional leisure and a wild ritual, sustained by an insurgency of liberated time. It is a disciplinary and cosmological way of being that essentially opposes the discipline dedicated to alienated labor in the bourgeois era. Márcio Almeida's visual poetics in the installation Nheë Nheë Nheë translates an authorial drift that evokes his most recent site-specific works. These were developed through residency and immersion in the mythical imagery of the Usina de Arte Santa Terezinha (Água Preta-PE), with special emphasis on Eremitério Tropical, a mythopoetic temple that solidifies the spatial cosmology of his research.

Nheë Nheë Nheë, a colonial and derogatory expression that alludes to a supposed indolence toward work—a "complaint" inherited from Indigenous peoples—simultaneously refers to the lack of understanding regarding the diversity of languages and dialects of these populations. Nheë, in Tupi, means to speak. Nheeng-katu, "good language." The creation of Nheengatu by the Jesuits during the 16th century aimed to promote a lingua franca. By disregarding linguistic variations and standardizing a communication strategy between colonists and native populations, it represented a vertex of colonial domination, supported by catechesis and the forced labor of Indigenous people.

Facing the hegemonic way of viewing labor in contemporary capitalism, classical Western philosophy, since Aristotle, identified a self-centered form of discipline. This was oriented toward personal fulfillment and the critical, sensitive, and contemplative exercise of intelligence, conventionally called leisure (skholé). This stands in contrast to the regime of idleness or free time in the bourgeois sense of industrial society, and to leisure as free time directed toward consumption, useful and productive for the market. Mentioning one of the prophets of modernity who called attention to "the history of the defeated"—that is, the populations marginalized from the colonial process in the West—Walter Benjamin restored the genealogy of the Aristotelian skholé or leisure, perceiving it in the drifts of poets, gamblers, and flâneurs in late 19th-century Paris.

The poetics of Nheë Nheë Nheë represent an authorial experience by Márcio Almeida, exercised through two methodological principles of the artist's work: immersion and the anthropophagic operation. In immersion, he approaches the ethnographic, practicing a situationist and anthropological trend in contemporary art; it is a marginal becoming and a spatial drift. Interacting with the rural culture of the population of Usina Santa Terezinha and its surroundings, and engaging with the particular aspects of the local landscape, Márcio Almeida proposes a reflection that engages in a marginal becoming bordering the ethnographic. He appropriates the unconscious relationships that the population establishes with the place and its narratives, assuming them as a creative medium to elaborate his own mythopoetic narrative.

The anthropophagic operation consists of the artist's own assimilation of these narratives, articulating them with other global, national, or regional imageries. This includes the search for Western situationist and leisure (skholé) traditions, the national genealogy of leisure in Oswald de Andrade’s anthropophagy, and the imagery of Freyrean regionalist modernism in Pernambuco, by proposing the centrality of local historical experience to interpret the heritage of Afro-Indigenous populations in their relationship with the colonial Portuguese matrix.

As an immersive and reflexive space, the installation Nheë Nheë Nheë manifests a genealogical, regionalist, tropicalist, and anthropophagic exercise of a philosophical and aesthetic reclamation of leisure. In the objects presented, it appropriates branches gathered at the Usina de Arte Santa Terezinha, marking their species—Oliveira, a tree of European origin—and shovels, as icons of manual labor, the Roman torture "tripalium" in its most explicit sense. In contrast to the objects, a performance updates the ritual use of the Indigenous burial urn as a representation of the collective experience of death. In the installation, the questioning of the playful and reflexive dimension of leisure stands out. This translates into a search for a timeless, collective experience that founds subjectivities and cultures—its cosmological place—beyond the current contingency that imposes a labor of mortification on the individual, reducing them to their materiality.

It is by looking at local and native populations that lost leisure is restored—the genealogy of a currently marginal way of life. Despite its classical reference to Western philosophy, it shares with it a scholarly discipline of the good life, distanced from the necropolitical pretension of neoliberal governments to transform Brazil into a general free-trade zone. It reinforces the Phenomenology of the Brazilian in Vilém Flusser, who perceives us as deniers of an official progress that links misery by excess to misery by scarcity. It is a manifesto against the current project of an entrepreneurial Eldorado and an evocation of Oswald de Andrade's Matriarcado de Pindorama; without the faith, without the law, without the king of the resentful in the once Jesuit and now missionary ethics. The tropical genealogy is the mystery of leisure against the ministry of misery.