HEAVEN (AS YOU SEW SO SHALL YOU REAP)| Roberta Saraiva Coutinho
According to Davi Kopenawa, Yanomami spiritual and political leader, in the worldview of his people, the fall of the sky is a constant threat. In his role as a shaman, he announces: “We are apprehensive, beyond our own lives, about that of the entire Earth, which is at risk of falling into chaos. White people are not afraid, like us, of being crushed by the falling sky. But one day maybe they will fear it as much as we do.” [1] Little by little, both science and increasingly disturbing and perceptible climate events seem to echo a reality equivalent to that preached by the shaman in his intrinsically mythical and poetic vision of the universe.
In these dark times when the sky is falling, only a poetic reading of the world is capable of proposing an inversion: that of raising the ground. Which is what Julio Villani did, at the Morumbi Chapel.
He – who, as a boy, looked for so-called “lightning stones” on the dirt of his parents’ farm in Marília, objects associated with meteorites falling from the sky, but in reality archaeological remains of the original peoples – today covers visitors with an embroidered plot of land, in lieu of the heavenly sky customary in baroque churches.
If, for the Yanomami, the sky is supported by metal rods, the one imagined by Julio Villani for the Morumbi Chapel overcomes gravity with the help of cement counterweights. In this counter-version, the artist is accompanied by Manoel de Barros, a poet from Mato Grosso whose eyes were resolutely focused earthward. “[…] to adore the little things on the ground, rather than the heavenly ones” [3] and other verses of the poet are here made into a sort of prayer, which inverts the order of values at task in the world.
Julio Villani’s work has always been in direct dialogue with poetry, having in the past conversed with Jacques Prévert, Charles Baudelaire, Julio Plaza, the Campos brothers, among many others. And long before this era of ours – by many called Anthropocene, since the entire planet, and all its life forms, are affected by the changes we bring about – another poet, Dante, invoked myth and cosmogonic views to propose a path leading from hell to paradise. Guided by Virgil, a Roman poet from pre-Christian Antiquity, Dante created poet-characters that cross paths with different instances in a journey that is sometimes intimate, in the sense of a personal and spiritual trial, sometimes involving analogies and elements of the society in which they lived.
The reference to the Divine Comedy is called forth not only because both Dante and Julio are led in their respective works by poets, nor because Paradise is something generally connected to the sky, the very same that now threatens to fall. It’s rather because, being presented in a chapel, Julio Villani’s work inevitably sides with the symbolic charge and the cosmogony of the Christian West which, in the specific case of the Morumbi Chapel, concretely merges with the ground, through the rammed earth of this ancient tea farm’s ruins’ walls [3]. The heaven idealized by Christian tradition – which now brings de facto the skies down through the climatic and humanitarian hell in which we live, as pointed out by the original peoples – materializes in the colonial clod of this building, compacted by the slave and the boor.
This is not the first time that the artist has installed a work in a religious environment. His debut took place with the creation of a sheet entirely covering the dormitory of the Cistercian abbey of Thoronet, in the south of France – the immense embroidery hovering over the dreams of the monks who lived there in the 13th century. The title of the work, taken from a quote by Derrida – One cannot think of the closure of that which has no end –, alluded to the perpetual questioning of the meaning of things and the impossibility of an end in itself. In the Morumbi Chapel, a building of colonial heritage in São Paulo, Villani announces the end in the title of the work, in a tone of prophecy: as you sew so shall you reap.
To paraphrase Jean de Loisy, curator of the exhibition in France, this paradise is yet another mosaic of Julio Villani’s theoretical, emotional and geographical references. “A cartography of multiple lines, like a body that reveals on its skin its joys, its anguish, its desires, its journeys through different countries and eras.” [4] In this sense, Julio’s embroidered bedlinen – from which this large suspended courtyard originates – are reminiscent of the work of Bispo do Rosário, in his obsessive effort to organize the fragments of the world under an embroidered narrative, in a delicate preparation for the Day of the Last Judgment. Both have in common an aesthetic proposal that organizes and presents the same logic: that of valuing the “superb little things” [5] that surround us.
The delicate and meticulous thread and needle work of this Heaven, made of fabric and colored wool twine, was carried out by multiple hands, in the historic studio of Lina Bo Bardi, an Italian architect who knew so well how to see and reveal the sophistication of the Brazilian people’s hands, through their material culture.
And it is precisely in the Glass House, conceived by her in 1951, at the same time that the Chapel was being rebuilt (1950), that Julio Villani simultaneously presents his Museum of Everything exhibition [6]. With a title borrowed from the poet João Cabral de Mello Neto, the artist here again celebrates the ordinary little things that surround us, though in a different way: through a set of curious creatures, made from everyday objects.
As chance would have it – or as proof of the concurrence between Julio Villani’s work and Dona Lina’s vision – another of the artist’s “creatures” is on display in the exhibition Ensaios para o Museu das Origens (based on the historical project by critic Mário Pedrosa), shown beside works by Tarsila do Amaral and Mestre Valentin, as an excerpt of the MAM collection in Salvador, put together by Lina.
This itinerary alone reveals the work of a multiple-faceted artist, inscribed in modernity, and consistent with his way of finding heaven on earth.