Influenced by her Phd research on Cannibalism in Contemporary Art, Renata Andrade revisits the colonial past in this performance and highlights the exotic imaginaries integrated by contemporary society. She uses what she defines as the cannibalistic myth to reveal its colonial character.
Commonly associated with the primitive, the exotic and the erotic, the accusation of cannibalism greatly contributed to the justification of colonization. By associating current stereotypes of Brazil with human zoos pictures from the 19th century, Renata Andrade shows the persistence of colonial domination. In this work, she de-exoticizes her own body, often associated with the beach, the samba and the favela, and shows the break between reality and European imaginations.
The posters inspired by human zoos invite you to observe a cannibalistic woman, a pictorial mixture between the cannibal Brazilian Indian women imagined by De Bry at the end of the 16th century and the contemporary sambistas, objectified during the carnival parades. This hybrid character, like the cannibalistic myth, fascinates and frightens. The performance, in which the artist wears a decorated wooden panel, ironically shows that this pejorative image is only a facade.
