June 20th – July 7th at Le 26BY from 18 until 22h, 26 rue Saint Georges, 1050 Brussels
Opening hours: Tuesday to Saturday 11-19h
A proposition by Le 26BY and The Bridge Project / Julie Dumont
When thinking about Latin America and Brazil in particular, one can’t help but think about lush vegetation, golden beaches and blue skies, just as the blue, green and yellow harbored by the Brazilian flag. Tropical Gardens approaches this outsider perspective through a series of artworks by Alice Quaresma, Mano Penalva and Daniel Barclay, questioning the idea of personal and collective identity and their representation.
Using matter and form to deconstruct and perform a slippage of the references that inspired them, searching for new meanings and substituting places and geographies with colors and geometries, Quaresma, Barclay and Penalva may be seen as the creators of a garden. A garden where art and life gather in an heterotopy, a place inside and yet outside of the world, ruled by their desires and urgencies.
Anchored in the here and now of nationalists and populists movements in Brazil and worldwide, Tropical Gardens somehow evidences the contradiction of the idyllic exoticism linked, in the collective imaginary to South American countries and the inherent violence of a post-colonial pseudo-democratic system, addressing by extension the European migration crisis and the rise of far-right movements. This reminds us that the appeal of distant gardens should be taken with care because as they say, the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence, only this is a lie.
