The Anthropophagic Body and the City

Jose Lirá (Brazil)

Galata Greek Primary School

“A major figure in Brazil’s 20th century avant-garde culture, Flávio de Carvalho (1899 – 1973) subjected himself to deep research on new human possibilities aligned with the idea of a technicized-barbarian. His 1930 City of the Naked Man was conceived as a machine for the sublimation and creation of human desires, and their liberation from repetitive mechanisms, Christian and Classical dogmas and other outdated taboos. …in his 1956 Experience number 3, [Carvalho] paraded through the streets of downtown São Paulo wearing a very unusual male costume, which he called a New Look for the Summer — pleated cotton skirt, crystalized nylon vaporous blouse, long fishnet stockings and leather sandals; a performative device to be enacted/reflected within the social, allowing the object to… reshape the human itself.” –JL

The Anthropophagic Body and the City looks at the work of Flávio de Carvalho, a Brazilian architect, designer, painter, sculptor, writer and playwright who engaged the Anthropophagic Avant-garde movement after its launching in São Paulo in 1928 by writer Oswald de Andrade. Jose Lirá’s installation for the biennial brings together photographs, sketches, texts and material artifacts mainly from two of Carvalho’s provocative projects that explore the close relationship between the performative body and urban space.