De Vleeshal provides a likely home to show FUNK STADEN – which was shown last year as a video triptych at documenta XII in Kassel – for the first time ever as a captivating octagonal installation that challenges the viewers to rethink their convictions of and their distance to the other.
For FUNK STADEN, Dias Riedweg collaborated with Funk dancers from favelas in Rio de Janeiro to establish through this work a connection between the scene of Funk Carioca (Portuguese for “Funk from Rio de Janeiro”) and the book True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America (1557) by Hans Staden (1527-1578).
Photo(s): Leo van Kampen
Since 1993 Mauricio Dias (Rio de Janeiro, 1964) and Walter Riedweg (Lucerne, 1955) have been working together on projects that investigate the way in which private psychology affects public space, and to which the issues of otherness and perception are central. They often depart from interactive, performance-like processes that produce specific exchanges within particular groups from society, and which focus on identity and the involvement of the participants. The results of these encounters with the other crystallise in poetic video installations, such as FUNK STADEN (2007-2008).
De Vleeshal provides a likely home to show FUNK STADEN – which was shown last year as a video triptych at documenta XII in Kassel – for the first time ever as a captivating octagonal installation that challenges the viewers to rethink their convictions of and their distance to the other.
For FUNK STADEN, Dias & Riedweg collaborated with Funk dancers from favelas in Rio de Janeiro to establish through this work a connection between the scene of Funk Carioca (Portuguese for “Funk from Rio de Janeiro”) and the book True Story and Description of a Country of Wild, Naked, Grim, Man-eating People in the New World, America (1557) by Hans Staden (1527-1578). The work shows how the representation of the other in the early days of interactions between Europeans and indigenous tribes from the New World probably differs not that much from how nowadays media, in a modern way, use their authority to marginalise certain groups from society to the benefit of political or industrial powers. The artists oppose this mediated view of the other by focusing on a contemporary phenomenon that is taking place inside the favelas of Rio de Janeiro and up until now largely has remained hidden from outside views, and by inviting the Funk dancers to re-enact nine of the original woodcuts from Staden’s book as contemporary tableaux vivants ‘Funk style’.
As on several other occasions in the work of Dias & Riedweg, FUNK STADEN is conceived as a three screen video installation, this time combined with mirroring surfaces to form an octagonal arena in which two little known and marginalised cultures – four hundred and fifty years apart from each other – are being looked at in close-up and confronted with and superimposed upon each other in video images. The mirroring surfaces capture the viewers in a hallucinatory space and add another layer to the story in which the reflections of their bodies become part of the world of Staden’s 16th century Tupinambá cannibals and that of the contemporary funk dancers. The work bridges the four hundred and fifty years that separate Hans Staden and the funkeiros, eliminating a seemingly big historical and cultural gap while sucking the viewers into a time-space vortex in which they become participants instead of onlookers. The confrontational aspects and richness in layers of the work is further completed through its showing at the Gothic architecture of De Vleeshal (Dutch for “Meat Hall”), which appropriately used to be a meat market in the times Staden spent among the Tupinambá and – not less appropriately – is nowadays a space that concentrates its activities on highlighting new developments in contemporary culture in its broadest form.
exhibitions
tags: dias & riedweg,
funk,
hans staden,
tupinambá
