DE BRAZILIAAN*
by Marie martens
Since 2018, Livia Melzi has been working on Brazilian identity issues, anthropophagic rituals, and what they reveal about the indigenous communities she has studied, in particular based on Oswald de Andrade’s foundational Anthropophagic Manifesto. In parallel to her interest in these topics and their reception in Europe, as well as the museographic methods employed by Western institutions, she became fascinated by the collections of cloaks belonging to the Tupinambá indigenous community, exported from Brazil during the first centuries of its colonization. The artist's work is thus at once composed of aesthetic fascination and sociological, even scientific, research. Moreover, she does not conceal a great empathy for these populations who find themselves somewhat out of time, as if trapped in vernacular traditions that they re-enact today to please tourists, while representing almost their only source of income. Among this legacy of Tupi culture, Livia Melzi discovered Johan Maurits, a 17 th -century German sent to the Brazilian colonies, whose wealth set the grounds of The Mauritshuis art museum in The Hague. “I investigated this Dutch governor of Brazil, who may have built up his cabinet of curiosities and ethnographic collection with sincerity and passion, but whose actions were akin to spoliation,” she explains. “Through different formats, such as video and photogravure, which I experimented with during the residency, I wanted to question the way we might look at him nowadays, showing the photogravure plates as ghostly elements that fade away.” Johan Maurits is also tangible in the plaster used to build previous sculptures, which the artist fetched from Germany. Would it be a relatively gentle gesture that could be linked to the cancel culture? Such is the continuation of a body of work based on the reading of numerous sources, without denying the pleasure of form. Livia Melzi constructs her entire approach in relation to knowledge, while becoming increasingly at ease with distancing herself from it, in order to constantly develop the issue of how to transpose images and a historical narrative into another era and a new way of looking at things.