The story of Hélio Oiticica and the Tropicália movement

Michael Wellen: Oiticica was someone who was always pushing against trends, pushing against being contained, whether it was by the market or by a museum or by a nation.

Caetano Veloso: Everything that Hélio was doing was like the most radical response to the lack of liberty and the lack of respect to liberty.

Jill Drower: 'Tropicália' was a creative explosion and it was a political movement wrapped into one.

Michael Wellen: The idea was for an art that could be participatory, that could be immersive and that would give the public the freedom to move and
to interact in a new world and in a new way.

Over time, that led to some of the most radical breakouts of what art could be.

Hélio Oiticica: Dear Guy, I have received your letter and I'm very enthusiastic about the news concerning the possibility of an exhibit.

I will be showing an environmental manifestation that I have already planned and I named it 'Tropicália'.

caetano Veloso: The very word 'Tropicália' came to me because of a song that I had written in 1967 and a friend of mine who was a filmmaker, he heard the song and he said 'This felt so much like something Isaw in Rio'.

It's an artwork by this artist, Hélio Oiticica, and it's so much like it that you should name this song 'Tropicália'.

Michael Wellen: 'Tropicália' is one of Oiticica's his best-known works. It's about the image of Brazil and trying to confront a stereotype of Brazil as a tropical paradise.

Caetano Veloso: It was unbelievable because it was this little tropical labyrinth and I thought it was really very much like what we were trying to do in in popular
music and it was like a visual expression of our feelings, at least my feelings.

Michael Wellen: In the 1950s, Oiticica started as a geometric painter, he was making very rigorous, very small paintings usually on cardboard.

In the early 1960s, Oiticica developed a new kind of sculpture, what he called 'Bólides', or fireballs, and these were boxes that were constructed with little drawers and interactive elements that the artist would put earth, or different kinds of found materials inside.

Some of the earth that Oiticica placed in the 'Bólides' were taken from places like Mangueira, one of the largest favelas in Rio de Janeiro.

He made friends with members of the Samba dance school in Mangueira.

Oiticica himself was a great dancer. He drew lots of inspiration from the architecture, from the colours of those places but mostly from the movement, the dance and the personality.

Hélio Oiticica: 'We are Blacks, Indians, Whites, everything at the same time. Our culture has nothing to do with the European, despite being, to this day, subjugated to it'

Michael Wellen: In 1968, things in Brazil got really intense because the government issued a law that suspended 'habeas corpus', people could be stopped on the street and arrested without any warrant, without any need, just on suspicion and that led to the arrests, mass arrests and torture of intellectuals, students, young people and that risk applied also to musicians who were probably at the forefront of a kind of protest and a kind of counterculture movement.

Musicians like Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil.

Jill Drower: A lot of creative people in Brazil suddenly had to leave Brazil.

Hélio wasn't in prison, so it was slightly different for him, but he was a refugee in a way, and he couldn't, I don't believe he could have stayed in Rio at that point.

When he arrived in London, he was looking for somewhere that was a rented room and so he came to live with my parents in Putney.

He was absolutely amazed at how much freedom there was here because he had come from a dictatorship where, if you stepped out of line, you would be taken out.

Hélio Oiticica: As you can see, I'm anxious to leave Rio. It is too much for my brains. All free wills seemed to be repressed or castrated by one of the most brainwashed societies of all time.

Michael Wellen: So the 'Parangolé' was another type of sculpture that Oiticica was developing in the mid-1960s. He created a series of capes that could be worn in almost any way. They were basically pieces of cloth stapled in odd places and the wearer got to choose how they wore it. Some of them contain messages, often poetic messages but also they could be read as forms of protest or solidarity.

Caetano Veloso: These things are a radical experience. You just wear a 'Parangolé'. Those clothes that were not clothes. Still,they say so much.

Jill Drower: He introduced into his art the Afro-Brazilian culture, and then it would involve favelas, the Samba and all other aspects that were very
identifiable as Brazilian and that led to 'Tropicália'.

Michael Wellen: In 1969, Oiticica had a major exhibition called 'The Whitechapel Experiment' and it was filled with all of these groundbreaking types of artwork.

Jill Drower: It was a totally bewitching exhibition because you go to an exhibition normally and you wouldn't be allowed to touch anything. This was the absolute opposite, and not only were you encouraged to touch things but you are obliged to participate because you had to take your shoes off to go into the sand.

And then you'd go into these 'Penetrables' where you would brush aside a piece of hessian and have to explore through this tropical delight really.

Michael Wellen: It was a place where people could come, could move freely and enter into spaces that were filled with surprises. They wouldn't
necessarily know what would happen inside these 'Penetrables', and it was exactly the opposite of what people would understand as 'high art'.

Jill Drower: It was about engaging people and local people started realizing there was a sandpit in their local art gallery and mums came in with their pushchairs and got their kids playing in the sand.

Michael Wellen: There were businessmen coming in on their lunch breaks and listening to the parrots that were squawking around in 'Tropicália' at
that time.

Jill Drower: Hélio just adored the participation of everybody.

Hélio Oiticica: 'Tropicália' is a kind of map, it's a map of Rio, and it's a map of my imagination. It's a map you go into.

Michael Wellen: 'Tropicália' is nothing but a problem. It was a problem for the artist in his own day and it's a problem for curators and conservators now.

It's like, what are we going do with 'Tropicália'? How are we going to show it in the right way? How do we get across the cultural importance that this work had, broadly, but what it meant for the artist and the challenges that he faced in creating it?

Hélio Oiticica: It's only by furiously bringing down that we can raise up anything that will be valid and palpable: our reality.

Caetano Veloso: Gilberto Gil told me, 'we are under a violent political situation. Our musichas to have some violence to respond'.

And Hélio had that in pure form, you know. He had it radically.

Michael Wellen: Oiticica was very interested in that sense of liberty, and something that emerged deliberately from living in a repressive regime in Brazil,
but just in general, he was always pushing the boundaries of what art could do and how it could free people.

Jill Drower: Well I think, as it developed, I think he was trying to take art off the walls in the galleries and put them out there in the street where the people could enjoy them, just like they enjoyed dancing Samba atcarnival. He wanted it to be of the people, that was very much his message.