Antropofagia
アントロポファジア / 1928–1930s / Aesthetic / Brazilian Avant-garde
A Brazilian programme that took cannibalism as its metaphor: do not refuse European culture, eat it and turn it into your own blood. Its affirmation of mixture as a method rather than a weakness has run underneath Brazilian design, music and architecture ever since.
The deliberate digestion of imported styles / Mixture with indigenous imagery / Motifs of the enlarged body / Primary colours and a tropical range
Dictionary entry
- Best used for
- Brand work for cultures that import heavily and want to own what they import rather than apologise for it · Cross-cultural campaigns in which the visible seam between a foreign form and a local one is the idea, not a defect
- Type
- A European display face redrawn until its proportions no longer belong to it.
- Composition
- One swollen, over-scaled figure dominating the field, with the borrowed reference still legible underneath it.
- Material
- Saturated primaries and tropical greens laid flat, with no atmospheric softening between them.
- Caution
- Treating it as a licence to sample freely: the point is digestion, and a collage that leaves its sources intact is quotation rather than appetite.
- Further study
- Oswald de Andrade's manifesto of 1928 / Its relation to Tarsila do Amaral's painting / Its inheritance by Tropicália