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.
At a glance
Visual cues
- The deliberate digestion of imported styles
- Mixture with indigenous imagery
- Motifs of the enlarged body
- Primary colours and a tropical range
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
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Dictionary entry
- Type
- A European display face redrawn until its proportions no longer belong to it.
- Composition
- One swollen figure dominating the field, the borrowed reference still legible underneath it.
- Material
- Saturated primaries and tropical greens laid flat, mixed without hiding where each came from.
- 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
Related entries
- Tropicália (トロピカリア)Same Brazilian Avant-garde lineage.Compare Antropofagia and Tropicália
- Neo-Concrete Art (ネオ・コンクリート・アート)Same Brazilian Avant-garde lineage.Compare Antropofagia and Neo-Concrete Art
Cite this entry
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- https://indexstyle.org/styles/antropofagia
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- [Antropofagia — IndexStyle](https://indexstyle.org/styles/antropofagia)
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