Abre a porta

John Ahearn’s sculptural murals are far more than simply realist sculptures; they are challenges to the very nature of representation, of who gets to represent whom. They result from an extensive process whereby the artist and his frequent collaborator, Rigoberto Torres, immerse themselves in a community and get to know its people, their character, values, and vitality in order to portray them – the workers who are the backbone of a society, yet uncommon subjects of portraiture, or when they are, who rarely have a say in how they are portrayed. In the case of the two murals here, Ahearn and Torres have chosen as their subjects the citizens of Inhotim’s surrounding region of Brumadinho, a number of them employees at Inhotim. Abre a Porta [Open the Door, 2006], depicts a solemn and spirited religious procession that takes place every year at the church just behind this mural and uphill from it. The procession is enacted by followers of Congado and Moçambique, two branches of a local population of African lineage descended from slaves, who practice a kind of Cat holicism that has absor bed animistic deities.