De lama lâmina

Matthew Barney’s artworks, filled with metaphors and references, are based on an exuberant and singular aesthetic vocabulary. The video De lama lâmina (2004) came out of a project developed with the composer Arto Lindsay, involving music and performance. Set against the backdrop of Carnival in Salvador da Bahia, in 2004, the Video, however, not only documents a performance – the passage of an enormous logging truck that leads a parade of costumed African-Brazilian drummers and revelers. It also displays a fictional narrative that intertwines the real and the imaginary. The work’s title [From mud, a blade] refers to two deities in the Brazilian candomblé of African roots: Ossanha, the orisha of plant life and ruler of Nature’s vital forces, and Ogun, orisha of iron, warfare and technology. The conflict between these two deities provides an organizing principle for the work and reflects Barney’s keen interest on the dialectic nature of apparently opposing elements. The truck on which the art performance is staged has two sections, symbolizing the coexistence of an open-air earthen world and a hidden underground sphere. The Greenman, a hybrid man and plant inhabits the darker area between the truck’s wheels, whereas a character inspired in an environmental activist climbs a huge uprooted tree held at the front of the truck. In Barney’s syncretism, the fusions of activist and tree and of Greenman and driveshaft evoke the dualisms of creation and destruction, fecundity and death. In its addressing both the deforestation and the fragile balance between the natural environment and technology, the work also conveys a political content. On the basis of this video, Matthew Barney created a work especially for Inhotim – a large installation that involves the logging truck featured in the video.