MOVING BEINGS - MIS COLLECTION

If culture is
really going to exist, it is not enough to be

the author of
social practices; these social practices

need to have
meaning for those who effectuate them.

Michel de Certeau

Mining industry (1972) by Roberto SabeyMuseu da Imagem e do Som

“Is it up to the artist to anticipate the future?” “Have you ever tried to grasp the multitude of information that is being lost due to the lack of an archive?” “How to explain the Museu da Imagem e do Som?” The future heralded by the film Nasce o MIS [The MIS is born], directed by Eduardo Leone, has come for all who, in 1970, embraced the mission of making documentary records of the unavoidable transformation processes going on in Brazilian culture and society. It is important to remember that today is also the future of all those who the Museum wanted to address: the housewife, the artist, the children, the secretary, the mechanic, and others who are repeatedly present throughout the short film. We are about to enter the second decade of the 21st century. This force full of desire for recording and sharing perceptions and experiences that moved many of the cultural projects implemented by the Museum provided the displacement of its protagonists, resulting in works that brought people, places, and things closer together.

Gradually, MIS’s Photography Collection intentionally and authorially built its collections with the generous participation of those who allowed themselves to be captured and the bold work of photographers who were interested in registering and making public what which had moved them—a word that indicates the power that some situations have in engaging the feeling of empathy that brings us closer to that which renovates our worldviews. In this context of ideas, the exhibition Moving Beings presents itself as the result of an exercise of poetic investigation in the Museum’s collection, seeking photographs on situations of displacement and itinerant work across different professional occupations. The word moventes [moving beings] encompasses varied meanings surrounding the quality of that which moves, of being “a moving entity” and, in linked gestures, can move other entities. In the photographs and films that make up the exhibition, we can find rural workers, grocers, truck drivers, porters, circus performers, street vendors, human billboards, wagoners, and many others. They present themselves to the public gaze as mirrors as well as flashbacks of fragments of human survival, with the implications and subtleties of everyday processes. The exhibition also shows children, young people, adults, and the elderly who were—or perhaps still are—daughters and sons, mothers and fathers, grandmothers and grandfathers, loved or disliked by others.

What we don’t see in the images are the ones behind the lenses, showing us with their records how they saw everything they found along the way. The photographs and films that make up Moventes evoke the countless Sisyphi and Phoenixes that create and recreate movements, displacements, and gestures that demand endless efforts on physical, emotional, and spiritual levels, giving rise to life-death-life cycles. By living, humans build meaning and value for the cycles of life from the apparent banality of existence, consuming, in pain and pleasure, the potency of their own bodies, one day at a time. We must not forget that everything we perceive in the images can reveal to us our ideologies and worldviews. In this sense, the exhibition’s interest lies in sharing some of the ways photography shapes everyday displacements, often unnoticed and therefore invisible—waiting for someone to catch a glimpse and bring them into existence as narrative potency. Precisely like the many photographers whose works are part of the MIS collection have achieved with precision and poetry—whether it’s those who have been here before us, the many who are with us, or the ones who are yet to arrive after we are gone. Like all of them, we perpetuate the movement of shaping and predicting the future. With actions and worldviews. Valquíria Prates Curator

Untitled (1990) by Pedro RibeiroMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Clear Gestures to Confront

Pedro Ribeiro, Denise Abrantes, Rogério Correa da Silva, and Eduardo Pagotto moving through Eldorado (SP), Tabocas (SP), Vale do Ribeira (SP).

 

The field, the body, the tin can, and the basket hold the potent labor of the gestures.

The sun that pierces through clothes and skin sustains life flows and witnesses the twirls and twists—of earth and on Earth.

The hoe choreographs the treads that know how to open streams and nests

for the seeds that are thrown in the adventure of the fruits. 

It is the nature of the peasants’ movement to sow and harvest the food

that touches so many hands until it is added to the matter of the bodies

that will invariably return to the earth.

Holding the repetition of the cycles and the weight of the materialities, they gesture:

until when must one cause (e)motion?

Untitled (1990) by Pedro RibeiroMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Untitled, Pedro Ribeiro, 1990, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Untitled, Pedro Ribeiro, 1990, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Tea harvest, Denise Abrantes Banho, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Manioc plantation workers, Rogério Correa da Silva, 1975, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Rice weeding, Eduardo Pagotto, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Workers at the Junuca Farm (1975) by Rogério Correa da SilvaMuseu da Imagem e do Som

The Names of Things Are Helena Tassara, Pedro Ribeiro, Denise Abrantes, Rogério Correa da Silva, Marcio Mazza, and Samuel Moreira meeting people in Tabocas (SP) and São Paulo.   What do
children know?

What do adults fear?

Situations, worldviews, ideas, and ideologies.

Children know how to wait. They believe.

They interpret what is lived.

Adults can measure displacements in units of
time and space.

What moves the freedoms of those who are free
and their displacements?

What does a photograph inside another celebrate?

Once upon a time, Brazil (1993) by Helena TassaraMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Untitled (1990) by Pedro RibeiroMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Tea workers, Denise Abrantes Banho, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series, Márcio Mazza, 1977, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series, Samuel Moreira, 1977, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series, Samuel Moreira, 1977, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series, Márcio Mazza, 1977, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series (1977) by Márcio MazzaMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Untitled (1990) by Pedro RibeiroMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Untitled (1990) by Pedro RibeiroMuseu da Imagem e do Som

E pur si muove

Pedro Ribeiro, Plácido de Campos Jr., Marcio Mazza, Samuel Moreira, Carlos Eduardo Mistrorigo de Almeida, Fernando Scavone, and Jorge Furtado displacing stories in São Paulo, Vale do Ribeira (SP), and Porto Alegre (RS).

 

To carry.

To drag.

To stack up.

To organize.

To choose.

From basket to sack to box to truck to cart in bags.

To cupboards. Refrigerators. Pantries.

From there to here.

From here to there.

Again. New again. Once again. The same other.

Repeats.

“e pur si muove” everything

that moves as it moves.

Untitled, Pedro Ribeiro, 1990, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Rice warehouse, Plácido de Campos Junior, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Rice warehouse, Plácido de Campos Junior, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Rice warehouse, Plácido de Campos Junior, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series (1977) by Márcio MazzaMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Central Market series (1977) by Samuel MoreiraMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Central Market series, Márcio Mazza, 1977, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series, Márcio Mazza, 1977, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series, Samuel Moreira, 1977, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market's days series, Carlos Eduardo Mistrorigo de Almeida, 1994, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market's days series, Carlos Eduardo Mistrorigo de Almeida, 1994, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series, Márcio Mazza, 1977, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Central Market series (1977) by Márcio MazzaMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Dianopolis Street, Fernando Scavone, 1975, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Wagoners (1972) by Roman Bernard StulbachMuseu da Imagem e do Som

The Phantom of Liberty

Roman Bernard Stulbach, Pedro Ribeiro, Rino Marconi, Fernando Scavone, Gabriel Bonduki, and the anonymous people who have crossed lives, streets, circuses, and street markets in São Paulo, Iguape (SP), Vitória (ES), Chapada Diamantina (BA).

 

The peasant, the grocer, the artist, and the street vendor

meet the housewife, the photographer, and the porter

in fruit rind,

under the circus tent and the market stall,

on the street,

on the roads that carry

those who arrive and those who leave 

in the lives that touch on the skin of an image

in the art-life field.

 

slip away

in the certainties of the dictionary,

where “free is the condition of those who have freedom.”

Untitled (1990) by Pedro RibeiroMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Untitled, Pedro Ribeiro, 1990, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Untitled, Pedro Ribeiro, 1990, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Untitled (1990) by Pedro RibeiroMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Bartholo Circus, Autoria desconhecida, 1974, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Orlando Orfei Circus (1972) by Autoria desconhecidaMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Untitled, Pedro Ribeiro, 1990, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Claudio, Mirian and Suely Robattini, Autoria desconhecida, 1940, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Herta Orfei presenting a group of horses (1940) by Autoria desconhecidaMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Polydoro, the clown, Autoria desconhecida, 1940, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Circus performer, Autoria desconhecida, 1940, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Circus performer, Autoria desconhecida, 1920, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Alves, the clown, Autoria desconhecida, 1940, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Pery François, the clown (1920) by Autoria desconhecidaMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Weekly street market, Rino Marconi, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Weekly street market, Rino Marconi, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Weekly street market (1972) by Rino MarconiMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Weekly street market, Rino Marconi, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Weekly street market, Rino Marconi, 1972, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Untitled, Autoria desconhecida, 1970, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Untitled, Gabriel Bonduki, 1973, From the collection of: Museu da Imagem e do Som
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Untitled (1973) by Gabriel BondukiMuseu da Imagem e do Som

Credits: Story

Governor of the State of São Paulo
João Doria

Vice Governor of the State of São Paulo
Rodrigo Garcia

Head of São Paulo State Secretary of Culture and Creative Economy
Sérgio Sá Leitão

Executive Secretary of Culture and Creative Economy
Cláudia Pedrozo

Head of the Cabinet of Culture and Creative Economy
Frederico Mascarenhas


PAÇO DAS ARTES ORGANIZAÇÃO SOCIAL DE CULTURA


Administration Board
Chairman
James Murray Sinclair

Vice Chairman
Marcello Hallake

Board Members
Mauro Andre Mendes Finatti, Renata Letícia, Roberto Giannetti da Fonseca, Rosa Amélia de Oliveira Penna Marques Moreira

Advisory Board
Board Members
Cecília Ribeiro, Max Perlingeiro, Nilton Guedes


MUSEU DA IMAGEM E DO SOM

General Director
Marcos Mendonça

Management and Finance Director
Marcos Campagnone

Cultural Director
Cleber Papa

Programming Coordinator
Renan Daniel

MOVING BEINGS
MIS COLLECTION

Curator
Valquíria Prates


Curator Assistants
Cristiane de Almeida, Patricia Lira


Image Processing
Guilherme Savioli


Research
Renata Tsuchiya

Credits: All media
The story featured may in some cases have been created by an independent third party and may not always represent the views of the institutions, listed below, who have supplied the content.
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