Totem | SuKarne
With age comes wisdom, and the knowledge from the Old World dictated what happened in the art world. Nevertheless, as good rebel children, the colonies were confronted with local inputs. Brazilian modernism was a reaction, inviting the artists to rescue from their cultural roots and behave like the tupinambá: eat your opponents and nurture yourself with their qualities to be better warriors. Under this manifesto is how the Brazilian Antropophagic movement started and permeated the identity of its people to the extent of offering significant contributions to the contemporary art world.
About a century has passed since this movement, and it is clear that he has a Neo-Concrete aesthetic tradition in his works: consumer product universe and poetic epiphanies that dilute everyday life and art. Like this, Souto digested his Mexican experience and transformed it into one of his anthropophagic series.
Totem in memoriam of Bishop Sardinha is an invitation to learn about the event that started it all; the tupinambá ate one of the evangelist priests to become more holly. Using the packages of what he ate during his stay in Mexico, he revises the idea of a body/totem that presents his Mexicanized food consumption.
SuKarne Delivery is a wordplay – with a local brand that means “your meat” – in a literary sense, the brand and the cardboard limbs that resemble votive offerings uses in Mexican churches to ask the question as to who is in actual charge of our bodies.