Nuno Ramos’ work, especially in recent years, has made use of a collection of other people’s artistic works, of different natures and origins, as a very peculiar method of composition. In some of his most recent projects, we immediately recognize reproductions of Malevich and Van Gogh, as well as replicas of emblematic works of Brazilian culture, originally composed by Goeldi, Drummond, Flávio de Carvalho, and Nelson Cavaquinho. In other areas, as part of the same artistic project, Nuno co-directed an opera, *Intolleranza*, by the Italian composer Luigi Nono, and a symphonic piece, *Terra em transe em transe*, made from a reinterpretation of the soundtrack of Glauber Rocha’s classic, both in partnership with the artist Eduardo Climachauska. Understanding the peculiarity of this method has become a key to interpreting not only Nuno’s work, but also the artists present in his works.
These fragments of other people's works, reproduced, remade, and reinterpreted, could be unequivocally characterized as a kind of ghost that haunts the artist's imagination. The formats matter little: they can be musical recordings, pieces of films, reproductions of geometric shapes, poems. They are not exactly homages, although Nuno generally makes use of artistic works that he deeply admires, nor are they "appropriations," since the method does not imply taking the thing for oneself. With heightened self-awareness, the operation is never, or almost never, encrypted: the artist makes a point of explicitly stating and expressing the signature of the original as an important part of his work. Nor are we talking about procedures broadly categorized by modern and postmodern art theories, such as parody and pastiche, although it may have some kind of kinship with them.
In one of his recent essays, Nuno Ramos spoke of a kind of “euphoria of influence”—in which influence becomes the starting point of creation, “something to be accepted, something from which one creates and writes, a firm place to stand.” By inverting the famous formula of literary critic Harold Bloom, who defined influence as a cause of negativity and “anguish,” Nuno opens a door, by accepting it almost without reservation, to a maximum expansion of his stylistic possibilities. That is to say, it is the very access to authorial styles and forms that becomes the material of composition for the artist. As if the language of general essay writing were now incorporated into his work as an artistic method.
Among these ghosts and influences, Glauber Rocha came to occupy a decisive place, and this for a variety of reasons, among which – perhaps the main one – is because his films describe “with shocking accuracy the political project that prevails among us today,” as Nuno wrote in another essay, this one about Glauber. For the artist, Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol (God and the Devil in the Land of the Sun) is one of the most original films in Brazilian cinema, precisely because it consciously combines an extraordinary mythological/ritualistic force with a consolidated cultural repertoire, which, in turn, also crosses different Brazilian artistic forms, from Villa-Lobos to the repentistas of the Northeast, from Graciliano Ramos to cordel literature. As for Terra em Transe (Land in Anguish), for Nuno, its value is explained by almost opposite reasons, which are more in line with the proposal of this installation: in it, in seeking “the heat of the moment,” Glauber made a parable of the country.
It is from fragments of two classic Glauber Rocha films that Nuno Ramos's new work operates: "The fault is not with the people," the title of his installation, is a line spoken in both *Deus e o Diabo na Terra do Sol* (1964) and *Terra em Transe* (1967). Therefore, from the outset, Nuno's installation invites us to revisit Glauber's films in the light of present-day politics, and to reflect especially, in each case, on the context and conditions of production of this sentence full of ambiguous and contradictory meanings. In the first film, the phrase is uttered by the blind man Júlio, the repentista (improvisational poet), in dialogue with the hitman Antônio das Mortes, before questioning him whether killing is how he intends to solve the people's problem (misery). "The fault is not with the people, Antônio!" shouts the blind man, without receiving any answer, making the phrase echo in the emptiness of a sertão (backlands) landscape. In the 1967 film, Glauber takes the sentence to its extreme in what became the most famous scene in his cinema, moments before the poet-intellectual Paulo Martins silences the "people," accuses them of being "imbeciles, illiterate, and depoliticized," and asks us, looking directly at the camera in a challenging tone: "Have you ever thought about Jerônimo [the people] in power?"
In Nuno's installation, several toy monkeys bang their cymbals amidst projections of scenes in which two lines of dialogue are repeated in a loop: each line is about ten seconds long, but carefully chosen. On the one hand, the artist practically forces us to listen to the same sentence, since almost twenty monkeys are drawing attention to it uninterruptedly. On the other hand, the sarcastic and histrionic element of the installation, somewhat in the style of Glauber Rocha's own cinema, is accompanied by new information, which is the transformation of his films into a kind of children's theater, a kitsch or even Kafkaesque anti-fable. In this sense, the installation can be thought of as a second act of the symphonic concert that Nuno co-directed, Terra em transe em transe (Earth in a trance), because here too the monkeys – in a trance – conduct their concert, not with the film's soundtrack, but with the lines of its characters.
For the artist, in short, the fact that there is a single, unified voice in the film of hope (Black God, White Devil) and in the film of political crisis (Land in Trance) demonstrates Glauber Rocha's profound connection to the country, and his brutal political perception, which concerns the loss and crisis of the "people's" place in the imaginary and symbolic construction of the Brazilian elites, both political, artistic, and intellectual. Apparently, all of this still gives much food for thought. With Nuno's work, after all, this perception gains new life, bringing back the dilemmas of those years in the contemporary political devastation.
Victor da Rosa
Professor of Brazilian Literature at UFOP
