Brasil! Brasil! A street-side ode to Brazilian modernism and migration

Partnerships

Brasil! Brasil! A street-side ode to Brazilian modernism and migration

In collaboration with the Royal Academy of Arts and Camden Market, BUILDHOLLYWOOD presents a street-side celebration of Brazilian modernism in the heart of Camden Town. The five selected artists turn their hand to reimagine the seminal Brazilian work featured in the Royal Academy of Arts, all in their own ways returning to the legacy of Brazil’s diasporic cultural identity. In its artistic candour and creative consideration, the responses to the RA exhibition Brasil! Brasil! are a stark reminder of the way our society depends on the legacy of migration, without which our British isle would be far poorer, in economy, community, and artistic integrity.

“Brazil is home to the largest Japanese population outside of Japan”, shares Fernanda Liberti, one of the artists featured in the BUILDHOLLYWOOD collaboration, “ it has the biggest African population outside of Africa, with more Lebanese people living in Brazil than there are Lebanese people in Lebanon”. Her own Syrian and Brazilian heritage speaks to the rich cultural complexity of Brazilian migration, with artist Gustavo sharing his own anthropological understanding of the very human history of migration. “Nations are built because of people that come and go”, he says, with his project in collaboration with artist JC Candanedo exploring the diasporic identity found in the Brazilian delivery driver population in the UK. “We can’t live without these people”, JC shares, “they have completely changed the way we live”.

12.02.25

Words by Elsa Monteith

Visual artist Bunmi Agusto speaks to her Afro-Brazilian lineage, with her Yorùbá Nigerian heritage by way of Brazil speaking to the sinister legacy of colonialism and slavery. With the RA’s exhibition showcasing over 130 works from Brazil’s modernist movement in the 20th century, Bunmi spoke to the exhibition providing a new lens for her. “Usually I’d probably be understood as a Nigerian”, she says, “but now we’re looking at that complicated relationship with migration”. Kiko Lopes, another artist featured on the billboards, discusses his own origins, coming from a working-class family with immigrant grandparents from north eastern Brazil. His heritage led to a profound connection with Tarsila do Amaral’s paintings, an internationally celebrated pioneer of Brazilian Modernism whose work has been reimagined as one of two large-scale artworks on a mural in Camden Town to celebrate the exhibition, alongside Djanira, a self-taught artist of Indigenous descent. The reimagination of their striking works showcased in a one-of-a-kind mural on the famed Hawley Wharf arch brings forward the Brazilian modernist movement into the public realm, inviting passersby to immerse themselves in the rich visual storytelling the artworks offer.

Complementing the new mural at Hawley Wharf arch is a display of contemporary artworks on nearby art boards, offering a present-day response to a now well-documented legacy of Brazilian modernist work. The billboard campaign can be found hung in the al fresco public gallery fondly known as the streets of Camden, with the focal showcase located at 31 Chalk Farm road, right next to the Stable market entrance.

Discussing where she now lives in London, artist Juli Manara mentions Camden and its alignment with her home country, “I’d compare it to Brazil”, she says, “it’s a place that has so much culture”. This is a nod to the rich partnership between the RA, BUILDHOLLYWOOD and Camden Market, as well as an acknowledgement of the outstanding work that the five artists have contributed to the public project, found sprawling across Camden and beyond for the next three months.

Artists:
Bunmi Agusto
Gustavo Dias Vallejo and JC Candanedo
Fernanda Liberti
Kiko Lopes
Juli Manara

Bunmi Agusto

Can you tell me a bit about how you came to be an artist and your journey to be where you are today?

I was born and raised in Nigeria and went to school there until I was 16. When I was in school, I was more so known for math and IT. I think when you’re an artist people like to use the adjective “talented” on you, which sometimes undermines the hard working elements of it. When people suggest to me that I’m a talented artist, I’m like, no, I worked hard to be an artist! My talent is systematic thinking which is why I could go from being a math and IT person to being fascinated by architecture to then world-building as an artist. Throughout my life, there’s been this line of system building and system analysis.

Can you tell us about the specific piece you’ve created for this project? What themes, ideas, or stories does it explore, and how does it connect to the broader themes of the Brasil! Brasil! exhibition?

The piece is called “Apparitions Fly Past Umbanda”. Umbanda is one of the characters in my work, one of these hybrid characters I’ve built. She has a mutation on her head where has these skin prongs that extend to create the shape of an archbishop’s miter. Each hybrid, based on their mutation in my work, has their responsibilities, almost like gods and mythologies. Umbanda is in charge of the spiritual knowledge and healing in the world, and she embodies my relationship with religion, which is a complicated one, like for many Afro-Brazilians. In my basic nuclear family dynamic, my father was Muslim and my mother Christian, but at the same time as a Nigerian, you also have the latent presence of Indigenous religions.

If you look to Brazil, the enslaved peoples still practiced those religions when they were taken to Brazil, as do the descendants today that still practice those religions, or have returned to those religions. Not only that, but they have synthesized them with other religions such as Islam and Christianity. The Umbanda is the name of one of those religions that synthesised the other. There’s a synthesis between Christianity, Islam, and Indigenous African religions.

Much of your work features dreamlike landscapes and surreal imagery. How do these elements manifest in your contribution, and how do they interact with the modernist themes of everyday life, Indigenous identity, and Afro-Brazilian culture?

I came to it almost coincidentally, but the more I read the more I see that there is a long history of people whose ancestors were somewhat involved with the slave trade returning to this idea of relating slavery to alien abduction, and it’s one of the key themes. Fantasy so often lends itself to such narratives to create metaphors for the difficulty of the experience. I think when you have a harsh reality, or maybe any sort of reality, you sometimes tend to create fantasy to make sense of your experiences. For example, if you believe that the subconscious plays a significant role in the mundane material of the everyday, that manifests in how you create work. So that manifests in Brazilian modernist works and surrealist works and embeds the magic of religions from elsewhere and of folklore anthologies into our everyday.

The RA exhibition highlights the enduring legacy of Brazilian modernism. How does your work engage with this legacy while offering a contemporary perspective, and what dialogue do you hope to create between past and present?

This is actually the first time I’ve been given the opportunity to be in dialogue with my Brazilian lineage. My great great grandfather was enslaved in Brazil, but is the same person that came back to Nigeria – does that make me Afro-Brazilian? There’s this idea of material and immaterial heritage, and the fact that, yes, he came back to Nigeria, but he came back with lots of practices that contemporary or other Afro-Brazilians in that generation would have been practicing. That passed down in his family with certain foods, and even being perceived as westernised in a Nigerian context, and how different values brought back trickle down through generations. There’s an area in Lagos called the Brazilian quarters, and there’s a small museum that focuses on the contemporary past and contemporary lives of Brazilian Nigerians. So with this contemporary exhibition, it’s interesting to see me in that context. Usually I’d probably be understood as a Nigerian, but we’re looking at that complicated relationship with migration.

What have you got coming up?

I have my first institutional solo exhibition in Freiburg, Germany, E-Werk which opens on the 16th May. My next solo exhibition in London opens at Tafeta on the 5th June called “Clouds Never Die”, and it continues my research and work looking at afterlife and different religious cosmologies pertaining to afterlife and ways of using that to explore my own grief and ancestry.

Gustavo Dias Vallejo and JC Candanedo

Gustavo, your journey spans from visual anthropology to theatre-making, with a background in social science, anthropology and storytelling. How have these diverse experiences shaped your artistic vision, and how does this perspective manifest in the work you’ve contributed to the BUILDHOLLYWOOD billboard project with JC?

G: There’s a very clear connection. I did anthropology as my BA and I specialised in visual anthropology – that was more than 15 years ago – and then I was doing theatre at the time. When I moved to the UK I started working with communities, and my work went from the stage to non-actors, which was a kind of full circle feeling because I went back to anthropology. What I see today as my role in facilitating or enabling performance or theatrical moments to happen with different people that can somehow negotiate their differences.

I’d love to move on to you JC, and hear a bit more about your background and the collaboration.

JC: I really related to this project when Gustavo offered it to me, because in my work I explore identity, migration and displacement. I was born in Panama and my family is a family of immigrants, and then I left Panama in my early 20s and became an immigrant myself. I’ve always lived in the diaspora and I’m really interested in finding out how immigrants, and people who live in communities with immigrants keep their identity in the diaspora. So when Gustavo mentioned this community of Brazilians who live and work here as delivery people and that he was working with them on an art project, I thought that was a fantastic opportunity to celebrate them.

As a duo, your work involves a collaborative approach to exploring these concepts. How did your partnership shape the creative process for this project, and what unique perspectives and practices did each of you bring to the final piece?

JC: Gustavo is a highly creative person with his theatre background, so the way he sees life is similar to the way I see life. We’re both very visual, albeit in different disciplines, so it was easy to communicate and share the ideas that we had and how we thought that the image of this painting could be translated into something contemporary. We’re bringing this image of immigrants from the middle of the 20th century in Brazil to a contemporary setting in the UK.

Your work explores identity, displacement, and interconnections between micro and macro, and local and global contexts. How does your Brazilian heritage inform your contribution to this project, and how do you see it resonating with the themes of the Brasil! Brasil! exhibition?

JC: The conversations around migration and immigrants are always the same and they’re always very stereotypical, and we’re always put in these boxes, and we only think about the “negative” things we bring into the countries. I think it’s about time that we started painting immigrants with a different light, and just celebrate how enriching it is for people to come with different backgrounds and different ideas to the UK. We contribute to society so much. This community of Brazilian delivery people are contributing to the economy of the country. We are saying that nowadays, we can’t live without these people (laughs), they have completely changed the way we live to a point where we depend on them. We don’t go out to eat so much, we order so much delivery food. This is a growing sector of the economy that relies on this labour, and that’s the sort of conversations I want to have instead of thinking about all the other negative connotations.

G: You see what’s happening in the United States and how the whole world is suddenly talking about how we deal with the idea of the “other” that is coming? In my view, as an anthropologist, it’s just a cheap and lazy image, because that’s not how communities or individuals create things in human history. Human history is about migration. Nations are built because of people that come and go and accumulate. This is true for Britain, for the United States, for Brazil, for everywhere, and on a micro, smaller level, it’s true for someone who just wants to look for a better life. We talk about sagas, it’s about people looking for things.

Fernanda Liberti

You’ve shared that your work looks to navigate the “post-colonial roles and experiences of people of colour, women and LGBTQ+ people in the twenty-first century”. How does this interplay shape the artwork you’ve created for the BUILDHOLLYWOOD billboard project?

When I read the theme of the exhibition, I thought this piece from my archive really fits, because I’ve always been in love with my country, and I’ve always been really upset with the way that my country was perceived. Living in the UK for so many years, people always had two views of Brazil, which are two different stereotypical views at the same time. So with my work, I really wanted to show a different type of Brazil. People think that because we’re so multicultural and diverse, that we don’t have prejudice, but that’s not true. Our society is like any other, it’s constantly trying to reinvent itself and grow in a way to be more accepting. And I want my work to be a part of this. I want people to feel represented and to feel seen.

Could you tell me more about the two ways that Brazil is interpreted or perceived?

I think in a way, people have this view that Brazil is extremely primitive and that we don’t have the internet for example, but I think thankfully with social media, that’s changing. People are experiencing more of our culture due to social media, but it’s this view that it’s just the jungle and that’s all we have, and this view that it’s very dangerous. I think both ways are a sort of primitive and underdeveloped way of seeing the countries. And it’s not true, they are parts of a reality, but it’s not the only two realities we have in Brazil.

How does your Brazilian identity and experience growing up in Rio and moving to the UK influence the themes and stories in your art, and how is this reflected in your contribution to the Brasil! Brasil! exhibition’s broader conversation about cultural identity?

I lived in Rio until I was 19 years old in the same neighborhood, and then I moved to London to study photography. I’m not going to lie, it was very difficult. It was my first time living away from my parents, and I didn’t realise how bad the winter was (laughs). There were many things for me that were hard to adapt to, especially the way society works. For example, in Brazil, time, especially in Rio, is a suggestion. Time is a concept, you know? And in London, time is time. If you are 20 minutes late in Brazil, you don’t even need to tell anyone most of the time.

I think because I’ve been going back and forth from Brazil to London for a very long time, what I like to see in my work is representing portals that can transport you to somewhere else and can make you feel different. It can make you feel safe, or seen, or admired, or you can see someone that maybe looks like you, or someone that you love. Maybe someone will stop and look, and it will brighten their day. So having my work on the streets of London – it’s the city I chose to be my home as well, it means so much because it’s like two worlds colliding. I remember the first project I did at university was actually collages that I would make of streets of London with scenes from Brazil. I would make these little worlds that existed inside of me which was the myth of these two cities.

Can you tell me more about that project?

I had spent one year in London and then I went back to Brazil for the first time. It’s interesting when you go back home, when that home is not the only home you have anymore. You’re not the same, and you leave a piece of yourself and take a piece of the place with you. I did a project right when I came back from Brazil – I had these two little worlds that exist inside and outside of me. Especially the first weeks and months, it’s almost like you’re living in a dream in a way, reality feels a bit uncanny, it feels familiar but strange, which is a feeling I like to bring into my work too. That project was really trying to navigate between these two landscapes that existed both inside and outside of me.

This project brings your work into a public, city setting in Camden. How does the context of a bustling, multicultural space like Camden shape your approach to creating and presenting this piece? How do you want people to engage with the work?

I want my work to bring this Brazilian energy that we have, the sunshine is uplifting. We don’t like rain that much (laughs), but the other day in Brazil I was at a party and it started raining, and everyone was dancing around. I want to bring this Brazilian way of seeing life into someone’s day, even if it’s just for a little bit.

Kiko Lopes

Your collaborative practice reflects a dynamic interplay of form, structure, and cultural storytelling. How has your Brazilian heritage influenced your approach to art, and how is this expressed in the work you’ve contributed to the BUILDHOLLYWOOD billboard project?

I think I started to fall in love with native tribes and this kind of aesthetic when I moved to London 17 years ago, I started to miss my roots a little bit. In Rio, there’s a museum about native tribes called Museu do Índio, and some of my good friends lived quite close to that museum, so whenever I was going to Rio, my first stop used to be that museum, and at one point I started going just to go to that museum to the point that they started to notice me there, and started to save books to give to me.

Can you share the story behind the artwork you’ve submitted for the billboard display? What inspired its creation, and how does it respond to the themes of Brazilian modernism or the broader cultural themes explored in the exhibition?

There is no title for the painting, but at first I was thinking about calling it something like “No Mirrors”, to go against the colonisation cycle where colonies would visit tribes and offer murals to swap for a native tribe’s culture. At first I started playing with the patterns and the body paintings, and it grew from there.

How did you get into being an artist?

I was born north of Rio in a very working class neighborhood. I didn’t have much to do around there, but when I was around nine years old, my father started working at a factory east of Rio, so we moved nearer there which is closer to the sea. I was becoming a teenager, and my new friends were very into a kind of California way of life, like surfing and skateboarding. I went to an advertising and marketing school after.

Everything was going well until one of my colleagues from my class said his friend was selling a tattoo machine. So like two weeks before I turned 18 years old, I decided to buy it, I didn’t think twice. I went straight to my room and started to tattoo my legs, and then my girlfriend and my best friends, and I didn’t say anything to my parents. One day my mum saw my tattoo on my legs and she didn’t like it, but my father said to me, “why don’t you start studying art?”.

Was that your first tattoo?

Yes – it’s just a little skull. I have two brothers and when I showed them they said you’re too selfish, you only did one skull! We’re always together! There should be three! So I had to do three little skulls (smiles).

Did you continue to tattoo after that?

Yes, I had to start work to help my parents, so I was going to the tattoo studio around my parent’s house for a job, but my father asked me; “why don’t you go to the best tattoo studio?” And I said that they’re not going to give me a job. But he said to try it, and if they don’t give me a job, to try the second best one, then the third best one. So I went to the best tattoo studio I knew in Rio on Copocabana beach where all the celebrities get tattoos, and they were looking for an apprentice and gave me a job. In two months, I became a professional tattoo artist tattooing celebrities and my mum’s TV idols!

That’s amazing. Can you give me any names?

I tattooed a singer called Cássia Eller, she was very famous, kind of like a Brazilian Janis Joplin. I did three tattoos on her, the first one was a scene of a couple having sex from a book from Thailand. I love that illustration, and all her three tattoos came from that book. At that point we didn’t have many tattoo artists around, so we had to do all the styles, whoever came.

Your practice is self-described as “transdisciplinary”, could you tell me more about what that means to your identity and work as an artist?

Most of my income comes from tattooing and spray painting, but everyday I’m trying something new. If I’m going to buy a plate for my kitchen, I’m going to buy a plain white one, and search for the kind of ink I have to use to paint it. And if I want to have a carpet, I’m going to try to learn how to make tapestry, or put my drawings on it. I try to blend them together to see what happens.

Juli Manara

Can you tell me a bit about your life growing up in Brazil?

I was born in the countryside about an hour from São Paulo. Compared to London, we had a lot of freedom, we’d always play in the streets, that’s my memory of Brazil at that time, but I’m not sure if the kids are allowed to be in the streets like we used to (laughs). We used to go to the beach a lot, and that’s where the Atlantic forest is. I was curious, because I always saw certain flowers, but now because of the exhibition, I noticed them in a different way. I’ve researched the name – they’re called Manacá, and some of the work that’s going on in Camden includes these flowers, I thought, “oh my god, they’re everywhere!”.

Your practice spans a variety of themes and is concerned with the “relationship between nature and the material world”. Can you share how your journey as an artist began, and how your early experiences inform the work you’re creating for this collaboration?

I started as a photographer, I was working in commercial photography, and then I ended up becoming an artist. I moved from Brazil to France to do my studies, and that was where I started creating artworks. At first I was doing normal photography, and then I started with this technique of montage and collage and interfering with different mediums. I started like 10 years ago with The Botanics, but this series that you’ve seen for the billboards, it’s a very new project related to the forests and Brazilian backgrounds that I grew up in.

Brazilian modernism often highlights Indigenous and Afro-Brazilian heritage, along with themes of everyday life. How do your personal experiences connect to these traditions, and how have they informed the ideas you’ve explored in your piece for this project?

In the beginning I didn’t feel like I was very influenced by my Brazilian childhood, because I wanted to move abroad and do things instead. But when I got more mature, my art also got more mature, and I started to see that actually I had a lot of influence from Brazil. I have a new artwork that I’m doing right now and I’m trying to do very, very English backgrounds. So if you see those two artworks, you can see the difference, because when I created The Botanics for the forest, it’s a kind of landscape I see in Brazil and don’t see here.

I just came back from Brazil, and I was by the coast with a lot of natural environments like the Atlantic Forest, so we went hiking into the woods. Those artworks are going to be on the billboards, they are very much what I see there, but I recreated it with more imagination and more surrealism, it’s totally a Brazilian vision. When I was there I realised that this is really the nature that I have in my memories.

This project brings Brazilian culture into a public space in Camden, far from its origins. How do your personal stories and artistic background intersect with this new setting, and how does it influence the message or intent behind your contribution?

Camden of course is different from Brazil, but it’s a place that has so much culture. There are so many people from different backgrounds. I’m in Brixton now, and I’d compare it to Brazil, because there are different cultural backgrounds, and I think Camden has a bit of this as well.

What have you got coming up?

I’m holding a workshop at the Royal Academy on the 15th and 16th February, and have an exhibition at the Brazilian Embassy from 13th March to the 3rd April 2025.

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