Utopia (Bringing bananas and coffee back to Brazil)

Mixed media installation2024

Utopia: Bringing bananas and coffee back to Brazil is a free interpretation inspired by Anders stay at the Finn community of Penedo, Brazil. The show present a series of various works made from banana boxes, alongside another group of collages using coffee as a painting medium. Picture from his previous work Mirror House will also be on display, highlighting the theme of utopia.

You can read bellow the full exhibition statement.

When I first came to Penedo almost ten years ago, I was fascinated by the story of the group of Finns who had come there almost a hundred years earlier to create a utopia based on a vegetarian diet, equality and asceticism. With traces and reflections of Finnish and Nordic traditional cultural expressions, flavored with Brazilian influences, this place at the foot of the mountain right next to the jungle seemed to me to be enveloped in a mysterious aura. The exhibition at the Resende Modern Art Museum is a free interpretation inspired by this event about a utopian dream and I am very happy and grateful to have the chance to present this exhibition in this fine museum.

Let's break down the headline and see what we get.

Utopia means "no place" in ancient Greek. The visual representation of a possible "non- place" and a reference back to the word itself is a series of documentation photos of the site-specific installation work "Mirror House" located in a hayfield near the Haihatus Art Center in Joutsa, Finland.

Bananas: This refers to a series of collage works, sculptures and drawings made from ordinary cardboard banana boxes. The works are presented in the form of an installation.

Coffee: Another series of collage works with different papers and colors. The coffee was used here as a painting medium and as a reference to an ancient tradition of reading fortunes in coffee grounds.

Together with various stakeholders, we work to increase the cultural exchange with this region in Brazil and the Nordic/Baltic region in Europe. I want to give a big thank you and a round of applause to my excellent producer Pedro Luz and to the museum director at MAM Resende, Carmem Faria Aguilar for their tireless efforts and support to make this happen.

P.S The cardboard works made of banana boxes presented in the text above was not presented in the exhibition due to paper bureaucracy at the post terminal in Sao Paulo where they got stuck. They where replaced with the paper collage works that can be seen here.