I left the Gulbenkian Foundation astonished, moved, and thoroughly ashamed of what my country has become politically, morally, and culturally. The art I saw returned me to the politics that I had hoped, to some degree, to ignore for a few days. When I was there, though, US Immigration and Customs Enforcement–ICE–had only murdered one innocent in Minneapolis. Now they have murdered two.
Fundação Calouste Gulbenkian
The CAM
Two structures nestle in the embrace of a landscape of trees and shrubs, walkways and waterways, groves and glades. Benches invite moments of solitude and the intimacy of conversation. CAM (Centro Arte Moderna) is a swooping building with soaring ceilings easily reconfigured to accommodate changing installations. The museum, library, performance and administrative areas spread out in a building across the campus.
Complexo Brasil
In the Garden
The museum is closed until July 2026 for improvements and expansion. In the meantime, temporary exhibitions fill a spacious gallery. “Complex Brazil,” as curators José Miguel Wisnik, Milena Britto and Guilherme Wisnik write,
…Brazil (which is made up of many Brazils) is the complex result of colonial actions of great proportions and consequences in which Portugal dragged parts of Africa to America and took this immense indigenous land for itself. What has been termed ‘discovery’ was an act of force that conceals this traumatic origin. The exhibition aims to reveal the concealment of these Brazils and to offer the Portuguese and Brazilians, from a position of shared responsibility, the prospect of a reciprocal revealing…
We embrace the country as a powerful racial and cultural mosaic: a complex mix of biomes, ethnicities, cultures, times, logic, languages, religions and economic processes. We affirm one of Brazil’s strengths: the power of inclusion, that is, of a relationship with the world in which nothing is excluded… We stress the aesthetic and political revival of indigenous and black creators and thinkers. At the same time, and for this very reason, we bring to light the structural realities that have made the country unequal and violent.
Parallels and Resonances
One video illustrated the duration and intensity of the African slave trade by nation. (The Portuguese had long made a practice of enslaving Indigenous peoples from their arrival in 1500.) Africans were trafficked to Brazil from 1540; Brazil achieved independence from Portugal in 1822 and ended slavery in 1888, the last nation in the western hemisphere to do so.
Complexo Brasil
Freedom did not bring with it economic opportunity or social acceptance. As one panel points out, enslaved peoples simply stopped being enslaved; the racism and economic oppression that had imprisoned them remained systemic. More than three hundred years of tyranny and subjugation built walls that remain intact.
Gold, gemstones, fine woods, sugar, cotton, tobacco and other goods produced in and imported from Brazil—thanks to its enslaved masses—made Portugal the richest nation in the world in the 16th and 17th centuries. In the United States, slave labor created immense generational wealth for white people in the South. The white, Portuguese government of Brazil shut out the descendants of Indigenes and African slaves, consigning them to poverty and social disorder. The policies of Jim Crow in the United States did the same.
Art as Witness
If “Complexo Brasil” were only a survey of three hundred years of art connected to indigenous and African peoples of that nation it would have been a marvelous show. In connecting visitors to the history, cruelty, and racism that shaped it, the exhibition is a document about who we—Indigenes, former slaves, descendants of invaders and colonial powers—are in the present. It tells us, moreover, why we need to know and understand who we are and how we became so.
In recognizing how complex Brazil is, I see my own country, the moral disorder of my government, and the righteous anger of so many citizens in a brighter light with sharper detail. I also know, for certain, that my government, the Trump Administration, would never ever allow such an exhibition or its organizers to evade severest punishment.