In his programmatic text ‘Blockexperiments in Cosmococa — program in progress’ (1973), Hélio Oiticica, probably Brazil’s most famous twentieth-century artist, describes the work of US film-maker and performance artist Jack Smith as the ‘precursor’ of his cocaine slide-show environments, the ‘Cosmococas’.¹ Highlighting the importance of Smith and Mario Montez, an actor and icon of the queer film and theatre scene, for New York’s underground in the 1960s and beginning of the 70s, Oiticica developed the term ‘tropicamp’ in 1971 to characterise a resistant element in the gradual commercialisation of queer aesthetics at the time. His text ‘MARIO MONTEZ, TROPICAMP’ from that year is an exemplary description of an attitude that is traceable in Oiticica’s own work from the early 1960s onwards, and which would become overt in his later work. One might consider the notion of ‘tropicamp’ as a well-put critique of how consumerism was expanding into the field of avant-garde art that he encountered in New York.² Indeed, in the last twenty years, the politicised art-historical reception of 1960s and 70s avant-gardes has used Oiticica’s political opposition to culturally imperialistic tendencies as a crucial paradigm. Yet the last period of his artistic activity, before he died in 1980, continues to be held in low critical esteem. For example in his recent Conceptualism in Latin American Art: Didactics of Liberation (2007), the Uruguayan artist and author Luis Camnitzer concludes his otherwise laudatory writing on Oiticica with an unexpectedly negative remark: ‘After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship, Oiticica moved to New York (1970—78), where he continued working on his Parangolé series and other projects. Inspired by the disco and drug scene, he also worked on his less satisfactory slide-show environments, the ‘quasi-cinemas’ and Cosmococa pieces (1973).’³

Whatever Camnitzer’s reason for categorising Oiticica’s oeuvre in pre- and post-New York phases may be (beyond being suspicious of disco and drugs), he seems to follow a current trend in the contemporary art world. Even Mari Carmen Ramírez, curator of the large retrospective ‘The Body of Color’ at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston and Tate Modern, London in 2007, differentiated in her introduction to the exhibition catalogue between the rise (before moving away from Brazil) and fall (afterwards) of the artist: ‘If Oiticica as a “marginal artist” belongs to the period of self-exile in London and New York (1969—77), then the Oiticica revealed in this exhibition belongs to the optimistic, utopian period of the 1950s, with its developmental impulses, as well as to the radical thrust of the Brazilian neo-avant-gardes. This ascent and failure represented the two sides of an unprecedented modernisation effort that sought to place Brazil at the apex.’⁴

On the other hand, as Carlos Basualdo, curator of the ‘Quasi-Cinemas’ exhibition and editor of the seminal publication project of the same name (2001) has written of Oiticica,

to consult his unpublished writings is to understand that this last decade of his life and work was certainly as fruitful as the preceding ones, and that the intellectual discoveries of this period may even oblige us to reconsider the totality of his previous works [… and to see] a systematic consideration of the relations between the different regimes of labour and the subjective formations to which they give rise.⁵

What is more, Oiticica’s playful alienation from behavioural norms as a continual agenda and political point of view from 1959 to 1980 is in fact virtually impossible to understand from the perspective of media specificity or from an essentialist discourse on modernism. It is surely difficult to categorise the oeuvre of an artist like Hélio Oiticica. It poses the challenge of not distinguishing between interactive (non-)objects, numerous writings of fascinating clarity, as well as polemic and humorous pamphlets, multimedia, ‘suprasensorial’ installations and uncompleted series of diffused authorship. Therefore we will shift our focus from immediate descriptions of the works to Oiticica’s different contexts and coalitions. Ideally these notes will help raise the question of what the geographical and temporal differentiation in the reception of his work actually conceals, and, in spite of the above-mentioned tendencies to differentiate between work produced before and after 1970, may serve as an attempt to map the continuous ideology critique — that mirrored the shift from a modern to a postmodern condition — present in Oiticica’s work.

TROPIcamp (Pre-Tropicália)

Viva a banda-da-da / Carmen Miranda-da-da-da-da

Caetano Veloso, ‘Tropicália’ (1968)

Hélio Oiticica, Eden, 1969, installation including PN5 Gil and Caetano's Tent (pictured), 1969. Installation view, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1969. © Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

In 1959 the poet and art theorist Ferreira Gullar published his famous ‘Teoria do nãoobjeto’ (‘Theory of the Non-Object’⁶) and the 22-year-old Oiticica joined the newly founded Grupo de Arte Neoconcreto in Rio de Janeiro. It was also the year of the Cuban Revolution and the country’s subsequent joining of the community of socialist states in the Cold War. Consequent geopolitical tensions, and pressure from the US government, changed the political situations in most Latin American countries, including Brazil, drastically. Five years later, these developments converged in different ways for Oiticica. The year 1964 was crucial and tragic for the artist. Ferreira Gullar, to whom Oiticica had looked up and who had become active in the Brazilian Communist Party, published his essay collection Cultura posta em questão (Culture Put into Question), in which he finally severed his ties with the avant-garde art scene, condemning it as elitist and functional to the system, and proposing a return to the popular cultural roots of art production. In July Hélio’s father, José Oiticica Filho, died. Just before, the military organised a putsch, and remained in power until 1985, several years after the artist’s tragic death in 1980. And still in the same year, even if Oiticica did not agree with Gullar, he started to want to escape his bourgeois surroundings, and developed his soon-to-be famous fascination with the favela Morro da Mangueira. In this context he also developed the Parangolé capes and made popular music an integral part of his work. Three years later, in 1967, Oiticica first exhibited the interactive installation Tropicália, which included his Penetráveis PN2 and PN3 (penetrable geometric wood and fabric structures), TV programmes, tropical birds and plants, gravel, sand and other objects in a labyrinthine setting under the heading ‘A Pureza é um Mito’ (‘purity is a myth’). Only months later, the military regime passed the AI-5 law, empowering the president to make decisions without the consent of the congress and judiciary. In order to ‘protect’ the people from ideological corruption, they were stripped of virtually all political rights while the military police were allowed to persecute individuals and groups without reasonable suspicion or court orders.

From the onset of the military regime in 1964 there was a subtle atmosphere of oppositional solidarity among progressive Brazilian social circles, despite differences in opinion. However, there was no encompassing cultural alliance that was able to join the forces of politically active groups. At the same time, several new formats appeared on Brazilian television, including numerous entertainment shows modelled after ‘Western’ programmes, among them the music and talent event Festival de Música Popular Brasileira. In the second Festival, in 1966, the young Chico Buarque won with his song ‘A Banda’, triggering a sociopolitical phenomenon which peaked two years later as ‘Tropicália’. Buarque, a good-looking and charming fellow, and an avowed socialist, sang an ode to the magic of the carnival, namely to the carnival band that plays love songs — which as it passes lets the old man forget his pain and makes him join the dance; makes the bureaucrat pause in his work; stops lovers from counting the stars in isolation and makes them join the parade; lets the sad draw new courage and the ugly step out of the shadows onto their balconies because they feel as flattered as if they were being serenaded. The band’s love songs have the energy of a social movement which, like carnival, can reverse conditions, suspend order and hierarchies and spur the collective quest for freedom. Buarque’s performance synthesised two important qualities which would soon make the experience of Tropicália in popular music so intense: firstly, the appropriation of superstars in music who were celebrated by large parts of the population, and secondly, the circulation of contents that tended to be ambiguous or even explicitly subversive through nationwide distribution systems such as radio and TV. At the 1967 Festival, two young musicians and their bands from Bahia hit a nerve: Gilberto Gil e Os Mutantes and Caetano Veloso and his Beat Boys introduced electric guitars, and with their hits ‘Alegria, Alegria’ and ‘Domingo no Parque’ amped up Brazilian carnival with the sound of international youth movements. A year later their joint album Tropicália: Ou Panis et Circences and Caetano Veloso’s solo LP Tropicália came out. These made reference not only to youth movements and pop music, but also to the agents of marginalised Afro-Brazilian and indigenous cultures, and to a wide range of oppositional film-makers, poets and avant-garde artists. Veloso’s inspiration to name his half-finished song ‘Tropicália’ came from the photographer Luis Carlos Barreto, who pointed out that it bore a strong affinity to Hélio Oiticica’s installation from 1967. Funnily enough, Veloso, who at the time knew neither Oiticica nor his work, has explained that he was inspired to write ‘Tropicália’ when he noticed that Buarque’s song title ‘A Banda’ rhymed with ‘Carmen Miranda’,⁶ thus pointing towards two main references of the movement.

It was in the international atmosphere of protests in 1968, and within a widespread and rapidly growing vibe of solidarity movements, that Veloso seized the opportunity and sang: ‘I organise the movement / I give orientation to the carnival / I inaugurate a monument on the country’s central high plateau / Viva Bossa-sa-sa!’⁷ However, as soon as Tropicália consolidated itself as a nationwide popular movement of political proportions, state authorities began taking action against it. Oiticica’s famous banner reading ‘seja marginal, seja herói’ (‘be an outlaw, be a hero’) was presented at a joint Tropicália troupe concert, an event that was violently dissolved by the police. In early 1969 Veloso and Gil were imprisoned for several months. Following their stint in jail, the two musicians fled to London, where Oiticica had gone shortly before.⁸ In his installation Eden (1969), the direct sequel to Tropicália, alongside which it was shown in a solo exhibition at Whitechapel Art Gallery at the time, Oiticica also included PN5 — Gil and Caetano’s Tent (1969), and with it offered spaces of shelter, literally building a tent in which magazines could be read and music tapes listened to. He thus added the experience of political exile to the experimental alienation of the visitor’s aesthetic disposition.

On the other side of the Atlantic, within a few months, the Brazilian regime ‘cleaned’ the music scene of all subversive elements while simultaneously ‘tropicalising’ the national media image by plastering press outlets and TV programmes with hordes of tropical birds and plants. A plethora of young starlets were soon put on stage, turning the electrifying impulse of Tropicália into a heterogeneous and tropicalist mainstream fad that was content with proclaiming freedom as pop liberalism and wearing bell-bottoms. In one of his most remarkable texts on the subject, Oiticica described this process as ‘Brasil diarreia’ (1970) — the dilution of critical elements in brown muck.⁹

Many members of the opposition voluntarily went into exile to escape ever-increasing suppression by the regime’s authorities. Many close friends and artists associated with Oiticica went continually back and forth between different countries and cities. Artists like Caetano and Gil, Waly Salomão, Torquato Neto, Glauber Rocha, Júlio Bressane, Jorge Mautner and Lygia Clark — to name only a few — all spent time in London, New York or Paris. Some were able to return to Brazil for shorter or longer periods of time. In these years newly founded underground magazines took over the important role of offering a local platform to the voices of those who were abroad. Presença, in which Oiticica, who had moved to New York in the meantime, published his article ‘MARIO MONTEZ, TROPICAMP’, was one of these magazines. The short-lived exemplar of the deviant cultural scene only survived two issues. The names of the publications reflect the precarious situation and programmatic aims of the time, such as Pólem (‘Pollen’), Flor do Mal (after Baudelaire’s censored volume of poetry), O Pasquim (‘Pamphlet’) and Presença (‘Presence’). These magazines served as a map of the constantly shifting constellations between those exiled and those still at home, thus creating a sense of continuity that had been lost in official state organs. Tropicália had by then gone underground. 

tropiCAMP (Post-Tropicália)

Diarrhea, Diarrhea, Di-a-rrhea, ‘Diarrhea’ — Diarrhea, Di…

— Mario Montez, aka Miss Montez, in Andy Warhol’s Screen Test #2 (1965)¹⁰

Against this backdrop it is interesting to note that the use of text, film and photography as artistic media made it relatively easy for Oiticica to send his work to Brazil and circulate it locally there, which he did throughout his entire time abroad. During this time Oiticica also incessantly wrote letters describing his life and work in voluntary exile in New York, from 1970 on, and sent entire series of slides and photographs to accompany his descriptions. This material, the still unpublished ‘Héliotapes’ (audiocassettes of interviews and music, 1971—75), unedited Super 8 material (1971—76),¹¹ the film Agrippina é Roma Manhattan (starring Mario Montez as himself, 1972) and the aforementioned ‘quasi-cinemas’ (1973—75), including Blockexperiments in Cosmococa (1973), provide impressive examples of how Oiticica, despite changing conditions, produced his work in continuous collaboration with a wide range of Brazilian artists, such as Neville D’Almeida, Antonio Dias and the brothers Augusto and Haroldo de Campos. He filled hundreds of notebook pages and wrote numerous texts for publication in Brazil. Some of his published texts were themselves written in the form of letters and were a mix of descriptions of his artistic work, social critique, gay sexuality, drug use (and images thereof), philosophy, rock music and his precarious financial situation, all presented as inextricable from one another.¹² These text and image collages illustrate how consistent he was in blurring the boundaries between life and work, a project he had started in Rio; and most of all, how closely linked his living conditions and possibilities afforded to him in New York were to the repressive conditions in Brazil, which they were in many ways a consequence of. When ‘MARIO MONTEZ, TROPICAMP’ was published, Oiticica wasn’t only publicly out of the closet (a political issue in both Rio and New York), but also was a South American dissident in voluntary exile in the USA, with a residence permit that was about to expire. He had nearly run out of money and considered the idea of returning to Brazil ‘disastrous’.¹³ He exuberantly called Manhattan ‘the only place that interests me’, but equally referred to it ambivalently as ‘Babylon’.¹⁴ He would note how

today I’m feeling awful, I have thousands of problems to solve without knowing how; I feel like I’m in prison, on this infernal island […] I have to accept whatever exploitative job they wish to offer me […] it’s irritating; this city lives from slavelabour; illegal Puerto Ricans, Brazilians, Portuguese, Irish and god knows who else.¹⁵

Despite all the difficulties that life bore for Oiticica after his fellowship ended in 1971, he endured the consequences of his dissident position and decided to stay in Manhattan, living in precarity. This meant following up with Tropicália in ‘Babylon’. In this sense his ‘Babylonests’, his inhabitable structure Ninhos that he showed in ‘Information’ at the Museum of Modern Art in 1970 and its reinstallation in his loft on the Lower East Side, can be considered a headlong rush into the future.¹⁶ These spaces functioned as protective cocoons, in which the experience of vulnerability and of being uprooted can be understood as the pursuit of what Mário Pedrosa once called an ‘experimental practice of freedom’, or, put more playfully, as alienation from alienation.¹⁷

This approach also clearly illustrates that for Oiticica, social and political opposition was not constituted in clean-cut contrasts such as straight versus queer or north versus south. He developed a minoritarian position within both the US’s democracy and Brazil’s military regime. Due to this role he was involved with a system of underground coalitions for which both the liberal and fascist mainstreams, in the US and in Brazil, were agents of repressive systems and thus problematic and unacceptable. The notion of ‘tropicamp’ can be considered one approach to forging such an oppositional coalition.

Parangolé in a public space manifestation on the New York City subway, 1973. Photograph: Hélio Oiticica. © Projeto Hélio Oiticica, Rio de Janeiro

Yet Oiticica’s stay in the US in 1970 was not the first one made possible by a Guggenheim fellowship. Thanks to a grant by the Guggenheim Foundation his father, an entomologist and photographer, had been able to take the entire family to Washington, DC for two years in 1947.¹⁸ During the conversation between Oiticica and Mario Montez recorded as the basis for ‘MARIO MONTEZ, TROPICAMP’, Oiticica recalls his first visit to Times Square in New York City in 1948. He tells Montez about the deep impression a Broadway poster made on him as a ten-year-old — for Irving Berlin’s ‘Annie Get Your Gun’ (1946), which was made into a movie a few years later. The poster depicted Annie holding a gun that ‘stuck out of the huge poster’ and was suspended in space as a horizontal element. He remembers: ‘I was very impressed.’¹⁹

This early memory can be considered key for the reception of Oiticica’s work for many reasons, both biographical and formalist (the overcoming of the illusionist pictorial space, etc.). For us, conjuring the image of little doe-eyed Hélio in the middle of Times Square makes it possible to imagine an additional aspect of Oiticica’s perspective in 1971 — the view of someone who had just arrived — or, to put it in the words of the playwright Charles Ludlam (whom Oiticica esteemed), ‘an outsider’s view of things other people take totally for granted’.²⁰ Oiticica’s anachronistic love for 1940s and 50s Broadway shows and US popular culture is something he shared with Montez and which made up a large part of their complicity. Stars like Carmen Miranda and Marilyn Monroe — both of whom Montez impersonated — were quasi-mythological figures in the Tropicália universe and the queer New York underground scene. They were superstars who didn’t take the backseat to rock stars when it came to dying, who were still considered shocking in highbrow culture and who — up to this day — prove that concepts such as ‘true national culture’ and ‘true love’ don’t work without the right combination of barbiturates and amphetamines — and not forever with them. As Oiticica notes during the conversation, ‘There is a lot in common between the Tropicália movement in Brazil and your and Jack Smith’s work, you know.’²¹

When Oiticica came to New York in 1970 he was disappointed by the local art scene. He was unforgiving in his judgements and wrote to Guy Brett: ‘I don’t know what is going on here, but there is such a bourgeois art scene, conformism and reactionarism going on, unbelievable.’²² Oiticica found an exception in Jack Smith, in the queer theatre context and New York’s underground. He was impressed by the Theater of the Ridiculous (‘an important group’) and by Mario Montez’s projects (‘he’s a genius’), by Ira Cohen who dressed up as a caliph and by Stefan Brecht —Bertolt Brecht’s son — who was disguised as half-bride, half-groom, impersonating a hermaphrodite in a play Oiticica saw and whom he met at a party. ‘They’re the best things in theatre here, I have the feeling they’re always thinking together, as a group, something that seems rare around here.’²³ The more Oiticica admired the community feeling of the Theater of the Ridiculous, the more his mistrust of the remarkably more competitive atmosphere in Warhol’s Factory grew. In another letter he wrote about the abysmal situation of some of the Warhol stars, who basically ‘live on the street’, and how he offered his apartment (the ‘Babylonests’) to Holly Woodlawn, who didn’t know where else to go.²⁴ During their recorded conversation Oiticica asks Montez directly about the low pay for Factory productions, and when Montez confirms that it is true (‘$10 per film’), Oiticica responds in disbelief: ‘They [the producers] must be millionaires!’ Montez, however, comes to the defence of Paul Morrissey, the director of Warhol’s films at the time, because he had slipped him $100 to buy something nice to wear. Montez diplomatically adds ‘I usually get what I want from him’, and Oiticica drops the subject.²⁵

In a letter to Brazilian film-maker Ivan Cardoso Oiticica writes:

Trash is the name of Paul Morrissey’s film produced by Andy Warhol: commercial: but beautiful: it is the definitive commercialisation of the underground: […] all of Park Avenue is currently asking: have you already seen the film Trash?: thinking that they are hip: and feeling like allies of the marginal: but they are just raising marginal activity to a bourgeois level: this reactionary way of doing things is fully accepted in Trash: which doesn’t change anything about Morrissey’s fascinating sensitivity.²⁶

Oiticica was aware of the fact that the selling out of New York’s queer underground had been long underway. Smith, in Oiticica’s opinion, remained immune to ‘reactionary’ tendencies and commercialisation: ‘Jack Smith’s thing is quite different.’²⁷ In early 1971 Oiticica visited Smith’s loft for the first time and saw one of his ‘living performances’: Claptailism of Paloma Economic Spectacle: Saturdays at Midnight at the Plaster Foundation, 36 Greene Street. On several occasions he mentioned and elaborately described his impressions, which would have a lasting influence on him. In a letter to Brett he writes:

Jack and a fat gayish guy were dressed in arab complete dresses (tunics), and the fat guy had soutiens hanging on his chest; they were, when i arrived, on an antique table, where you were supposed to sit, at a time, after depositing a dime on a can (the bottom of the can was jack’s hand, and he would always check to see if you were depositing dimes or cents), and talk secretely to him and to the man, as if they were priests of some unknown subjective religion; i said where i had come from, and jack remarked he had been in rio (probably 1966, for he said the samba school that had won was blue and white, portela then, whereas in 67, 68, was mangueira which is rose-green) and had tried to make films, but that everything was absorbed on things he had not counted with (expected), and that was a great remark: things in brazil are absorbed, no matter how much you plan the issues.²⁸

During the conversation with Mario Montez, Oiticica tells him about Smith’s visit to Brazil. Smith had produced — despite thwarted film plans — a series of slides depicting Brazilian architecture, a project that Oiticica seemed to have a particular interest in. However, all the images, the carousel and the projector were stolen, leaving Smith with only a few fragmented shots of the carnival in Rio and of military police officers guarding the event. Together with an audio-track of the carnival, and footage of the 1950s and early 60s Smith had put together with them, these images were restored under the title Respectable Creatures (1950—66). In 2009 at the ‘Live Film! Jack Smith! Five Flaming Days in a Rented World’ conference in Berlin, writer, film and queer theorist Juan A. Suárez, after screening the film and in reference to Oiticica’s Tropicália, fittingly described this as ‘Smith’s Tropicalism’.²⁹

In both ‘MARIO MONTEZ, TROPICAMP’ and in his recorded conversation with Montez, Oiticica harbours hopes for Montez to make a comeback through Warhol in a film he first refers to as Tropicana Heat, as a consolidation of an aesthetic-ethical attitude: ‘tropicality as critical tropical things’, though being aware that ‘nobody can imagine what the film will be like once it is edited and distributed’.³⁰ Ironically, Warhol made Heat in 1972, one year later, without Montez and without ‘Tropicana’ in its title, and it became a huge commercial success. This was just when Warhol pulled his pre-Morrissey films from the market, following Morrissey’s advice. As Douglas Crimp has put it, ‘Morrissey thought they were pretentious and boring, and I think he wanted the attention for his own films’, thus making all Warhol films that Mario Montez and Jack Smith appeared in unavailable until the end of the 1980s.³¹

Oiticica’s TROPICAMP

Should we open the closet now, Andy? Let’s open the closet.

Can I open the closet?

Jack Smith as Jack Smith, in Andy Warhol’s Camp (1965)

It is important to recognise that Hélio Oiticica’s artistic manifestations of queer aesthetics and his emphasis on sexual politics have rarely been made explicit on the international circuits of art history and criticism. Yet, it is fair to say that the more attention Jack Smith receives by the broader public and critics, the more important he will become as a crucial (queer) reference for Oiticica scholars in the future. Since Smith’s show at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center in New York in 1997, his work has indeed attracted a steady growth in attention from institutions and on an international scale, with shows this year at Barbara Gladstone Gallery, New York and at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, London.

Against this background it is interesting to note that Oiticica did not change his way of working after his encounter with Smith’s work, but found in Smith, and in Montez, an intrinsic alliance in the pursuit of ideological critique that he had been working on since 1964, at least. Thus Oiticica’s notion of ‘tropicamp’, as he details it in his Presença text, may be understood as simultaneously pre- and post-Tropicália: while it stems out of his experiences in repressive societies (both liberal and fascist), it also affirms the experience of being uprooted (political exile, losing fathers and father figures), and never nostalgically looks backwards toward a true origin nor supposes a true destiny. In this text Oiticica provocatively draws his own work’s genealogy via ‘Smith’s Tropicalism’ instead of Oswald de Andrade’s ‘Manifesto Antropofagico' (1928) or Brazil’s 1950s avant-gardes — both of which are the standard genealogy for Oiticica’s work in art-historical narratives. What is more, Oiticica’s development of his own deviant genealogy rooted in Smith’s work actually makes it possible to cast a light on the structural similarities that may be drawn between ‘anthropophagic’ and ‘camp’ practices, as an attitude against cultural hegemony and as an ahistorical alliance: appropriation, humour, deterritorialisation of semiotic structures and signification patterns, de-essentialisation of cultural practises, etc. As Oiticica’s observations suggest, today’s challenge would be to analyse anthropophagic and camp strategies against the backdrop of new forms of consumerism and commodities that emerge around 1971. Thus it is important to understand that the term ‘tropicamp’ implies fundamental shifts in society under changing labour regimes (from Fordism to Post- Fordism), in the global economy (Nixon’s dissolution of the dollar-gold exchange standard) and new ideological constellations after the 1960s (the impact of the 1968 movements globally): to a post-Tropicália subject such as Oiticica, the hype of marginal culture in the mainstream and the subsequent demands of avant-garde consumerism in a deregulated liberal market represent a threat that is even more difficult to escape from than the military or the factory.

Finally, it is crucial to address Oiticica’s gay sexuality, but also to keep in mind that his emphatic affirmation of queer politics is one important aspect in a whole set of propositions. These constitute an internationalist and subterranean coalition that strictly rejects the heteronormative mainstream and behavioural fascism, and is at the same time truly suspicious about liberal narrations of social progress, and about the distinctive chic of the metropolitan bohemia. Like Oiticica’s relationship to Manhattan — ‘Babylon’ — his attitude towards sexual politics, national attribution and alienation is more complicated than any binary of pre- and post-exile can contain, and suggests the layering of meanings that change brought to his understanding of Tropicália, his life and his work. – Max Jorge Hinderer Cruz