In Brasil nativo/Brasil alienígena [Native Brazil/Alien Brazil], Anna Bella Geiger appropriates postcards from the former Brazilian magazine Manchete, which show images of the Bororo (an Indigenous population from a region located in the current state of Mato Grosso). The artist proposes new readings by creating nine pairs of postcards displayed side by side: on the left, the original image, Native Brazil; and, on the right, its simulacra, Alien Brazil. When taking into account the Brazilian context of the 1970s, the magazine images become considerably more perverse. At the time, Indigenous populations were enduring the violence inflicted by the policies enforced by the civil-military dictatorship — the opposite to the idealized and exoticized versions shown on the postcards. The new photographs were taken on the balcony of the artist’s apartment, in the neighborhood of Flamengo in Rio de Janeiro, with the collaboration of friends and relatives to compose the scenes. Geiger puts these images and worlds in confrontation as a way of approaching the traumatic process of Brazilian colonization resulting from the Portuguese (alien) invasion of the current Brazilian territory, which was occupied exclusively by native peoples at the time. Geiger places herself (an artist living through a dictatorship, a woman, a mother and a descendant from immigrants) in this complex equation in an attempt to discuss these notions not only in the field of politics and history but also in the personal and intimate sphere, as per the statement written on the work: “…with my unpreparedness as a primitive man”. Later, the work unfolds into the enlargement of the two images, which, despite operating in completely different contexts, have an element in common: the bow and arrow held by an Indigenous man in the forest, and the same item held by the artist in the restrictive space of the city — sterilizing its usefulness as a hunting and defense tool and bringing to the fore the idealization of this element frequently found in the representations of Indigenous people in Brazil.
—Matheus de Andrade, research assistant, MASP, 2023
