Lucas Albuquerque: The neon chosen for the Futuração exhibition is part of a larger installation, which you call “Light with darkness”. The project includes, in addition to neon pieces, films, performances, music, and other media. How does the visuality of neon contribute to the poetic concept you have been trying to unfold in this project?
Cabelo: Like paint, a piece of metal, wood, a skateboard wheel, a photo or a news clipping, a slang word, a ponto, a passe, the passinho, a funk beat, a lime beat, a drum beat, video, earth, manure, worms, plants, words, neon is one more element, among an infinity of others at my disposal, to make, to give birth to, to offer my poetry. Spoken, sung, stone-carved poetry, or written and drawn in luminous lines. Luminous lines that I have seen since I was a child, when I close my eyes, lights and visions that spring from the darkness… just like the vivid visions of the mirações [ayahuasca visions]: “Drink the liquid / access the hollow of the coconut / ayahuasca is the cinema of the caboclo.”
LA: In the song “Luz com trevas” [Light with darkness], you highlight issues intrinsic to cinema and, subsequently, to the technical image, as in the verses where you emphasize the materiality of cinematographic language [negative/positive, light/cinema], expanding the understanding of these concepts in a poetic drift. However, the relationship between light and image also appears in the neons, which are recurrent in the project. How do you seek to relate neon to cinema?
C: I am tuned in to listening to the cinema of the world. Before the world was world, it was mute, and then sound was made. From sound, light was made, stars, sea, eye, stone, sand, serpent, a mouth that speaks the word gas, neon gas inside luminous glass tubes on the facade of a store, a diner, or a cinema presenting “Testament of Orpheus,” a masterpiece by Jean Cocteau, a pure manifestation of poetry through the projection of light through a film in a dark room. Light/Darkness, Negative/Positive, Yin/Yang, complementary opposites that are the very cinema of creation. From Greek, creation is a poem, and cinema, movement, an attribute of the orisha Exu: a dynamic and communicative principle among beings, divinities, and ancestors, bearer of axé, lord of the paths and crossroads. Exu promotes encounters and “makes things copulate,” as in the song EXUberância [EXUberance], which opens the album. Encruza [crossroads] is also a place of arrival, of consensus, of integration, where knowledge and worldviews complement each other.
LA: The neon presents a stylized human figure. Its face may allude to a mask, a recurring element in the “Light with Darkness” project. A lightning bolt hovers above its hand, with an unclear allusion to its origin. The graphic iconography can refer to pixo [a unique form of São Paulo graffiti], while the neon refers to urban signs. Is the visuality of cities an important element of your work? How does urban aesthetics activate your poetic research?
C: This figure that you see as human, some people see as a monkey, others an E.T. … It is surely all of them, and many more, perhaps a link between the present being and an original being… someone receiving the strength of the spiritual world, a Buddha, sudden enlightenment… and also a reference to “Raio de Amor” [Ray of Love], a funk song dedicated to the great shaman and Yanomami leader Davi Kopenawa, and to all the peoples of the forest, their wisdom, their enchantments, and this struggle, which belongs to all of us, against the perverse greed of agribusiness, loggers, land grabbers, and miners… I’m interested in the rolê [stroll, scene] of pixo, but I’ve never been involved. It is a striking presence in the urban landscape, as are neon signs. My studio is the instant, the here and now, and my body immersed in the city is affected by its energies, its manifestations, characters, lights, smells, sounds, rhythms, colors, heats, and flavors. The city, the street, is also my laboratory, but in it, I do not conduct research, I surrender to the experience.
LA: The relationship between the divine and the profane is a constant in the “Light with darkness” installation, a dichotomy that is present in this neon: the iconography of the lightning bolt as a symbol of a relationship of the forces of nature that connect to the human clashes with the commercial aesthetic of neon. How do you seek to relate these dichotomies in your projects?
C: For me, there is no dichotomy between the divine and the profane. It’s all together and mixed. The electricity of the lightning bolt is the same that lights up the neon sign.
LA: How do you see the “Light with darkness” project within your artistic production?
C: Light with Darkness was conceived to be an exhibition, a show, and an album, which together form a single work. The opening day of the exhibition was the same day as the inter-religious act for Marielle Franco, and due to the geographical proximity between Cinelândia and Largo da Carioca, a connection was formed, a magnetized path, with people going from one event to the other, making the night even more intense and exposing the relationship between the context of the show and the serious state in which Rio de Janeiro and Brazil found themselves, and still find themselves. People I admire and respect participated in the show, such as Aderbal Ashogun, greeting Exu with the group Treme Terra, formed by ogãs from Ilê Omi Oju Arô, a Candomblé house founded by Mãe Beata de Yemanjá, DJ MSE, from the rap collective Bloco 7, dancers from Grupo Suave, Ed du Corte, master of the “na régua” haircuts, the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa, the Slam das Minas (a collective of women poets), the musician and activist Marcelo Yuka, the filmmaker Emilio Domingos, the writer Fred Coelho, among others. I brought to the exhibition space everything that influences my creative process: our indigenous and African heritages, mixed with the pop culture and street culture that I have always experienced. The very title of the show is not just a name, but a song, from which fragments of the lyrics inspire the production of plastic objects, such as the Ovos-Bomba [Bomb-Eggs], sculpture-paintings that, when opened, reveal all sorts of materials, such as urucum, turmeric, capes, and masks, which when worn make the participants activate the space to the sound of the music. In conceiving the show, I established the atmosphere of the exhibition on stage, with fabrics, drawings, videos, and sculptures. The album follows the same process: revealing this universe through the rhythm and poetry of the songs: expanded sound cinema. Light with Darkness is the invocation of the force and magic of poetry against the rotten powers of the Empire, of this necropolitics; it is the affirmation of enchantment, of the songs and traditions transmitted orally, of the vivacity of the vibrating body and the freedom of its language in its coming and going, a political body that affirms life, because as the thinkers Luiz Antonio Simas and Luiz Rufino say, “the opposite of life is not death, but disenchantment.”
[Interview produced in the context of the Futuração exhibition, between March and April 2021]
