In Conversation with Desali

Bringing the Art Gallery to the Neighborhood Bar in the Periphery

Desali’s story began with comic books and graffiti, continued with his training in Art Education and Plastic Arts and follows an ongoing process of resignification of space, involving protagonists originally unconnected to the art world.

"Embarque nessa promoção” (Embark on this deal) Series, Untitled, 2018. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

“O Estado eliminas geral chupa cospe acaricia” (The State you abolish sucks, spits, fondles), 2014, mixed media on canvas, 120 x 90 cm. "Embarque nessa promoção" (Embark on this Deal) Series. Photo: FAMA Museum.

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by Tânia Caliari

Mon 22 Mar, 2021

“Bartering is a word that is very present in my work,” declared the artist Desali, born in 1983 in Contagem, an industrial region near the city of Belo Horizonte. The idea of bartering was already familiar when the artist became a member of the Piolho Nababo – an anarchic collective that held art auctions with bidding starting at R$1,99. Starting with graffiti and comics in his adolescence, Desali has been expanding his artistic techniques and research through his formal education in Art. An art education activist, he is concerned with bringing urban occupation to the museum, the art gallery to a neighborhood bar in the periphery, artistic workshops to at-risk areas – always with the direct involvement of the social protagonists originally unconnected to the art world. “There’s an exchange of experiences, an accumulated knowledge that I want to understand,” said the artist in an interview with C& América Latina.

Landscapes
Nacional, a neighborhood in the city of Contagem, is my world; it’s what I understand as real. It’s my roots, which I identify with, and which shaped me as a person. It’s where I get my inspiration, where all of my images come from and the relationship that I create with other worlds. I lived in Belo Horizonte, but now I am back in Contagem. My painting work, for example, is divided into two blocks: one with landscapes of the periphery, of the houses and the colors of the houses; and the other with a human presence. I mix in techniques with the proposals. Technique allows for an amplification of the gaze on this periphery, which is multiple, which has, on the one hand, this pulsating energy, of bodies; and, on the other, this relaxation, this calmness that I feel living there.

Street Market Prices
That’s a long story, which starts with the graffiti I used to make here in the neighborhood as a teenager, with the underground comics, with punk connotations, and with urban intervention. Later, in Belo Horizonte, we created a collective, Piolho Nababo, which was an anarchic space, self-managed, a libertarian gallery, with no curatorship or any of those institutional ties. Whoever wanted to participate brought their things. And we grew and grew until we became truly chaotic, with exhibitions, shows, art auctions starting with 1,99 bids, cheap prices, street market prices. When no bids came, we would destroy the work. This surprised everyone and attracted people from diverse places, from the periphery to affluent areas. We were in various independent spaces and we even got to the gallery at the Palácio das Artes. My background with graffiti and anarchy made this interaction with everyone possible, independent of the consequences – whether it succeeded or not, everything was possible.

Art Education
I was working in a neighborhood bar on Paraná Avenue, in Belo Horizonte’s central region, selling mocotó (calf’s foot jelly), and I managed to pass a college prep exam. I studied during the day and worked at night. Then, I learned that the Guignard School was offering an evening B.A. program, not very competitive. I worked for an NGO to maintain my income and I started teaching classes in at-risk communities in the cities’ peripheries. That was an important experience, because I had the children’s feedback. All of my research in Art entered into my teaching dynamic. I was teaching what I was learning… putting up street posters, making short videos. Further along, that experience infused my work that was part of the Pampulha Scholarship, when I created a gallery in the Dandara squatting neighborhood. I gave a series of painting workshops in that space for children, and we sold the works at an auction at the Pampulha Art Museum, which, at the time, became the Dandara Art Museum. We gave the name a new meaning, and the community went to the Museum. The children bought what they wanted with the money. Art education is integral to my conceptual; it’s all connected.

Basquiat and Abdias do Nascimento
I went to college as a black guy from the periphery, and back then there was no history of black art. It’s a Europeanized idea that they constantly drill into your mind. And then there is Basquiat (Afro-American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, 1960-1988], a black reference, and you identify an immediate familiarity, the question of policing, a series of elements, the presence of the black body in the painting. He was a major influence for me, including for his series of interventions in the urban space. His paintings embody hate, and this is present in my series Embarque nessa promoção (Embark on this deal), which is a tour that the youth take from the periphery at night. These are groups that come out in the face of police, authoritarianism, emprisonment. And there is also Abdias do Nascimento (actor, director, dramaturge, painter and Brazilian activist, 1914-2011) whom I also encountered when I was in college, but always in the background. They don’t place those artists in the foreground, they’re just the backdrop. Basquiat appears, because he is on the scene with Andy Warhol, for instance. That is extremely irksome.

“Bom Jesus” (Good Jesus) Series - "Junim", "Adilson", "Wilsin," 2010, P&B photographic paper, 60 x 50 cm. Photo: Courtesy of the artist

The Word
Literature was an important influence for me, Concretism, concrete poetry, the relation of the word with mathematics. I place things in my paintings that seem to be a personal diary of my life, mixed in with sentences from books, broken sentences, words related to the image. And this elicits an interesting reaction in people: they see the painting, the painting is small, pleasant, and when they get closer, they get a shock depending on the word. Some paintings have a three-dimensional relief that leads the person to move from one side to the other. My research is around this as well: the body of the person facing this image, which is going to walk, analyze from up close and from far.

Irony and the Market
I wonder what the image of the artist would be faced with these spaces of power of the art market. So, I use that type of irony, that disbelief in power, in capital that just absorbs and drains. If I were to enter the game, I prefer to do so that way. I’m there inside but playing in the same way that you are playing with me, using my images. Everyone takes advantage of such movement. People end up feeding the platform of the institutions, which in their turn are promoting the artist. I got caught up in it and my comics are kind of a joke in that sense. I talk about the Pipa Prize, but with some irony. I try to address the situation of wanting to be in the artists’ network, of showing my work on that platform as honestly as possible.