FORGET ALL YOU KNOW*

By Almendra Benavente

Last summer, I had the chance of visiting La Ciotat, a peaceful commune sheltered by the cliffs to the east of Marseille. During my stay, I learned that the Lumière brothers had made one of the first movie screenings there, and that one of their first films—that, for that matter, had overwhelmed the audience—was precisely the image of the train entering the city station. The creation of cinema is attributed to the Lumière brothers. Well, that’s what I knew.

My local friends had learned, on the other hand, that the creator was rather Thomas Alva Edison. Once the debate was started and after some respective researches, plus one mention to Jean Le Roy, we arrived at different conclusions: the Lumière brothers are behind the screenings that gave rise to cinema as we currently know it, but Edison is at the root of the mechanism that made it possible. For all that, there was not only one single answer, but even more questions: who created cinema then? By the way, at which point one can say that a discovery actually took place?

I then remembered of my History studies at the university in Chile. The first lesson was: forget all you know. This course is called ‘Historiography,’ for history is told by those who write it. Or those who win, who impose themselves on others. And which histories are told in Latin America? Who discovered what, and when? The discovery of America was one of the first things I had to forget. Or to correct.

The history of Hercule Florence is inscribed in that same research. Not that of ultimate truth, but rather among several existing truths surrounding a part of history.

Since her early education, Livia Melzi, a visual artist born in São Paulo, learned that photography was discovered by Florence in Brazil. As a French immigrant arrived in 1824, he dedicated himself to illustrate Brazilian nature, as well as to experiment with silver nitrate and a darkroom. Yet, in the end, his history was not fully written, because the negatives he sent to European labs always arrived blank. Just as the images he could not look at, his own history vanished, obtaining little acknowledgment during his lifetime, but being forever carved in the minds of inhabitants of Brazil.

After specializing herself in oceanography and photography, Livia Melzi settled in Arles, France. Back then, she realized that everybody talked about photography without ever mentioning Florence. In this continent, the inventor was Niepce, even if it would only take place ten years after the experiences of that French man in Brazil. He then became one of the several characters of the Latin American mythology inhabiting our continent, simply because the history we were told was another one.

In order to untangle her recollections, Melzi decided to retrace the photographer’s steps in Brazil. In this search, she went to the places he visited in times past. Afterward, she recreated a cabinet of curiosities in Devenir Hercule Florence [Becoming Hercule Florence] (2015), exposing his relics and inviting a saxophonist to interpret Florence’s zoophony, a composition he made about birdsongs in that country. By reviving his discoveries, she brings them to life through yet another one.

Later, in Terra Papagalli (2016-2018), a work that is part of the collection of the French National Museum of Natural History, the artist decides how she wants to represent her country of origin, by renouncing and diverting the colonialist imagery of the parrot from Terra dos Papagaios, literally the Land of Parrots, name the European gave to Brazil. While stuffing the animal, she introduces a backstage message for the future: a time capsule with encrypted information for those who wish to go a bit further. Brazil is definitely not made exclusively of parrots and palm trees.

During her residency at Dos Mares, Melzi explores the artistic and identity construction of Latin America through objects charged with the weight of European colonialism. In Qu’il était bon mon petit Français [How Tasty Was My Little Frenchman] (2019-2020), she makes a reference to the homonymous Brazilian film, part of the Cinema Novo movement, approaching the arrival of a French who, by the time of colonization, was welcomed by the Tupinambás and later devoured in a cannibalistic ritual.

On this occasion, the artist leaves behind the cannibalism, theme that served to feed myths surrounding her country for years, and focuses mostly on the research around the Tupinambá mantles that hide behind themselves a much more complex and unknown storyline.

During the 16th century, European colonizers firstly ordered that the mantles be destroyed, before usurping and taking them to aristocrats in Europe as exotic gifts. The sacred feather mantles, a symbol of the Tupinambá resistance, are currently and integrally exhibited in European institutions, lacking examples in their country of origin. Melzi thus examines the issue around the access to one’s own heritage, the role of museums, in addition to the European invention not only as an entity of conservation, but also as a power device.

In order to clear some space in our memory and to pursuit the exercise of rewriting our own history, it was necessary to void and rupture the symbols obstructing it. This is something one can observe in the streets, with the fall of monuments glorifying historical characters, although they do not deserve to be recalled. The artist takes inspiration of such facts, screening videos of the exile of emblematic statues in the occasion of social movements, something that happens as much in Latin America as in the rest of the world.

In parallel, she approaches the discovery of Julius Caesar’s bust in the Rhône valley. Legendary of the European culture, the bust was recovered after being submerged for several centuries—probably due to his expulsion from Arles, where the bust originally remained, by the people—and is finally consecrated nowadays.

The destruction of symbols of power is not something recent at all, perhaps it would only be necessary to remember it.

*Piece written in August 2020 during a residency at Dos Mares for the Printemps de l'Art Contemporain (PAC) in Marseille.