This text was published in BuDUM, an underground newspaper in Rio de Janeiro whose contributors included Artur Barrio, Francisco Bittencourt, Caio Fernando Abreu and Ivald Granato. The publication BuDum went to great lengths to reproduce mimeographed texts for wide distribution in alternative circles at the height of the repression and military censorship of the 1970s. The series Domingos da Criação was organized by the MAM-RJ in 1971, coordinated by the art critic Frederico Morais; it proposed creative participation by the Sunday visitors in the gardens of the Atêrro do Flamengo. It starts out from the principle that every individual has some creativity to be explored. Among the events held in the urban space of Atêrro do Flamengo, as a part of Domingos da Criação, there were two that were unforgettable due to their alternative (informal) contact with the visitors: Apolipopótese and Orgramurbana. The two portmanteau titles include apocalypse-hypothesis-hippopotamus and ogre-organigram-urban, respectively. [Regarding the first of these, see in the ICAA digital archive by Hélio Oiticica and Rogério Duarte “Apocalipopótese no Pavilhão Japonês” (doc. no. 1110621)].
Born in Portugal and living in Brazil starting in 1955, Artur Barrio (b. 1945) began writing his “notebook-books”—with notes in his own private language—starting in the late 1960s. His various writings clearly identify certain topics around which his art approach revolves, even assuming material form in his radical conceptual artwork.
[For other texts by Artur Barrio, see in the ICAA digital archive “Se o corpo é o suporte” (doc. no. 1110694); “Fantasias; Fragmentos” (doc. no. 1110600); “Depoimento I” (doc. no. 1110598); “Barrio” (doc. no. 1110491); with the artists Dinah Guimaraens and Lauro Cavalcanti “Mitos Vadios” (doc. no. 1110494); “Cadernoslivros” (doc. no. 1110597); and a publication about the artist published by FUNARTE ? Coleção ABC, Barrio (doc. no. 1111068)].
