Visual Cultures

From a Western perspective, the Amazon has been historically portrayed both as an untouched, mysterious territory and a land filled with innumerable riches for commercial exploitation that has attracted travellers and explorers since the 16 th century. In 1542, chronicler Gaspar de Carvajal, a Spanish Dominican missionary to the new world joined fellow Spaniard explorer Francisco Orellana in an expedition down the Napo River towards the Amazon River in search of the mythical kingdom of El Dorado. Published under the title Relación del Nuevo Descubrimiento del Famoso Río Grande de las Amazonas (Account of the recent discovery of the famous Grand river of the Amazons, 16 th century) followed Orellana's trajectory and consisted of one of the first among many narratives about the region from an European perspective: in other words, a narrative marked by the idea of conquest of a wild landscape through Christian faith. A famed passage from Carvajal's journal describes a fierce battle with an indigenous group near the mouth of the Negro River, among which there were several women warriors described as being tall, strong, fair-skinned, with braided hair and wearing nothing but loincloths. These women, according to a captive indigenous man, lived in all-female villages made of stone in the jungle, capturing warriors from neighbouring kingdoms whenever they wanted men. Similar stories about female warriors were also told several years later to explorer Sir Walter Raleigh, and in the 18 th and 19 th century, respectively, to scientist Charles Marie de La Condamine and botanist Richard Spruce. At any rate, it is believed that when word about Orellana's battle got out after the expedition, the association between these tribeswomen and similar female warriors from Greek mythology gave the Amazon River its name.

CONTENTS
Flávio de Carvalho 8
Kiki Mazzucchelli

Flávio de Carvalho: Media Artist Avant la Lettre 32
Rui Moreira Leite

Flávio de Carvalho in conversation with Silveira Peixoto 66

The Dialectics of Fashion or Fashion and The New Man: Ways of Dressing, The History of Clothing, The Summer Outfit 86
Rui Moreira Leite

Flávio de Carvalho/The Bones of the World: Projections
Rui Moreira Leite 118

Artist Timeline 133

Exhibition Checklist 136

In thinking of where to start from, or rather where not to start from, Salaam Cinema is one type of film that effectively manoeuvres itself into certain lines of questioning in relation to curatorial activity and its social engagements. This text, tries to analyse the complexities through which presentation, discomfort and improvisation are activated. Set in 1994 in Tehran, Iran, Salaam Cinema is one of Mohsen Makhmalbaf ’s most exceptional films. Relatively different from the originally planned story, this eighty-nine minute movie jumps between dualities and uncertainties in order to seek the Truth.

This visual essay explores a number of artistic and curatorial practices in which the archive acts as a primary tool for rereading histories. Contemporary art reveals a growing interest in the use of archival material and in the formation of new archives inside and outside institutions. Considering the archive as a series of documented and preserved knowledge, one motivation for such attentiveness could be the merging of artistic productions with curatorial practices. Building my argument on Irit Rogoff's analysis of curatorial practice as an "epistemic structure", I examine how archives have the potential to produce knowledge against historical forgetfulness. Furthermore, the process of sustainable changes within the museums, as discussed by Peter Osborne, is studied here as another motive for the increasing use of archives in contemporary art. This is done by focused examinations of a research-based exhibition, Karnameh: Visual Culture of Iranian Children (1950-1980); two curatorial projects (one temporary and one ongoing), respectively Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art's Poster and the Archaeology of the Final Decade (AOTFD) and lastly an installation art piece, Documentation. Through these examples, I argue how working with archives, especially in conflicted places, is crucial to help with recovering erased histories and accumulating shattered memories.

In the paper, through an analysis of the specific case of Manifesta 12 in Palermo (2018), I look at modes in which the art world in general and recurring large-scale events in particular, have been enquiring into the epistemological framework of the Euro-Mediterranean in recent years, often by means of idealisation, reiteration of the periphery paradigm and reduction of complex geo-social contexts to exclusionary rhetorical devices.

Focusing on the four editions of Manifesta that took place in Mediterranean cities, Chiara Cartuccia considers the curatorial risks of reducing the multitudinous space of the Mediterranean into a unified, functional metaphor. Probing into the ‘imaginative geography’ of the Euro-Mediterranean projected by Manifesta, the article calls for an event-institution capable of going beyond the metaphorical limits of curatorial fantasy, to set up a relation of care with its hosting territory.