My happiness

my happiness remains buried eternities

and only rises to the surface

through the alchemical tubes

and not of natural causality.

she is the bastard child of deviance and disgrace, my happiness:

a diamond generated by combustion,

as the final aftermath of a fire.

Waly Salomão, 1995. In: Algaravias: Câmara de Ecos, 1996.

yarn, cloth, folds

“Whoever knows yesterday and today will know tomorrow, because the weaver's thread is the future, the woven cloth is the present, the woven and folded cloth are the past”, says a Fulani1 proverb, which applies with unusual precision to the artistic procedures of Alberto Pitta.

For four decades involved with the production of serigraphs and prints that color the carnival parades of the most emblematic blocks of the Bahian black carnival, Pitta has with the threads, cloths and folds a deeper intimacy, built daily throughout his life. Watching the activities of his mother, Mãe Santinha de Oyá, an important ialorixá from Salvador, who was dedicated to richelieu embroidery and the education of children and adolescents in the Pirajá community – following the vocation community of Candomblé –, Pitta had from very early on an interest for cloths and for his commitment to bringing people together through words. He quickly understood that in the African tradition, from which he descends, clothing does not only respond to the utilitarian need to protect the body; it could also be a powerful signifying element, which inscribes man in nature and reconnects him to his ancestors, asserting itself as a support of language and social markers2.

In fact, signs, shapes and traits that evoke traditional African graphics found, on his fabrics, a privileged place for educating the masses and telling stories that only make sense collectively. If writing, in Pitta's work, is organized in the set of patterns and colors that reinterpret the Yoruba cosmo vision, reading, on the other hand, concerns the relationship established in the contact between bodies in motion, when the city streets turn into terreiro3. Through the folds of fabrics that cover the revelers runs through an alphabet of letters and affections, mobilized by music and through dance: it is on the body of the other that the text that completes us is read. It is on the printed fabric where Pitta strengthens the Bantu principle, according to which the being does not exist in opposition to the other, but in contact with what, in the other, can change him in search of constant renewal of meaning of life as an experience of beauty, joy and freedom4. “I write even for those who do not know how to read”, says Pitta, as a prelude to the famous line by Roberto Mendes and Capinan: “I will learn to read to teach my comrades”. Therefore, words can become indecipherable when literate public, while the symbols – masks, combs, adinkras, animals, gourds, whelks, ritual objects – the most sophisticated hieroglyphics under the eyes of anilliterate. The print becomes therefore, an activator of the encounter, a device of communion, of connection between two worlds, of intercession of the arrows of time. Thus, the woven and folded cloth (which is the past) is constituted of multiple possibilities for futures, the weaver's threads.

The tight weave formed by the threads of time, which accommodates theiconography around which the work of Pitta gravitates, is translated in the title of the exhibition. Inspired by a verse by the Bahian poet Waly Salomão, “buried eternity” refers, on the one hand, to cave paintings and fossils, these remnants of the past crystallized in the present, which challenges the finitude of life and emphasize the transformation of matter. This archaeological dimension of his work is manifested in the accumulation of layers of colors and shapes – resulting from the power of serigraphy to transform a trace into a graph –, in the work with mild and earthy tones and in the frequent allusion to the patinas and erosions caused by the time. On the other hand, the title also refers to the suffocated joy in the domestic environment, in times of pandemic isolation, a period during which the set of works presented here was accomplished.

gourds, caves, houses

Gourd designates the fruits of plants of the Cucurbitaceae family, used by different peoples of the world as a container for storing objects, food or water. For the Yoruba peoples, however, the gourd is the universe reduced to the scale of men: Oduduwa, which is omnipotence and ability to affect and reconstruct reality, is its underside, and Obatalá, creator of the humans, the top. The gourd is the metaphor of the womb, the place where life is generated and regenerated. It is in the hollow of the gourd where things are renewed and reborn. This is where the secret is kept, the mystery.

The gourd is a constant presence in Alberto Pitta's work. It figures explicitly in O Segredo nas Cabaças, but also operates in a deeper dimension, triggering and articulating two symbolic universes dear to the artist. The first is the imaginary of the origin of world and humanity, where the semi-abstract forms of cave paintings, of men from caves and the magical-playful daily life of hunter- gatherers is constantly confused with the Yoruba culture. Just think, for example, of Caça, Caçador 3 and Caçador 4, paintings that merge the prehistoric hunt with the perspicacity of Oxóssi, orixá of hunting, animals and plenty, who killed the bird of evil thanks to his skill in the use of Ofa, the bow and the arrow. Together these ways seek to situate Africa as the cradle of humanity and, by extension, as the birthplace of knowledge and technology. This artistic hypothesis finds scientific support5, but it is supported, fundamentally, in the axé of the Funfun orixás of the Nagô cosmogony – to whom the domain is attributed on the formation of human beings – especially Oxalá, the lord of the white cloth. It was he who molded men from the mud (Érupé) provided by Nanã, the elderly lady of wisdom and swamps, to whom Pitta pays homage through his Ibiri. The synthesis of this articulation can be found in the emblem of the Cortejo Afro – carnival group created by Pitta in 1998, part constitutive of his work and a fundamental key to the understanding of his artistic project-, in whose center cavemen walk carrying the instruments of the orixás. It was also in Afro procession that Pitta introduced the use of white-on-white, another reference to Oxalá that became an unmistakable mark of his graphic work, present not only in O Segredo das Cabaças, but also in Asas da Liberdade and Caçador 1.

The second symbolic universe dear to Pitta stems from this first one: it is the form closed in on itself, which finds wide variation, going from the circular and infinite shape of the serpent – evocation to Oxumarê, orixá of transformation and the water cycle –, to shells, a constant motif in their prints. The shells refer more explicitly to the whelks, whose uses extend from (cauri) to the oracular instrument of the game of Ifá, a divinatory system practiced by the Yorubas, but also to the snail (ìgbín), symbol of the calm and slowness of Oxalá, orixá that carries the weight of the house itself and controls the slow time of fossilization, the return to the original land. The gourd thus reconciles the universe of the cave and that of the house through the idea of seclusion in the hollow interior, conducive to the isolation necessary for restoration and rebirth. As already mentioned, the set of paintings presented in this exhibition was entirely produced during the pandemic, when the enclosure threatened the collective nature of Pitta's work, but at the same time, it re-signified its symbolic universe and enhanced the thickness of its narrative. As Nei Lopes reminded us, in several religions of African origin practiced in Brazil, the seclusion and solitude, imposed as a measure of sanitary control since the beginning of the pandemic of Covid-19, are necessary conditions for the initiation of the novice, who will emerge reborn into the orixá6.The domestic environment thus became an oscillating space between the cave and the refuge, between the prison and the lair, stressing the limits between madness and meditation, between the crudity of reality and the dream projected on the walls of the house, as in the wildly dreamlike world of Lascaux or Chauvet bulls. This was the tenuous limit of someone who saw part of the meaning of his work reassessed, which Pitta toured. From the cartographies of the impossible present in Caminhos I and Caminhos II to the series organized in the room attached to the Cunha Lima residence, which resumes the vocabulary of zoomorphic figures, Pitta rethought recollection and intimacy while he was rethinking his own technique, expanding the uses of serigraphy and experimenting with the transparencies and color overlays and graphic layers.

It is also in a house where these works are gathered: the Cunha Lima residence, headquarters of Carmo Johnson Projects, hosts a set of 24 paintings on canvas, in which Pitta rewrites the stories told in its cloths and reinscribes them in its own history, as an artist multimedia, for whom the print goes beyond the surface of the clothing. Designed by Joaquim Guedes, the features of the Cunha Lima residence show the architect's familiarity with the features of Lina Bo Bardi, with whom he was a friend and who conceived (in partnership with Marcelo Suzuki) the design of the terreiro of Mãe Santinha de Oyá, in an exceptional case in Brazil. The integration between the form built and the natural form, a common aspect between the projects, make the terreiro a home and the houses a terreiro, united at the same time by the telluric force of the cave and the knot of the gourd primordial, from which life flowed.

Renato Menezes, curator

1 The Fulani are a numerous nomadic people who occupy a large region of the Africancontinent. From the Sahel to West Africa, the fulanis are present in a dozen countries, including Nigeria, Senegal, Cameroon, Mali, Benin, among others.

2 Anne Grosfilley & Danilo Lovisi. Fibers Africaines - patrimoine et savoir-faire textiles d'un continent. Milano, Silvana Editoriale,

2020, p. 11.

3 Muniz Sodré. The city and the land. The Black-Brazilian Social Form (1988). Rio de Janeiro,

Mauad, 2019.

4 Luiz Antonio Simas. Umbandas: a history of Brazil. Rio de Janeiro, Brazilian Civilization, 2022,

p. 155

5 Chan, E.K.F., Timmermann, A., Baldi, B.F. [et al.]. “Human origins in a southern African palaeo-wetland and first migrations”, Nature, 575, pp. 185–189 (2019).