Vai, vai, Saudade

Published following the exhibition Vai, vai, Saudade, held at the museo Madre from July 4 to September 30, 2024, this volume consolidates and expands a project that intertwined research, memory, and vision to explore more than seventy years of Brazilian art. Curated by Cristiano Raimondi, it proposed a rigorous yet personal historiographic perspective, examining how the relationship between modernisms and identity unfolded in Brazil through fractures, contradictions, and reinventions. Conceived as both visual record and critical reflection, the book mirrors the exhibition's nonlinear structure. Organized as a dynamic album of documents, texts, and images, through the extensive research conducted by Mousse in collaboration with Cristina Ambrosio, it traces thematic constellations and unexpected dialogues across generations and geographies. From the radical experiments of Lygia Pape to the visionary testimony of Hélio Melo, from modernist utopias to practices shaped by dictatorship, migration, and resistance, the publication reveals a dense and plural artistic field that exceeds any singular narrative. The title—borrowed from a 1964 samba by Heitor dos Prazeres—sets the emotional register of the project. Saudade is approached not as mere nostalgia, but as a profound, oceanic condition of presence and absence, memory and projection. Through poetic juxtapositions and conceptual "short circuits," the volume invites readers to experience Brazilian art as a shifting territory where ancestry and experimentation, popular cultures and avant-garde languages, coexist and transform one another. The book also includes anastatic reproductions and contributions by Jaider Esbell, Frederico Morais, Hélio Oiticica, Ariano Suassuna, and Adriana Varejão, further enriching the historiographic and critical framework. More than a catalogue, Vai, vai, Saudade proposes an ethical and aesthetic stance: art as a space where thought and action converge, and where revisiting memory becomes a way of reimagining the present.