Mapas elementares I

One of the most outstanding characteristics of Anna Bella Geiger’s career is her relationship with cartography, a field of work she approached after her marriage to the geographer Pedro Geiger, and which influenced her to rethink on colonial policies and cultural stereotypes. Geiger appropriated the tools of geography from a political commitment and used them in a metaphorical way to rebel against the established without being noticed by the censorship of that time. Due to their political situation, ideas had to be camouflaged, as her redefining of the term “feminism”, for example. In the trilogy Mapas elementares, this idea of camouflage is present. In the background we hear Chico Buarque’s song Meu caro amigo (My Dear Friend), which speaks about the country’s difficulties as another way of doing politics as camouflage in mid-1970s Brazil. This video reveals its radical nature speaking of politics beyond the object of subversion: the map.