Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos

Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos, curated by José Luis Falconi and Gabriela Rangel, was organized in conjunction with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies and Cultural Agency Initiative of Harvard University. The exhibition featured enlarged color prints presented as diptychs, triptychs, and multiple panels, as well as video works. This exhibition was the first show of Paula Trope and the Meninos in the United States and it focused on issues related to authorship and artistic collaboration.

The prints included in Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos were produced by Trope and her partners, the children who live in the favelas (shantytowns) of Rio de Janeiro, and made with pinhole cameras created by the artist. Trope had established a long-term collaboration with the Meninos that included a series of photographs, videos, and, more recently, an urban planning project in Rio de Janeiro.

Trope’s work was influenced by film theory and contemporary photography. Within this framework, the pinhole cameras reflected the precarious conditions of medium and practice in the unprivileged peripheries. For the exhibition curators, the process of production of these images, “also pushes the notions of representation and inclusion into a larger debate of photorealism and authorship.” According to Trope, her relationship with the children who took part in the project “is that of mediator or agent of a process of symbolic exchanges in a situation of going beyond borders.”

Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos arrived during the heat of a debate that reexamined the ethical position of artists who collaborated with marginal subjects such as illegal workers, prostitutes, mental patients, especially in underdeveloped countries and through the use of methodologies that excluded them from final decisions of the work and economical compensation. Framing her artistic practice from the historical perspective of Hélio Oiticica and Glauber Rocha, Trope’s work generated questions that were not limited to the artist and the Meninos but were also extended to the agents involved in the show, including curators and organizers.

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^{Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and the Meninos was organized in conjunction with the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies, and was made possible by the generous support of the New York State Council on the Arts, a State Agency; The Jacques and Natasha Gelman Trust; and Humberto and Claudia Carvalho.}

^{Installation view: Emancipatory Action: Paula Trope and The Meninos at Americas Society Art Gallery. 2007. Photograph by Arturo Sanchez.}