Oddities and Abandoned Places

A climbing plant peels off a brick building, in an effect reminiscent of a snake shedding a layer of skin

Abandoned staircase in Poland

NYC elevated Railway tracks on the Westside of Manhattan, NYC.

Downed American aircraft, WWII.

Henrique Oliveira's Baitogogo
at Palais De Tokyo, Paris, France

As recounted by anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss in Le Cru et le Cuit, the indigenous people of Brazil have a myth about a man named Baitogogo who, having committed a rape, flees to the jungle, where, in divine retribution, a tree sprouts from his shoulders. This surreal story was a jumping-off point for sculptor Henrique Oliveira when he received one of the six-month residencies granted by SAM Art Projects to artists living in France but not natives of Europe or North America. He sees Baitogogo’s plight as a metaphor for the organic, tumor-like growth of favelas in Brazilian cities.

Taking over a 2,200-square-foot gallery at the Palais de Tokyo, a 1937 exhibition hall, Henrique Oliveira Baitogogo made it seem as if a knot of ancient tree branches and roots was growing out of a framework of columns and beams. “It connected architecture to a natural-looking structure,” Oliveira says. “There’s strong symbolism, representing how human thinking tries to understand the way life develops, yet existence always turns out to be impossible to comprehend by rational thought.”

The Palais de Tokyo is a building dedicated to modern and contemporary art, located at 13 avenue du Président-Wilson, near the Trocadéro, in the 16th arrondissement of Paris, France.

 

 

Monument Valley Road

Utah, USA