FELINA
CURATORIAL TEXT
OF INVISIBILITY-MUSEUM
Museums, by nature, constitute spaces of broad public visibility, their architecture intended for the exhibition of works of artistic, scientific, and cultural value, as well as for the construction and dissemination of knowledge—though, as a rule, not all forms of knowledge. Throughout modernity, since their origins in 18th-century Europe, museums have not only been responsible for consolidating the Western canon but, above all, for forging its comprehensive historical narratives.
But what if, conversely, we decided to think of the museum precisely from the perspective of invisibility? As a mechanism no longer of display, but of concealment of historical layers and institutional dynamics, or even of artistic creation itself? In "FELINA," a project proposed by Andressa Cantergiani following the closure of MARGS for renovations in 2020, the museum becomes an opaque, desolate space, refractory to the public sphere. And to the successive layers of social impermeability resulting from the structural works at the museum, the subsequent lockdown imposed by the COVID pandemic, and the devastating flood of 2024, the artist will superimpose yet others, derived from the ideological discourses constructed from within such institutions, which tend to ignore non-hegemonic narratives.
Going back in time to Catherine the Great's Russia, and drawing inspiration from the population of the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, a pack of cats—destined to rid the works of art of the constant threat of rodents—Cantergiani will develop a project of insidious occupation of the MARGS, from its interstices, be they physical or rhetorical, aesthetic or bureaucratic, its security devices, or even its work regulations. It is worth noting, however, that this is not a specific critique of this now "occupied" museum, but rather an investigation into the nature of such institutions, indistinctly, on a genealogical level.
Cantergiani employs an "animist" strategy by disguising herself as a feline to wander the Museum's rooftops, facades, galleries, corridors, blind spots, offices, and collections, revealing public and even institutional spaces, routines, and choreographies, while revealing architectural and hierarchical patterns and symbolic and aesthetic value judgments. By donning the "skin" of an animal, the artist questions herself and us about the idea of universality invested in a museum and the production of supposedly irrefutable forms of knowledge, although, more often than not, they are constructed unilaterally based on Western epistemological foundations and the a priori philosophical subject/object—or, put another way, an ontological perspective that understands culture and nature as antipodes, whose human gaze imposes itself on other forms of life.
By assuming the features of a cat, the artist is also, allegorically, speaking of the many narrative absences in these institutions, in their collections and their stories, namely: those of Amerindian peoples, Black people, women, LGBTQIAPN+ communities, among so many other cultures and forms of life subsumed under the univocal discourses propagated by museums around the world, which often neglect divergent cosmologies and disregard the broad diversity of material or symbolic memories on the planet — yet another reflection of the deleterious colonial processes that continue to unfold.
On the other hand, this feline invader, this agent provocateur within the institutional sphere, metaphorically alludes to the idea of reverse plunder—that is, looting the museum to return to the conquered peoples their most precious artifacts, which were systematically plundered in the wake of European imperialism. Or, perhaps, on the other hand, this feline's choreography is intended solely to deconstruct, or denaturalize, the forms of artistic expression rooted in the normativity of museum institutions.
Bernardo José de Souza
Curator