Marginal Blues, 2020
Unfired glaze on ceramic tiles, wood structure, sound (by Pedro Oliveira)
13 panels 100 x 80 cm each / instalation variable dimensions 





Marginal Blues departs from the encounter with the book ‘Bom Crioulo’ (1895) by Adolfo Caminha, considered the first major Brazilian novel with a homosexual romance narrative, and one of the first novels to present a black person as its main character. The novel narrates the romance between the characters Amaro and Aleixo, two navy man, in a story that takes place in a Brazilian society in the transition towards the republic, and in the shadows of the very recent abolition of slavery.

Although the book is considered by some as an important piece in Brazilian queer history, the author, Adolfo Caminha, was a white straight man part of the literary movement of naturalism, which brought to the public novels that focused on social minorities, by going against romanticism and using the format of a novel often as a ‘social study’. In the installation Marginal Blues, these gaps and silenced voices are translated into a visual and sonic investigation, drawing from photographic and sound archives of the time. As a result, the undertones of the book’s narrative are portrayed by bringing forward its silent spaces in a floor installation across the entire exhibition space accompanied by a sound piece. The room becomes a space for reimagining this story by placing queer history in this space of confusion and renegotiation. One that allows opacity and new ways to navigate without pre conceived orientation systems. 

In a similar process of developing the paintings, the sound stems from the first recorded song in Brazil, whose refrain goes ‘Isso é bom que dói’, meaning “This is so good it hurts”. The piano solo in the original song is reproduced and turned into a 80-minute synthesiser performance by Pedro Oliveira. The sound also has fragments of a poem written by Odahara for the exhibition, titled Marginal Blues.



The work was commissioned by Espace 3353 in Geneva, 2020.

* special thanks to Camille Kaiser, Vicente Lesser, Julie Marmet and Pedro Oliveira.



Press release:

For his first exhibition in Switzerland, Lucas Odahara presents the second chapter of his research project Os sons deles ecoando entre eu e você. The series examines kuir narratives that exist outside discourses of queerness originating in the Global North. Working from historical, archival materials, and paying particular attention to the silences and gaps in and among them, each iteration of the series folds in new stories and figures which Odahara evokes into his work. The chapter specially produced for the show at Espace 3353 departs from Adolfo Caminha’s novel Bom-Crioulo (1895), which tells the story of a formerly enslaved man who falls in love with another man in the navy during the period directly following Brazil’s abolition of slavery. Odahara’s installative work reflects upon strategies to pursue a kuir process of memory, in constant mutation and reconfiguration.

Images: Exhibition view at Espace 3353, Geneva, Switzerland, 2020.