Lucas Odahara
Os Desorientes da Pantera, 2021
Glazed ceramic tiles, wooden panels, performance
860 x 145 x 70 cm (catwalk)
Os Desorientes da Pantera is a ceramic tile catwalk by Lucas Odahara, commissioned by the Berlinische Galerie for the exhibition Park Platz. Installed so that it intersects the boundary between the museum’s parking lot and the public sidewalk, the work departs from the Brazilian historian Samyr Farias Leite’s research into a gay ball that existed between 1986 and 1992 in Rio Branco, Acre. The ball awarded the prize of the Pantera Gay (Gay Panther) to the best contestants, most of whom had grown up as part of the impoverished working class that formed in the aftermath of the Amazon Region’s rubber crisis. As Leite has noted, beginning in the 1960s, the rubber business’ near total implosion caused the displacement and movement of thousands of bodies and subjects, along with their identities and cultures, into the capital, resulting in rapid, unplanned urban growth. With this movement, various manifestations of gender and sexuality developed in Rio Branco, such as the Baile Pantera Gay.
However, it wasn’t only the local population that was dislocated in this story. The British thief Henry Wickham smuggled 70,000 Brazilian rubber seeds to the British empire in 1876, with the intention to develop a system of plantations in the British colonies in South and Southeast Asia – the British Ceylon (now Sri Lanka), British Malaya (now Peninsular Malaysia), Singapore, and other colonised tropical areas. Other such patterns of displacement are still occurring today in the Amazon Region as indigenous communities are violently threatened by illegal logging and face constant risks of land dispossession by governmental decisions. The machine that forces bodies to move around the globe in disorientation still functions – the Global South often being the stage for these displacements. Can we think of these regions such as South America and South/Southeast Asia as connected not only by the colonial and imperial powers that shape their economies, but also through an imaginary of resistance? Which other forms did these panthers assume? How to disorient the hunter and keep moving? The catwalk coming out of the Berlinische Galerie towards the street looks at the Baile Pantera Gay as a reference for these questions. It’s a homage to Rio Branco’s gay panthers and other dissident bodies, who must keep moving outside of conventional orientation systems in order to exist.
As part of the piece, Odahara is organising performances in collaboration with guests who are invited to use the catwalk in a public event. In September 2021, at the Berlinische Galerie in Berlin, the collective CFGNY has been invited to activate the work.
* special thanks to Nuno de Brito Rocha, Samyr Farias Leite, Winnie Ulbrich, Anne Hierzi, Ulrich Jahn, Daniel Chew, Tin Nguyen, Kirsten Kilponen, Ten Izu and Mizuki Kin.
Images: Exhibition views at Park Platz, Berlinische Galerie, Berlin, Germany 2021. Photos: Mizuki Kin
Performance by CFGNY 'Certain Forgotten Gestures Near Yourself', 2021
Lucas Odahara has invited collective CFGNY to respond to his installation Os Desorientes da Pantera in Park Platz at the Berlinische Galerie. The new commissioned performance, titled Certain Forgotten Gestures Near Yourself, imagines what it means to inhabit a bootleg identity. Moving beyond the need for the expression of authenticity, the performance explores the benefits of an identity unmoored from absolutes and revels in the joy and playfulness that can be found in the ungraspable. Using stand-ins, doubles, and transformations to create a space of distortion, the collective questions notions of seeing and visibility to open a discourse of potentiality.
Photos: Mizuki Kin