Quarta-Feira de Cinzas/Epilogue

Quarta-Feira de Cinzas / Epilogue (2006) is one of the most iconic examples of Brazilian video art to emerge in recent decades. The work was recorded on 1 March 2006, an Ash Wednesday, in the rainforest near Belo Horizonte, the city in the state of Minas Gerais where both artists were born. The Portuguese title translates to ‘Wednesday of ashes’: the day after Carnival, a time of transition from excess to orderliness and the first of the 40 days of Lent, the period of fasting before Easter. The artists describe this piece as an attempt to ‘capture the mood of the end of the festival, when there is a certain melancholy after the days of madness and excess’.

From a low camera angle and in close-up, we see swarms of red and black leafcutter ants carrying brightly-coloured confetti through the rainforest. To attract the insects, the artists soaked the confetti in lard and sugar beforehand. The video begins with just a few ants, but as time passes, more and more insects appear and begin to drag the reflective discs of confetti over the ground, past plants and trees. The soundtrack by the experimental band O Grivo (who frequently collaborate with Guimarães) combines ambient rainforest sounds with rhythms taken from Samba tradition, created using improvised instruments like forks and plates, matchboxes and cardboard fruit packaging.

The ants are a reference to Macunaíma, a 1928 novel by Brazilian author Mário de Andrade. This icon of Brazilian literature centres on a lazy and capricious fictional hero with a fluid character, a man who embodies the country’s national identity with all its contradictions. In the novel, ants are a recurring symbol of destruction and self-sabotage. Macunaíma literally loses his leg to an ant bite, while the old Brazilian adage De Andrade includes in the novel provides a bitter national diagnose: Muita saúva e pouca saúde, os males do Brasil são, or ‘Too many leafcutter ants and too little health, those are the ills of Brazil’. With their ironic reference, the artists contrast the ants – paragons of diligence and collective labour in the film – with the dubious role assigned to the insects in Macunaíma.