Gaspar Cohen

❐The Palácio das Belas Artes (PdBA) Lisboa inaugurates with the commission of an inciting digital artwork by Gaspar Cohen. The Porto-based Brazilian artist, through an audiovisual narrative, speculates on the journey of a palm tree found and analyzed by a future entity that struggles to comprehend its form and purposes. The video, which will be exhibited at the PdBA Lisboa in November, is a critical commentary on displacement and spectrality of power, particularly, although not limited to, those stemming from the colonial gaze, as it draws from found-footage and drone-captured images of the last persevering palm tree in the now concreted patio of the Palácio. ‍

*The Palácio das Belas Artes’ Patio

“Exotic” private gardens were highly popular in Europe and colonial-extracted palm trees stood tall amidst Lisbon’s aristocratic buildings throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The slim century-old tree that we still find today at the Palácio brings forth the contours of the country’s colonial past, forgotten in the back courtyards of the city’s buzzing tourist-filled urban scene. ‍‍

The “Imperial” Palm gained its title for having been introduced to Brazilian soil in 1809 by the Portuguese king D. João VI, becoming an arboreal token of its colonialism in nineteenth-century Brazil. Originally from the Caribbean and Venezuela, the tree was first planted in Brazil at Rio de Janeiro’s Botanical Garden and rapidly spread across the colony and beyond as its seeds gained monarchical status and capital value. In the attempt to preserve the institutional monopoly over the exhibition of such an “exotic” asset, the Botanical Garden ordered the destruction of all its seeds (1829), exacerbating their exchange value. 

The story goes that, while no seeds were to be circulated from this source, the Garden’s slaves would sneak out from their senzalas at night to grab a share and sell them for 100 réis each. This narrative is contrasted with the free distribution of seeds by the Brazilian Imperial Family to the crown’s most loyal subjects who would then proudly exhibit them in their noble private gardens and plantation estates. Representing wealth and nobility, the Imperial Palm seeds carried the traces of a cruel exploitative economic system to whom social privileges outweighed ideals of a just and humane society.

Through this commission, the palm tree no longer stands as a mere representation or symbol, but as material remains waiting to be brought back into sight.    

_{Funding / Kulturabteilung Stadt Wien (MA-7)}