Welcome To The Anti-Olympics, Where Brazil’s Artists Are Taking On Their Government

Phil Clarke Hill

Gracielle Monteiro, 23, a contemporary ballerina by training, is living with her infant daughter in a tent in Canecão in Rio de Janeiro. Aug. 7.

Angela Almeida Freelance Journalist

John Surico Freelance Journalist

RIO DE JANEIRO ― For the first time in six years, there was a line outside of Canecão. The famed “Big Saucer” music venue had been closed since 2010. But tonight, a ragtag and rambunctious group of artists and musicians had illegally occupied the abandoned concert hall and christened it as their new headquarters. Ocupa MinC, as the group calls itself, was protesting Brazil’s interim president, Michel Temer, and his deep cuts to government funding of the arts.

Naturally, a party was in order.
It felt like an eccentric blend of warehouse clubbing and guerilla activism: a woman in a Carnival dress, standing on stilts, greeted visitors. Eerie black-and-white close-ups of characters from Walter Salles’ 1995 film “Foreign Land” were projected on the stage behind a procession of rock bands, samba groups and poets. Cases of beer and cachaça fueled the festivities. At the end of the night, the legendary Chico Buarque gave a rousing performance; for the first time since the 1970s, he sang “Apesar de Você,” an anti-censorship anthem banned during Brazil’s dictatorship.

Phil Clarke

Ocupa MinC revelers dance at an alternative opening ceremony at Canecão in Rio de Janeiro on Aug. 4, the night before the Olympic opening ceremony.

The party, an “inauguration,” drew roughly 2,000 people and was purposely held on the eve of the 2016 Olympic Opening Ceremony. It spawned a series of parodied names such as the convoluted and whimsical “Ceremony-Party-Act of Olympic Re-Existence” and the “anti-Olympics.” A fake torch was passed around, and a poet got up on stage and exclaimed: “Let’s occupy everything, and resist!”
It was a cultural call to arms, just as the world’s eyes were turning to Rio. These artists were going to expose what is really going on in Brazil.

It was a cultural call to arms, just as the world’s eyes were turning to Rio.

Ocupa MinC began in May when Michel Temer became interim president and promptly announced that the government was going to deal with one of the worst budget deficits in years by absorbing the Ministry of Culture into the Ministry of Education. In response, thousands of artists and musicians occupied MinC buildings in at least 18 cities nationwide, camping out in tents and performing songs in protest.
Temer heard their discontent ― sort of. Days later, he reinstated MinC by presidential decree ― but with huge cuts to its cultural programming, which reportedly included slashing perhaps up to 50 percent of the programs planned in Rio for the Olympics.
“There weren’t resources for productions or shows or festivals ― nothing,” Gracielle Monteiro, 23, said. “It was like, ‘It’s over.’ So that’s when we decided, ‘No. We have to fight.’”