Carlos ‘Marilyn’ Monroy

Through the practice of dance and performance, incorporating reflections on mass cultural phenomena, multidisciplinary artist Carlos ‘Marilyn’ Monroy investigates how individuals, populations, and states deal with processes of identification and embodiment. His work contrasts the dynamics of historical oppression with the creative resistance, both personal and collective, of communitarian art forms like popular dance or folklore. Referencing Brazilian anthropophagia, twentieth-century ‘remix’ culture, and community-oriented Andean and Caribbean cultures, Monroy draws parallels between the dilemmas of copyright within the field of arts and a sociological understanding of individual performativity being based upon imitation, informed by ancestry and context. Consequently, notions of imitation and homage are reframed via a logic of ‘re-formance’. O Museu da Lambada (2015), presented as part of Musafiri: Of Travellers and Guests, is dedicated to ‘Chico Oliveira’, the adopted name of Francisco Orcossupa Olivares, a Bolivian street musician and disseminator of Andean music, to whom the first international hit of this genre, ‘Lambada’ (1989), was credited without his knowledge or financial benefit. Monroy’s work exposes how the French-Brazilian band Kaoma plagiarized Márcia Ferreira’s Portuguese version of the Afro-Bolivian song ‘Llorando se Fue’ by Los Kharkjas, and describes the genre’s international craze of the 1990s, which helped rebrand Brazil’s post-dictatorship national image into one of ‘progressive freedom’, through Oliveira’s Indigenous working class history and migration back and forth to the country. The success of the song points to the significance of contributions that migrants make to local identity and culture, while still revealing the asymmetries of transnational cultural appropriation.

Work in the exhibition: Llorando se Foi. O Museu da Lambada. In memoriam de Francisco ‘Chico’ Oliveira (2015), posters, objects, videos, vinyls, dimensions variable. Courtesy of the artist.

Full list of objects in the installation available here