Tropicália: The Brazilian Art Movement

Tropicália, also known as Tropicalismo, is a Brazilian art movement that originated in the late 1960s. Tropicália, as an artistic movement, involved theatre, music, poetry and art. Tropicália was influenced by what is called concrete poetry, a variant genre of the Brazilian avant-garde poetry embodied in the works of the movement. So, Tropicália is not just a Brazilian branch of the hippie movement of the 1960s that drifted down from North America. The works of Tropicália notables such as Augusto de Campos and Haroldo de Campos helped to form and solidify the movement in Brazil as well as on an international level.

Born from the visual arts scene in 1960s Brazil, Tropicália was named for an installation exhibition of the same name by Hélio Oiticica. Other Brazilian visual artists of the day such as Emerson Adriano Catarina, Antonio Dias and Rogério Duprat helped to infuse Tropicália with the vibrant visual energy that matched the music and poetry that were also a part of this artistic  movement. Above all, Tropicália was based upon the cultural constructs of the cannibalism of music and culture by all societies.

So, at its deepest roots Tropicália is about the blending, the mixing and the matching from any and all genres in any and all cultures and producing a unique but fabricated result. Formally, the idea is called the Concept of Intropofagia created by the poet Oswald de Andrade in his 1928 Cannibal Manifesto (Manifesto Antropófago).

Musically, the manifesto for Tropicália is considered to be the 1968 album collaboration of many musicians called Tropicália: ou Panis et Circencis. The mainstays of the musical side of Tropicália were Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso. In this music, they experimented with odd time signatures, strange song structures and bold political views as an artistic response to the Brazilian Coup of 1964, the event that also inspired the Brazilian film movement which is known as Cinema Novo.