Anna Maria Maiolino

Anna Maria Maiolino began her professional practice as an artist in 1958. Her film In-Out (Antropophagy) (1973) is representative of the artist’s work from the 1970s. The work references Brazilian poet, playwright, novelist and revolutionary Oswald de Andrade’s concept of ‘cultural cannibalism’ from the late 1920s, which returned to consciousness in the 1960s in discussions surrounding American cultural imperialism. De Andrade suggested that modernism in Brazil was founded on its consumption of European culture. Maiolino’s film presents two mouths, a male and a female, engaged in wordless conversation. The female mouth has been sealed by adhesive tape and suggests the censorship imposed by the military dictatorship in Brazil, or the frustrations of a woman artist. The film alternates between the two mouths, progressing through various situations and changes; a difference in stubble, the appearance of lipstick, the teeth, and spitting out of coloured threads.