In The Mountain Sermon: Fiat Lux (1978), Cildo Meireles set up a group of security guards, who were actually hired actors, to protect and watch over a stack of 126,000 boxes of Fiat Lux matches. The context was the Brazilian military dictatorship. Now, in Glass (2023), Amador and Jr. Patrimonial Security Ltd., who in reality are performance artists, become, in their work, a pair of security guards leaning their faces against a windowpane and through it, observing the events taking place around them. The headquarters of the historic Paraná Museum, inaugurated in 1876, is their venue.

Through their poetic-performative productions, the artists mobilize a set of ideas revolving around security, labor, and the racial implications that emanate from these issues. In the project Glass, designed to occupy the display window of the Paraná Museum, the duo makes a resolute and concise gesture to explore elements of absurdity and comedy. Employing a non-disruptive vocabulary in their performances, Antônio Amador and Jandir Jr. challenge the boundaries between the commonplace and the extraordinary within an art institution.

The glass, a central element in the concept that undergirds performance, becomes opaque when the faces of the two security guards appear against it. The duo interrupts the cleanliness and transparency typically associated with glass, as well as the supposed cleanliness and transparency of narratives rooted in museums such as the Paraná Museum, which have spanned two centuries – and were thus established even before the abolition of slavery in Brazil. When we ask how artistic and cultural legacies have been constructed within the territory that became Brazil, we encounter narratives of appropriation, violence, and erasure.

By reintroducing a certain opacity to the “glass walls”, allowing us to finally see them, the duo signals a revisionism that has, within contemporary Brazilian intellectual and artistic production, taken a radical turn. A revisionism which is rooted not in ideas of purity and clarity but rather in engagements with noise and polyphony, inherent to any knowledge that resists universalization. With courage and a touch of irony, Amador and Jr. Patrimonial Security Ltd. brings to the forefront of debate a worker who is often instructed to perform neutrality and stiffness, much like glass. May the duo's art cast spots of darkness over the illuminated zones of our time!

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Glass: Amador e Jr. Patrimonial Security Ltd., by Ana Raylander Mártis dos Anjos