Anna Bella Geiger, BU RO CRA CIA, 1980
Anna Bella Geiger
BU RO CRA CIA

Anna Bella Geiger (*1933, Brazil ) lives and works in Rio de Janeiro. Her influential oeuvre is characterised by the use of language and different media, ranging from painting, drawing, photography, photoengraving and montage to (performative) video. Since the 1960s she has explored the relationship between body, space and (national) territory often extending “the language of maps and cosmological charts ... to the ‘geography’ of the human body. The artist has called that confluence ‘anthropo- morphic cartography’.” (Marek Bartelik) Anna Bella Geiger is part of a generation, who experienced Brazilian dictatorship and economic hardship, which influenced her artistic language, being poetic and decisively political at the same time.

BU RO CRA CIA deals with art and the role of artists in times of military dictatorship, as the first shot that slowly focuses on the words sobre a arte suggests. Another single word, spelled by four smiling women asking spectators to repeat it, says it all:
BU RO CRA CIA.
Performers: Teresa Corção, Anna Bella Geiger, Noni Geiger, Paula Nogueira Camera: Davi Geiger

Courtesy Anna Bella Geiger

Format
video, colour, sound, 0:38 min

Issue date
1980

Tags
language, state oppression