Joaquim José da Silva Xavier, or Tiradentes, is another one of our national heroes. He was a dentist, hence the nickname, and the leader of the Inconfid’ncia Mineira, a movement of independence against Portuguese rule, held in 1789 in the state of Minas Gerais. The uprising was violently repressed, and its members were hanged. Tiradentes’ body was dismembered and its parts were scattered in the streets of Vila Rica (now Ouro Preto) and left there to rot, as a warning to people that rebellious dentists should keep their mouths shut.


In April of 1970, the military regime symbolically transferred the capital from Brasilia to Ouro Preto, appropriating the figure of the martyr and the movement’s ideals in a clearly populist manoeuvre of hypocrisy and misrepresentation. The inauguration of the Pal?cio das Artes in Belo Horizonte was part of the official celebrations. Cildo Meireles’ contribution to the museum’s opening exhibition was the work Tiradentes: Totem-Monumento ao Preso Pol‘tico (Tiradentes: Totem-Monument to the Political Prisoner). Wooden stake, white cloth, clinical thermometer, ten live hens, petrol, fire: that’s how the work is materially constituted and described. The function of petrol and fire can be easily guessed, and with it the destiny of the ten hens. But one might ask: what is the purpose of the clinical thermometer? What role does this healer’s device play, dislocated as it is, in this macabre instrument of sacrifice?


Dislocation is, precisely, what this work is about. The raw materials of this work are not wood, cloth, these things. Nor are the - oh, perverse dislocation! - ‘fried chickens’. The raw materials here are life and death. The hens become dirt, earth, the dislocation they perform is that of dust to dust, ashes to ashes, they are here for the sake of the inhuman. The thermometer explodes, no doubt, given the heat, the fever of the circumstances. But Mercury is dislocation with wings on his feet. If immolation is hell, the god dislocates himself, to heal. Mercury is the consolation of every prisoner, political, of war, for Mercury, by nature, is free. In a recent interview, Cildo declared: ‘Of course I would never repeat a work like Tiradentes Ö I can still hear those poor hens in my emotional memory. But in 1970 I felt it had to be done’. Memories are hot when they burn, but, like the wind, Mercury is always cool.


Later in 1979, Cildo Meireles again would provoke the gods with the installation O Serm?o da Montanha: Fiat Lux (The Sermon on the Mount: Let There Be Light). The material this time? Imminent danger of explosion. 126,000 ‘Fiat Lux’ matchboxes; eight mirrors; black sandpaper covering the gallery floor; eight beatitudes from the Sermon on the Mount; actors. Duration: 24 hours. The actors’ job was to pretend to act as security guards, and they were dressed to kill. The Candido Mendes Gallery, where the event took place, is in Ipanema, some hundred yards from the beach, where part of the audience had probably spent the morning exposing their bodies to the sun. In Brazil we say ‘hmmm, voc’ est? t?o queimado!’, which, despite the literal meaning, ‘hmmm, you really got burned’, stands for a compliment on the subject’s handsome, healthy-looking suntan. The fact is that, regardless of how one had spent the morning that day, the audience that came to hear the sermon that evening was hot.