At the entrance of the exhibition space of the current show, visitors will immediately encounter the moving images pulsing from a television monitor displaying the feature film “Bahia, for example,” directed by Rex Schindler in 1971. Over the course of the ninety-minute film, the filmmaker, born in the city of Parafuso, in the interior of Bahia, documents his various encounters with artists who, at that time, were thinking about and representing—in different forms and artistic styles—the strength and myth that the lands of Bahia hold beneath their soil and in the mystery of its sea waves.

We follow interviews with figures ranging from Mário Cravo to Dorival Caymmi, from Jorge Amado to Gal Costa, from Caetano Veloso to Carybé, at moments when Schindler positions himself as an active eyewitness to the artistic endeavors of these indispensable names not only in the culture of Bahia but, of course, of Brazil. Curiously, as we contemplate the performances of these visual, musical, performative, literary, and beyond artists, we realize that none of them use the “ruler and compass” that we affectionately borrowed from the song “Aquele Abraço” by Gilberto Gil, composed in 1969, for the title of this exhibition.

If this observation may at first seem contradictory in the context of the current exhibition, we soon understand it as a reverse statement, reflecting the ways in which Bahia’s art has always utilized moments of rupture and forms of creation divergent from those said to be canonical, carried out in other parts of the country.

In other words: the ruler and compass that Bahia gave to Gil, to the Bahian artists, and consequently to every Brazilian artist who is unavoidably influenced by this Bahian ethos—this “strange force” of art that emanates from here and spreads throughout the national territory—have nothing to do with Cartesianism or the geometric rigor that Gil’s ruler and compass might initially seem to reveal.

Thus, the current group exhibition brings together both historical and contemporary works by artists born in Bahia and in various other regions of the country. Names from often different, distant generations; artists of varied practices, encompassing painting, sculpture, video, sound, music, and beyond. These are names well-known in these parts (some of them, incidentally, appearing in Schindler’s film scenes) as well as others spread across the vast expanse of the rest of our country.

The connections we seek between these artists and their works, however, do not occur here through formal familiarity or even obvious proximities, clearly evident to the visitor traversing the fragmented paths of the exhibition space. While the walls of NONADA SSA pulse with colors sometimes vibrant and warm like the Bahian sun, they also darken in other parts of the exhibition space, enhancing the tone of contrast and friction—even strangeness—that we aim to trace here. With ruler and compass, even if these instruments are figurative, metaphorical. The Bahian ruler and compass, we know, are in the hands, eyes, minds, and (sentimentality aside) hearts of every artist who has ever created and still creates in this country.

Paulo Azeco and Victor Gorgulho