A taste of Rio in central London

By Bruno Garcez
BBC Brazil

Brazil's influential Tropicalia movement is the subject of a major three-month festival at the Barbican Arts Centre in London.

The Tropicalia festival runs at the Barbican until 22 May

A psychedelic band with a worldwide cult following, a government minister with a musical past and an arts exhibition that invites bare-footed punters to touch the works on display.

These apparent random elements are part of Brazil's Tropicalia, one of South America's most creative and influential artistic movements.

The movement emerged in the late 60s, a period in which young Brazilian artists were eager to challenge the country's military rulers and combine their own native influences with new ones from the US and Europe.

"Tropicalia was about updating Brazilian culture to the spirit of the times," says singer-songwriter Gilberto Gil, now Brazil's Culture Minister.

"In the 60s there was a revolutionary process going on. Young people were creating new approaches to life, proposing new trends. Tropicalia was the equivalent in Brazil."

Although Gil and his musical partner Caetano Veloso are normally credited for having invented Tropicalia, its emergence can also be attributed to the artist Hélio Oiticica, whose works are now being shown at the Barbican.

Installation

Created in 1967, Tropicalia reflects Oiticica's connection with the shanty towns of Rio by reproducing a "favela" and inviting the visitor to walk through its small, colourful accommodations.

The event includes installations by the artist Hélio Oiticica

Another installation instructs the audience to take off their footwear and follow a shanty town scenario while stepping on pebbles, sand and wet soil.

In Gil's view, London is an ideal city to host a Tropicalia festival. Both he and Veloso came to the capital as refugees in 1969 following their arrests by Brazil's military regime.

"London sheltered us, and we found many points in common with what we were doing back in Brazil.

"It was the land of the Beatles and the Stones, of Mary Quant and the mini-skirt. It's only natural that it now acknowledges itself as a crucial city for the tropicalists."

During his time in the capital Gil would also mingle with local musicians and find new influences for his later works.

"I used to hang around with Jim Capaldi from Traffic, David Gilmour from Pink Floyd and Alan Watts, who later joined Yes. I saw Miles Davis perform and watched John Lennon and Yoko Ono.

"It was in London that I played electric guitar for the first time. When I went back to Brazil, I was a different musician."

Psychedelia

But if London can be hailed as the Tropicalia capital of Europe, the works of the tropicalists have travelled way beyond its boundaries.

Gilberto Gil is not performing but is expected to attend

"There have been events in New York and Chicago, and I have received PhD works made by students in Belgium and Germany," says Gil.

One of the highlights of the Barbican festival, which runs until 22 May, is a concert by Os Mutantes, a band from Sao Paulo often dubbed the "Brazilian Beatles".

The band, who are reforming specially for the event, famously combined 60s psychedelia with traditional elements of Brazilian music and can count David Byrne of Talking Heads as one of their biggest fans.

Often considered as transgressors in the 60s, some of the artists that rose to fame with Tropicalia are now among the most popular in Brazil.

But Gil says being a best-selling artist and a government minister is not in contradiction with the ideals of the movement.

"I am many things: a composer, a musician and a minister. I see no complication in that. Above all, I am still a tropicalist."