Jasper de Beijer at Unseen Amsterdam

At the booth of Ron Mandos, Jasper de Beijer will present a selection of his new project, ‘The Brazilian Suitcase’

About ‘The Brazilian Suitcase’:

Popular stories about journeys in search of a lost civilisation tend to have a common theme. The adventurers’ expedition into the unknown ultimately leads to their demise. In his latest project The Brazilian Suitcase, Jasper de Beijer has superimposed a number of such accounts to create an artistic ‘blueprint’ of this phenomenon. Many people have been driven by ambition, curiosity and greed to seek the remains of ancient civilisations in the Amazonian jungle. Over the centuries, the process has repeated itself over and over, and these quests have left numerous traces in the once-virgin rainforest. The Brazilian Suitcase presents an imaginary tribe living in the heart of the rainforest. Its members have appropriated the paraphernalia of the European invaders, rearranging this fragmentary information in a distorted reflection of the modern world. The Brazilian Suitcase focuses on three different points in time. De Beijer has created images that show the gradual integration of the explorer’s physical and mental residue, while simultaneously exploring the imaginary setting that he has constructed for this narrative. The first part of the trilogy is inspired in part by archive material donated to De Beijer by the surviving relatives of a Dutch archaeologist. The artist has used this footage as a starting point for an entire virtual environment, which he has built with the aid of 3D software. In the second part of the series, De Beijer will recreate these virtual surroundings in his studio. He will be building a life-size environment that shows the same place recorded in the first series of photos, but 50 years later. This new scenery shows how the once-isolated environment has been transformed over time by the initial incursion. In the third part of the series, De Beijer will travel himself to the dense jungle of the Amazon forest, where he will confront the reality constructed in his studio and on his computer with his experiences on location. The combined trilogy is a visual record of three different expeditions, illustrating the cause and effect of journeys of discovery over a period of 90 years. An imaginary patch of land is gradually transformed into an abstract concept: the distorted reflection of the West’s longing for lost kingdoms and forgotten gods. The Brazilian Suitcase becomes a perpetuum mobile of confrontation and assimilation, mirroring the artist’s own artistic process.