It is interesting to compare Marmita, of 1967, to works representative of the artist’s production of the 70s, such as Identidade Ignorada (Identity Unknown), of 1974, and Para um Jovem de Brilhante Futuro (For a Young Man of Brilliant Prospects), of 1973. In the first, a photograph depicts a pair of human feet, seen from an angle that would have pleased Mantegna, or Andres Serrano, at different times, and with an identification tag attached to the thumb that would have left confused a coroner at the service of the morgue. Identity Unknown, and yet, the hint is clear: these are the artist’s feet, this is a self-portrait. This work is autobiographical, confessional. In the same interview of 1996, Zilio declares:

I had left prison very scared, and at the same time with a feeling of defeat. It was the opposite sentiment I had when I was arrested. I came there dead but triumphant. I was released alive but defeated.

Zilio provides clues for the reading of the work For a Young Man of Brilliant Prospects; he says:

I had been released from prison and thrown in what people called then the ‘Brazilian economic miracle’. Ö I didn’t leave prison to find a country in war, to a Vietnam as I had dreamt. I left to another prison, to the ‘Brazilian miracle’.

The young, promising executive in the photo is, again, the artist himself, acting, in action. Note his faceless mask - too busy to face the camera, he turns his back to us - and the position of his feet. We have seen this scene before. Note his right hand, and interpret the gesture as you wish: ‘Fuck the world, I am a young man of brilliant prospects, I am the fruit of a miracle, and I am number one’. Or: ‘EU LUTO (I FIGHT), my hand is a gun, beware of my pointing finger, for it aims at you’. And note his open briefcase on the foreground, shamelessly facing us, showing its contents: nails and geometry, order and progress. Ordem e Progresso: is this briefcase a new version of our national flag? A collection of pointing fingers? Or a coffin for a brilliant, miraculous fakir with an extraordinary capacity to resist?


Cildo Meireles

At the end of 1968, the Institutional Act #5 (the AI-5), the ultimate, ultra-sophisticated instrument of repression ever devised by the military in power, struck a hard blow on our revolutionary plans of having things back in their proper places, beginning of course with the military. A blow to our plans, but not to our revolutionary dreams. Imagination does cost us dear, but we must go on producing the currency.


Vladimir Herzog was a journalist accused of subversion and murdered in prison by the military police. The police explanation for his death was that he had hanged himself. In one piece of his series of interventions entitled Insertions in Ideological Circuits, to which the artist sometimes refers as a kind of ‘mobile graffiti’, Cildo Meireles stamped bank notes of Cruzeiros (the Brazilian currency at the time) with the words Quem matou Herzog? (Who Killed Herzog?) By making secret interrogation backfire, by promoting a forceful, promiscuous interface between the electrical shocks of torture and the continuous current of the public circuit, by making a note on a note pass from hand to hand, and thus to circulate as blood circulates in the veins, Cildo provided the currency to renegotiate a version of our recent history that everyone was finding difficult to buy, in a distribution of goods from which no one could profit.