Abstract

This essay aims at analysing the strategies of criticism and resistance to political and cultural oppression in Brazil between 1960s and 1970s. To this purpose, it examines an emblematic form of circumvention and subversion implemented by Antonio Manuel within as well as against the artistic instituions, intended as an authoritarian dispositif for surveillance and propaganda. During the dictatorship, Brazilian art released itself from the European model and assumed peculiar characteristics, even with respect to the postcolonial situation of Latin America. In this context, for the artists the museum became a privileged though controversial place for the experimental exercise of freedom.