Tropical Hangover / Ressaca Tropical

This book is in Portuguese. Published by our favorite Brazilian publishers and badass women, UBU.

In a notebook found by the artist in the trash, an anonymous narrator recounts loves, conflicts with work and intimate reflections of his daily life during the late 1970s in Recife. Jonathas de Andrade edited excerpts from this diary with photographs of Alcir Lacerda, of the Joaquim Nabuco Foundation and of his authorship, as well as homemade photos of personal collections. The images depict the developmentalism that took place in Recife in the 1960s: different angles of the city in the 50s and 70s, semi-abandoned modernist buildings recorded between 2008 and 2009, and everyday scenes of the beach, where tropicality and desire stand out.

When presented together, and without a hierarchy between past and present, the records surpass their purely documentary character to compose a fictitious archive of the city, evoking an indefinite time. Beyond the sexual content, produced mainly by the journal’s narrative, one of the central objectives of Tropical Hangover is to discuss the modernist legacy in Latin America, opposing ruin, desire and nature to construction, modernism and progress.

The homonymous installation that gave rise to the book, assembled in 2009 at the Galeria Vermelho in São Paulo, also participated in the 7th Mercosur Biennial (2009), the 12th Istanbul Biennial (2011) and the 2nd Triennial of the New Museum – the Ungovernables ), and was acquired as part of the permanent collection of Tate Collection in London.   This book was contemplated by the edictal Funcultura of the Government of the State of Pernambuco in the Photography line.