Bronze Revirado (Overturned Bronze)

Overview

Between 2007 and 2011, Pablo Lobato visited several church towers in eight different cities in Minas Gerais. Throughout many centuries in Brazil, slaves had to carry out the physical activities that whites thought of as degrading. Blacks and mestizos would climb the steep staircases up to the church towers in order to sound the bells. From this, it is plausible to infer that blacks participated greatly in the creation of the bell strokes, many of which are related to African rhythms.

Bronze Revirado shows festive bell ringing in a church tower in São João del Rey, Minas Gerais. Weighing approximately one ton, the bell is pushed by the bell ringers’ bodies until, with increasing speed, it turns on its axis for a few minutes. The video brings us closer to actions that are usually heard but not seen, revealing a performance in contrast to its religious connotations: the bell ringers’ violent, abrupt, repetitive and physically dangerous efforts seem almost like a pagan ritual carried out in a trance.