Instigated by the tourism theme of Plan your visit, Rodrigo Marti’s Macunaima: The year of the snake shifted attention from migration as a short-term experience of hospitality to the experience of immigration as cohabitation. The project took the spirit of “cultural cannibalism,” a Brazilian concept of identity strengthening through “eating” the other as a way to consider how we cohabitate in North America today.
Marti explored this through a narrative driven sculptural installation in the Schindler House and a final pool party for DREAM Act immigration reform activists at the MAK Center’s Fitzpatrick-Leland House. Each effort generated content for an adaptation of the popular Brazilian cinema novo film Macunaima (1969)—itself an updating and reinterpretation of the early modern book by the same name—that climaxes in a scene wherein the protagonist enters and defeats the megalomaniacal villain over an acid and blood filled pool.