Sergio Vega. Tropicalounge.

Looking for Eden

Sergio Vega was born in Argentina and lives and works in Florida. For many years he has pursued a long project called Paradise in the New World. It began with a seventeenth century colonial manuscript whose author claimed that the biblical Garden of Eden lay in South America.

Vega set out to find it. The search took him to the Brazilian state of Mato Grosso, a region of rainforest, swamps, mountains, archaeological sites, indigenous reserves, rural towns, shanty towns and cities.

What he found was not paradise. It was a layered Brazil, where myth, colonial history and daily life sit on top of one another. Tropicalounge, made between 2002 and 2005, is one of his answers.

A lounge in the Arsenale

In 2005 Tropicalounge premiered at the 51st Venice Biennale, in the Arsenale, in the section curated by Rosa Martínez.

Visitors entered something like a lobby or living room. Designer furniture in a harmonious colour scheme. Exotic plants in pots. Smooth bossa nova playing. Potpourri in the air. Some objects and corners invited people to sit and touch.

Around it were other parts of the project: displays on the cult of bossa nova, on the modernist cityscape of Brasília, and moments of tropical roadside surrealism, including a life size crocodile inside a phone booth.

Vega later brought Tropicalounge to the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston, in its Momentum series. There he combined brightly coloured furniture, potted palms, photographs, architectural models and sculpture with new work made for the museum.

Paradise as a style

Tropicalounge borrows the language of hotel lobbies, interior magazines and easy listening records. It is the tropics standardised for consumption. A palm in a pot, not in a forest. Bossa nova as background, not as the cultural movement it was in the 1950s and 1960s.

Bossa nova and Brasília belong to the same moment, when Brazil looked toward the future. A new capital built on a plateau to a modern plan. A new, light, intellectual music that travelled the world. From outside, it was the image of a young, optimistic, modern country.

Vega places that image beside what he saw on the roads of Mato Grosso. A promised paradise, and the people living at the edge of the promise. The work does not say who gets to sit in the tropical lounge and who does not. It lets you sit down first, then ask.

The smell of a living room

Of all the elements in Tropicalounge, potpourri is the smallest. Yet it does what furniture and music cannot: it surrounds the visitor. Without looking or listening closely, one is already breathing inside the paradise.

Potpourri is an interior smell. It is set out so a room seems clean, warm, lived in. It covers other smells. In Tropicalounge it completes the picture: a beautiful, soft place with nothing unpleasant.

So the smell becomes part of the question. What had to be left out for a place to be this pleasant? Which smells were covered? The work sits well beside Ernesto Neto's Anthropodino, by another Brazilian artist who used the smell of spices to build a space for the body. Two works, two ways of using smell to speak about a country.