RAR – A RARe vision
From sugar to organic tomatoes, salads to tourism, property, packaging, chocolate…the business journey RAR has taken for almost half a century is now being documented in the work of ten Portuguese artists.
—
717,000,000 kg. € 216,000,000. 33,099,000 m³. 13,287,286 Kw. 87,360,000 mins. With these numbers you read the images captured at production plants run by RAR (Refinarias de Açúcar Reunidas). They are images of details – chocolate drops, packets of sugar stacked up – which, when enlarged and repeated, take you into a world of minutiae, precision, rigour. This is the vision of José Maçãs de Carvalho, the first artist who in 1999 accepted the challenge of carrying through a project which every year would present, in the Annual Reports and Accounts, a new perspective on RAR, a holding company comprising companies from sectors as varied as food production, packaging, property, services and tourism.
Today, RAR seen by…, the name of the project commissioned by Miguel Von Hafe Pérez, is ten years old and is out there, expressing a RAR which describes itself as belonging to the present, not the past. A RAR “comfortable with contemporaneity”, says Vergílio Folhadela, with the group for 35 years, 25 of those in management, focused on the project which expresses the journey the group has taken over almost half a century.
RAR seen by… is not merely a way of illustrating the Annual Reports and Accounts; it now represents a collection of autonomous works by key artists in the contemporary Portuguese world (see box). The works – photography, painting, sculpture, drawing, video – are exhibited in several companies, provoking, asking questions, making employees aware of details they had never noticed before.
[DDET READ MORE]
The discovery of this other way of seeing becomes clear on the first contact with the invited artist who questions, points, draws, passes their fingers over surfaces to test their texture. The idea, argues Vergílio Folhadela, “is to open ourselves to the outside world by presenting not what we believe we are, but what the other, the artist, thinks we are”. And, emphasizes the engineer, “as soon as we have chosen an artist – three are suggested by Miguel Von Hafe Pérez – we don’t impose restrictions, we subject ourselves to the critical eye that our reality may inspire”. The result? “After some initial suspicion on both sides, the result is surprising. Especially since there are two distinct phases to the project. The first related to the work of the artists themselves and a second to do with the graphic designer – Atelier Nunes & Pã – in transforming the works into the Annual Reports and Accounts”, observes Vergílio Folhadela. He picks up the 2001 report, a deep orange – the work of Nuno Cera which reveals fragments of industrial materials – and remembers the stupefaction of those who received it, used to a discrete blue or beige, with a smooth cover, no surprises, colourless pages and no story other than the numbers.
Chocolates and aerosols
Vergílio Folhadela opens some more reports to show the details, revealing RAR’s sensitivity to other worlds, and remembers that they are the expression of another change which happened ten years ago- the takeover of João Nuno Macedo Silva, who succeeded his father as President of the group. A change backed up by numbers, starting with the fivefold increase in the RAR universe– spreading to Europe – and by the 200 million euro rise in sales to 1,000 million euros per year, making it part of a rare group of Portuguese industrially-based companies with sales on this scale.
Sugar – a product that many continue to associate with RAR – and its packet with the green elephant on now only accounts for 10 per cent of income; RAR diversified to face the challenges of development. In the 1970s RAR had already taken over Imperial, the neighbouring chocolate factory, and started notching up successes: “Do you remember bom-bokas?” Vergílio Folhadela describes the soft filled chocolate which in 1978 innovated and convinced consumers with a television advert of Father Christmas, desperately running to the shop to buy this children’s delight. But that’s not all. There was Regina chocolate and the sweets with bits of almond in, wrapped in red and gold foil – Pintarolas.
The world of chocolate has also nourished RAR seen by… Carla Filipe, for example, made a record with 20 minutes of the sounds of chocolate passing from one machine to another; sounds from the old and new Imperial factory, also recreated in writing and drawing, similar to the language of underground comics, from children’s schoolbooks or adolescents’ diaries. Along with a list of famous economists mixed with recipes for fried sardines and words like “invisible hand”, “feudalism”, “gentlemen’s agreement”, “free market”, or “laissez-faire”, you can read “little stories of a fantasy world” in the Annual Report of 2007. This is how Vergílio Folhadela describes the artist’s work.
In the 1970s, RAR went into packaging, and is now the market leader in the Iberian Peninsula for the production of industrial packaging and one of the largest suppliers of aerosol cans. One area explored by artist João Pedro Vale in the 2004 Report and Accounts: aircraft, buildings, a carousel, boats, a crane, factories and dunes built from plastic, cardboard, tins of olive oil and shoe polish. A world where a shocking pink aeroplane lands on a runway of chocolate bars; where beaches are made from sugar, palm trees from coloured packets and stones from sweets.
The company ColepCCL SA not only makes packaging, emphasizes Vergílio Folhadela. “Their skincare products, deodorant, hairspray or aftersun were all probably made in our factory. Or their anaesthetic spray and artificial saliva …” Which is hardly surprising since ColepCCL is the European leader in the manufacture of aerosol products for sectors such as personal hygiene and the home, cosmetics and over-the-counter parapharmaceuticals, with nine industrial sites in Portugal, Spain, Germany, Poland and the United Kingdom.
Beyond borders
Following the logical of diversity, the RAR group also went into the coffee business – creating the brand/concept Buondi – into wine and into chestnut processing, and set up RAR Ambiente SA, with an interest in sectors such as water and the collection, treatment and disposal of solid wastes. In the last decade, their biggest investment has been in internationalization, with the acquisition of a majority stake in Wight Salads Group, a market leader in the production of tomatoes for consumption with a 15% market share in the UK and 55% of the market in organic tomatoes, the largest organic producer in Europe. Another major investment is Vitacress Salads Ltd., one of the main European producers, packagers and distributors of baby-leaf salads, pre-washed and ready to eat. Then there is their investment in the tourist sector, with the acquisition of Geotur and a partnership with Star, from the Sonae group.
With links to the Serralves Foundation, the Casa da Música and the Escola de Artes of the Universidade Católica do Porto, RAR has made a point of engaging with culture, but also with activities of a social and civic nature. The idea, explains Vergílio Folhadela, is never to lose sight of the community, of people. This is an idea very much present in the images and sounds captured by Filipa César, winner of the 2009 BES Photo Prize and artist behind the Reports and Accounts for 2003. In response to the automated nature of most of the processes filmed, the artist responds with people, showing that, however removed they may be from the means of production, people continue to be essential to any economic enterprise.
[/DDET]
by Ana Serpa
—
