Victor Bandeira
In the 1960s and ‘70s he was a special kind of dealer: he spent long periods with distant peoples in search of what was once called “primitive” art, and the objects he brought back entered the collections of the National Ethnological Museum. Now, at 78, he wants to go where he has never been.
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The place he welcomes us is one he always likes to go back to, because returning is not always the same. Sometimes it should be avoided at all costs. As for going “home”, that’s a pleasure he can recommend. Like cod and chips. That’s the feeling he gets when he returns to the seafront apartment in Costa da Caparica, or the little house in the middle of the Alentejo, an old abode for workers on the nearby estate.
In the garden, there is only the sound of music coming from open windows, and the tinkling of a bamboo wind-chime blown in the warm breeze. Within the piano of Keith Jarrett becomes sharper in the cool shade dotted about with objects: some Indian embroidery, the curtain from Laos, drawings from Bali and a rug that belonged his parents, a cockerel rescued from the scrap yard and two table footballers, half rusted but still retaining their composure.
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“I could live there”
Everything began by accident. “And possibly my life as well.” Around 25 years of age, after studying at the National Society for Fine Arts, he opened an antiques shop with two others, and soon realised that he really liked artefacts known then as “primitive art”, as well as popular art and archaeology. This interest led him to specialized books and, as there was no-one else in Portugal, to establish contacts abroad.
Then he split from his partners, bought a jeep and started on a journey which fulfilled every part of his dreams all at once. “Travelling in itself doesn’t interest me much. What I wanted was a different horizon, to be elsewhere, with other people. To live other lives.” And to seek out those artefacts from their source, far from the auction rooms and antique shops of Europe. I had learned from these, to be sure, but now I wanted to live it all. One of the secrets of being an art dealer is having the ability to distinguish a valuable object from something that is common and uninteresting. Wherein does that difference lie? “I can’t define it, no-one knows.” He only knows the emotion he experiences when he looks at genuine art. “There’s a … I was going to say sincerity. There’s a truth. Not even the artist can repeat it, even if they try. What they do next will always be a copy.”
He set off with Françoise, his second wife, and a friend, also French, for Angola, via North Africa. There were adventures at border crossings, war zones and diplomatic entanglements. In Africa, for the first time he had the feeling that he might stay there and live a different life. They reached their destination in December 1961, at the beginning over Portugal’s colonial war; they were in Guinea “when Galvão hijacked the cruise ship Santa Maria”.
The collection of objects he amassed on his trip, especially sculptures, was exhibited at the inauguration of the Museum at the Escola Superior de Belas Artes in Porto. They were brought from Senegal, from ex-Portuguese Guinea, Ivory Coast and Mali, where he spent much time with the Dogon, “who put their dead in holes way up in a cliff-face. They have to climb ladders suspended by ropes”. He obtained artefacts in exchange for others he brought from Europe, after complicated negotiations with local chiefs. Jorge Dias, who directed the Centre for Ethnological Studies and with his team created the National Museum of Ethnology in 1965, visited the exhibition. It was the start of a long and productive collaboration. Victor Bandeira’s next trip, to the Amazon, was suggested by the anthropologist and would last a year.
Selling collections to the museum also gave him the opportunity to deliver artefacts without losing contact with them, as well as the fun of working with a team: Jorge Dias, Margot Dias, Ernesto Veiga de Oliveira, Fernando Galhano and Benjamim Enes Pereira. “All older than me, it was pleasure being with them. They were my best friends at that time.”
Then he went to the River Muni, the Bijagós archipelago in Guinea, and again to Angola. On these occasions he went without Françoise, who returned from Brazil pregnant. In Angola he hitched rides with Portuguese soldiers who “drove at crazy speeds” in unimogs. He was at their nocturnal dances around the fire accompanied by the accordion, “it was like being in Minho province.” In fact, many times they didn’t even know where they were. The maps they had didn’t show everything, and he would point out villages they’d never even heard of. “They were always in tatters because of playing football.”
So much new world
Next he went to Indonesia twice in a year, to Java, Bali, Sumatra, Kalimantan, New Guinea and Timor. He stopped off in various places, but when he got to India “it was terrible, we couldn’t get out of the plane as there were no diplomatic relations with Portugal.”
“Indonesia was mad, I could live there. Not just anywhere; on the Nias islands, for example, off Sumatra, I wouldn’t survive an hour. But Bali… Bali was the perfect place. Everything was so beautiful, the landscapes, the people, artistic, simple men and women, always elegant. Even their sarongs were beautiful. There were flowers and water rituals, memories, they were joyful not sacrificial rituals. And the parties, some of them lasted all night. They play, sing and dance, and the guys aren’t professional musicians, they’re just farmers and fishermen.”
The first time the places he went never disappointed him. “The fact that they were fascinating makes returning painful, because in our absence they change. Twenty years later a place is no longer there. The beautiful building is surrounded by apartment blocks, there are traffic jams…”
Goa, for example. He lived there with Lela, his wife of many years. That was in 1978 and 1979, in the village “there was just us and the fishermen.” Once they drove there overland on the old Silk Road: Greece, Turkey, Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan. They took a dog from France and bought two from Lhasa on the way. That trip “we visited spectacular places; impossible today.” They returned to Goa in 2000 and the number of hotels and the congestion disturbed all the reunions. What do you do? Set off in search of somewhere else that still retains the meaning it had back then? “No. What I want to do is try and forget the place I remember and try to enjoy it for what it is today. The initial shock is sometimes hard, but things have to change. I have also changed.”
The persistence of memory
He soon returns to a serene nostalgia. “But it’s still sad.” He also returned to Guinea, many years later, “I always had that dream.” But in the end “it’s such a sad, abandoned place.” In Bali, to which he returned in 2001, “they walk around in baseball caps; they only dress well for religious ceremonies. At the hotel they gave us an invitation to a cremation which included a cold drink. A cremation is something important. When a high-cast person is cremated they are believed to go directly to paradise. Other people wait years to be cremated at the same ceremony to hitch a ride. Sometimes by the time they are cremated there’s not much left of them. And now they do that for tourists. It’s gross, it’s pitiful, it’s pornographic.” And in the Amazon? “The Indians are put in the position of beggars. The man who needed for nothing no longer exists- in his place is someone whose life is full of problems.”
That’s why I prefer to concentrate now on places where I’ve never been. “I’d very much like to go to Mexico (if he’d been there, I’m not sure he’d want to go back), to see the archaeology, which must be unique, but not just that. I’d like to go to Egypt; it was the first trip I ever thought of and I never managed to go, for various trivial reasons. I’d like to go to Cambodia. And, nearer home, to some Eastern European countries, where they must have some amazing things.”
About actual journeys, he remembers comical episodes, like one trip in Mato Grosso, Brazil: the owner of a light aircraft picked up a map and made a few measurements on it with a ruler to work out what to charge. “I was weighed down with things to trade with the Indians, so I had to sit on top of my luggage. The control panel had no instruments, and he navigated by the smoke coming from the jungle.” But he also remembers the impact of certain transitions. His arrival at certain airports – “you open the door of the plane and there’s a smell. It’s another world.”
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by Fernanda Pratas
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