This art exhibition is something special – in more ways than one:

• for the first time a temporal link is being forged between pre-modern, pre-colonial times and contemporary art,
• for the first time an exhibition is covering the entire ‘solstice zone’ that runs all round the globe,
• for the first time such a major project is being organized jointly by the Goethe-Institut and the Stiftung Preußischer Kulturbesitz (Prussian Cultural Heritage Foundation), in cooperation with the latter’s Ethnological Museum,
• and for the first time an exhibition is being used as a foundation for a thematic supporting program dealing with the various aspects of the Tropics.

The idea and momentum came from the Goethe-Institut in Rio de Janeiro with its director Alfons Hug; the Ethnological Museum in Berlin, with its director Viola König and curator Peter Junge, was a strong museum partner with its unique collections from pre-colonial and colonial times; the Iberoamerican Institute with Barbara Göbel was, together with other institutions, responsible for the supporting program; and Bruno Fischli from the Goethe-Institut’s central office assembled all the components to form an impressive overall concept of events. The exhibition would not have been possible without the generous support of the Kulturstiftung des Bundes (German Federal Endowment for the Arts) and other sponsors. We would like to express our thanks to everyone involved. What has been achieved here is quite exemplary.

Following an initial, trial version in several Brazilian cities, the exhibition will now open at Berlin’s Martin-Gropius-Bau and turn the city into a tropical metropolis.
The over 5000-km-wide tropical belt between the Tropic of Capricorn and the Tropic of Cancer is a fascinating part of our Earth that follows a different rhythm and obeys different laws. This ‘zone of the solstice’ is a geographical reality and a cultural construction; it is a projection screen for European utopias and dreams. It is also a real place containing global phenomena such as environmental destruction and rampant mega-cities; it is both paradise and hell – a realm of paradoxes.

Dealing with these paradoxes is the concept and content of the exhibition. The exhibition has the potential of holding a critical discourse on the Tropics with the means of art – in a sensorial, reflective way, even to the extent of dismantling structures. It builds a bridge between works created in pre-modern times and art’s contemporary positions of today. It conveys the differences and similarities of nature, culture and ways of life in a diverse language of shapes and colors. Whereas pre-modern art grips the beholder more through its spiritual and mythical imagery, the captivating thing about contemporary art is its high degree of reflection. The exhibition organizers evidently believe that art is capable not only of formulating messages, but also of having an effect. Art is certainly not the weather-maker, but perhaps it has the barometer.

The issue at the center of the exhibition is a re-estheticization of the Tropics. The aim of this re-estheticization is "to bring the cultural weight of the tropical natural environments to bear in view of the overwhelming power of political and economic discourses." It is artistic expression which is becoming emancipated here vis-à-vis the daily poverty debates and superficial banalizations; it allows approximations that neither science nor religion can afford.

The tropical belt, in which over a third of the world’s population now lives, has clear, precise borders that separate it from the rest of the world. Within this zone, however, one experiences a different logic of what borders are. Not that they are absent; it is rather that they are not drawn with a ruler like the Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn: rather they are subject to the experience of the unpredictable, of sudden events. Precisely this logic is reflected in the art and the social life. Improvisation and flexible changes are its characteristics. Tropicalismo, an art genre and esthetic theory from the Tropics, confronts this issue. The exhibition does not cover the complexity of the Tropics encyclopedically, but in an exemplary way by focusing on characteristic phenomena, fragments of the Tropics which have nevertheless led to an astonishingly concentrated presentation.

Berlin is no arbitrary venue for such an exhibition. Nowhere has art from outside Europe – including art from the Tropics – been collected as comprehensively as in Berlin. And, in turn, nowhere is this more visible than in Berlin’s Mitte (the city’s central borough). One of the spiritual fathers of such a global venue for art and culture was Alexander von Humboldt, who impressed the distant cultures on us and proved to us the equality of cultures. His name and his message laid the foundation of the Humboldt Forum at Schlossplatz (Castle Square) in Berlin. What, in the 19th century, was a visionary idea can be realized by us today in the 21st century. In the same way as the Museum Island, as a humanistic educational landscape, presents the history of ideas in Europe, just opposite, at Schlossplatz, will be the venue of the non-European cultures, the world as a stakeholder in Berlin-Mitte.
Culturally, the Humboldt Forum is highly topical in several ways. The equality of all cultures is its program; in this way it helps people to experience and gain insights into the ‘other’ in a globalized world. It defines a network of metropolises through art and culture, and it becomes a point of departure for an exciting and knowledge-based presentation on the skill of understanding the world.
The Berlin museums are fully aware of the fact that the Royal Art Chamber designed by Leibniz, which was once located in the Schloss (castle), was the root whence they came. From the outset, the Berlin Museums were intended as universal museums of all the arts and cultures of the world and were thus geared toward the interplay between the Museum Island and the Castle.

The exhibition thus becomes a landmark on the road to the Humboldt Forum, a united intellectual unity of cultural heritage, cultural knowledge, cultural encounter, cultural experience. Not only exhibitions of classical and contemporary art belong to this concept, but also literature, music, theatre, cinema and discourses. This, too, will be realized in a suitable format at the Tropics exhibition. There will be a ‘Long Night of the Tropics’, a series of movies on the Tropics including Murnau’s famous silent film Taboo, theme days with performances, discussions and readings, series of lectures and symposia, and a "Lisbon-Maputo-Berlin" concert.
The exhibition and supporting program will reveal the Tropics to a European audience as a feeling for life, a way of viewing nature, and a conception of art in the most diverse of facets.

To return to Humboldt: it is a happy coincidence that in the fiftieth year of the magazine entitled "Humboldt," which is published by the Goethe-Institut in Spanish and Portuguese and whose current edition also deals with the Tropics, that this magazine will be available for the first time in German. This issue will provide additional and surprising insights on this exciting topic.

Humboldt Online