Patron Saint of Cannibals
Gabriella “Goya” Montalvo
“Cannibalism alone unites us. Socially. Economically. Philosophically.” In his Manifesto Antropófogo, Oswald de Andrade asserts the “world’s single law”: actors are forever ingesting the ideas, memories, and moments of others to create something entirely new—on both collective and individual scales. Oswald positions Brazilian culture as explicitly cannibal for its synthesis of European legacies with indigenous and African ways of being. For its cycle of ingestion and recreation, anthropophagy emerges as a mode of culture-making: it elides centuries of historical fact with mythology to yield a dynamic Brazilian—and by extension, Latin American—composite. "Patron Saint of Cannibals" captures the intermingling of Brazilian history and myth through faith, using materials from the New York Public Library photo archives to honor the cannibal.
Artist Bio
Gabriella “Goya” Montalvo is an Ecuadorian-Puerto Rican from Queens studying Ethnicity & Race at Columbia College. She is interested in the colonial residues which persist in modern urban settings. In her free time, she writes poetry, collages, and plays guitar. She is honored to be a member of the Roots family