Mario D’Souza

This Project was Terminated by IFA and the Project Coordinator is ineligible to apply to IFA in the future.

This Foundation Project implemented by IFA titled Entry-Points, is a research project that will use select objects from the Museum of Christian Art (MoCA), Goa in order to trace larger global histories of iconographic and material affinities that were a consequence of the cross-cultural transmission of ideas and objects between Europe, Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral. This is a collaboration with the MoCA, Goa. Set up in 1994 in partnership with the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portugal and the Indian National Trust for Art and Cultural Heritage (INTACH), New Delhi, the museum houses an exceptional collection of objects - sculptures, paintings, jewellery, embroidery – that cover a variety of genres and styles that date back to the 16th century. This is now widely recognised as Indo-Portuguese art, which is a combination of Christian, Hindu and Islamicate art forms. Mario D’Souza is the Principal Investigator for this project.

Entry-Points is an extension of the research that Mario has been involved with earlier on the subjects of the Maritime Silk Roads and the Indian Ocean World. As a creative practitioner based in Goa, he has been working with a range of contemporary artists, film-makers and writers, to think through diverse historical material including architecture, caste and culture through a new lens. For this particular project which deals with the ways in which cultural, material and intellectual knowledge has travelled between Europe, Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral, Mario has identified three entry-points or what he calls ‘transmissions.’ They are Matteo Ricci’s (1552-1610) Kunyu Wanguo Quantu or the Universal Map of the World, the Codex Casanatense, the 16th century illustrations made in Goa and the Italian Jesuit painter Giovanni Niccolo’s seminary in Japan that sent forth its students and artworks to different parts of Asia.

The first entry-point is Ricci’s map. Ricci was a Jesuit missionary who sailed to Goa in 1578 and then to China in 1582 where he lived till his death. He is credited for introducing Christianity to East-Asia and also drawing one of the first maps that provides an alternate view of the world which places Asia as the political and cultural centre of the universe. Split in two hemispheres, East and West, the map contains information on climate, landforms, customs and histories from different parts of the world.

The second entry-point for Mario is the Codex Casanatense, a 16th century Indo-Portuguese collection of 76 captioned watercolours. Painted by an Indian artist and annotated in Portuguese, the Codex is a remarkable work of collaboration that portrays the people of a geographical region extending from Africa, Asia and the Indian Ocean littoral. From the Cape of Good Hope all the way to China, including the two areas of interest to the Portuguese in India, Gujarat (Daman and Diu since the 1530s) and Goa (since 1510). The Codex is a unique historical record of a time when Europe first confronted Asia, an encounter that would transform the world and the pictorial language of European painting and sculpture forever.

The third entry-point is an art seminary, Seminario dos pintores, the largest school of Western painting that was founded by an Italian Jesuit painter, Giovanni Niccolo, in Nagasaki, Japan in 1590. His students produced paintings that were both religious and secular, which depicted their knowledge of Western painting techniques. With the persecution of Christians in Japan, Niccolo fled to Macau in 1614, while some of his students fled to China to assist Ricci. Artworks from his school however spread all over Japan, Macau and Manila, which grew into an important Catholic centre in East- Asia. Western missionaries frequently moved between Macau, Manila and Goa where significant commercial trade also took place.

These three then will form the points of departure for Mario’s research which aims to achieve the following:  to stage  the historical transmission of Christian art both through tangible materials like objects, etc and personal accounts like oral histories, travellers’ texts and letters; to plot new frameworks of interpretation where museum collections and institutional knowledge is combined with contemporary artistic work in order to produce new meanings and readings, both of the past and the present; and to move beyond region specific understandings to more expansive fields of cultural production, that will examine the conditions that have enabled a cross-pollination of cultures and an assimilation of ideas.

His research will also be supplemented by contributions from creative practitioners, scholars and academics both from India and Asia, who will be invited to participate in the public events that he will organise. The events he has planned are: a workshop, where he will invite creative practitioners from Goa/India to study and respond to the museum’s collection and the history of Christian art in the region; and a three-part seminar that will explore the Universal Map of the World, the Codex Casanatense and the missions and assimilations in Manila, Macau, Goa and Nagasaki. The seminar will include papers and essays from scholars who are working at the intersection of geo-politics, religion, postcolonialism and art history particularly in South, South-East Asia and East Asia.

The outcomes will be an e-book/catalogue that will be a compilation of all the material that has been staged and created, together with essays and texts that look at Christian art from an Asian perspective. This will be a significant addition to an important field of study today that attempts to challenge the Eurocentric view of the world. The deliverables to IFA with the final report will be the e-book and all audio and video material relating to the public events. Given Mario’s past experience on the Maritime Silk Road and Indian Ocean projects and his larger circle of contacts in the visual art world in Asia, he is best equipped to be the Principal Investigator in this project that IFA is implementing.

IFA will ensure that the implementation of this project happens in a timely manner and funds expended are accounted for. IFA will also review the progress of the project at midterm and document it through an Implementation Memorandum. After the project is finished and all deliverables are submitted, IFA will put together a Final Evaluation to share with Trustees.

This project is made possible with part-support from Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan New Delhi and Parijat Foundation.