Artistic experimentation in Rio during the 1960s culminated in the collective exhibition Apocalipopótese, in Rio’s Atero do Flamengo park. Documented in beautiful 16mm by the marginal poet Raymundo Amado, the exhibition included Lygia Pape’s Ovos (Eggs), cloth boxes from which an enclosed person breaks forth; Antonio Manuel’s Urnas quentes, wooden boxes that participants broke open to reveal slogans like “Down with the Dictatorship” and “Power to the People”; and poet Torquato Neto and critic Frederico Morais donning Oiticica’s Parangolé capes. The exhibition marked the passage from the 1960s to the 1970s in the work of the group of artists around Clark and Oiticica.
Duarte coined the event’s title by fusing the words apotheosis, hypothesis, and apocalypse, in order to describe a series of artistic actions that distanced themselves from artistic institutions to approach the streets as the main stage. Apocalipopótese shows a search for the margins as creative methodology. Duarte considered himself marginal because he had discovered that “the margin is inside the river (rio in Portuguese),” a play on words that pointed at the urban experience of Rio de Janeiro.