The Parangolés are capes, sashes, and banners made of fabrics and plastics, sometimes bearing political or poetic phrases. When someone wears, runs, or dances with a Parangolé, they cease to be a spectator and become part of the artwork. Through samba, dance, and the street, Oiticica definitively breaks with the divisions between visual arts, music, and dance, as well as with notions of “style” and “aesthetic coherence,” arriving at his “discovery of the body.”

Visiting Morro da Mangueira and engaging with the Estação Primeira de Mangueira exposed Oiticica to the ecstasy of samba, its Dionysian rhythms, and a community organized around creative action. “From the experience with dance comes the Parangolé, a name Oiticica found on a sign marking an improvised shelter built by a homeless man that read ‘Aqui é o Parangolé.’” The colorful capes continue to affirm the importance of color and movement in the artist’s work. An incorporation occurs between the artwork and the dancing participant. Thus, the boundaries dissolve between art and body, artist and spectator, artwork and viewer. For Oiticica, such integration could lead the spectator to a new ethical attitude of participation, collectivity, and transformation.

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The Parangolé marks a decisive turning point in Hélio Oiticica’s search for a new structural understanding of color, space, and the artwork’s relation to the world. Far from being an object derived from folklore or popular idioms, the Parangolé establishes a specific experimental position, one that Oiticica considers essential for the total comprehension of his work. Its meaning is not anecdotal or descriptive; it emerges from the discovery of what the artist calls the “work’s foundation”, a condition in which the artwork reveals itself not through isolated parts but as an indivisible and perceptive totality.

At the center of this redefinition lies the idea that the Parangolé does not relate to pre-existing objects—tents, banners, capes, or ropes—by association or imitation. Instead, Oiticica identifies in these objects certain structural nuclei: modes of spatial organization that resonate with his broader investigations into “Penetrables,” “Núclei,” and “Bólides.” What interests him is not the visual resemblance but the manner of realization, the specific how through which the work comes into being. This leads him to detach the Parangolé from any purely figurative or folkloric reading and situate it instead within a developmental process of constructive experimentation.

Oiticica calls attention to “objective foundations” — fundamental spatial and perceptive structures that underlie the artwork. A glass container, for example, is not significant because of its everyday function but because of the pure spatial relation it establishes, its capacity to reveal an unknown side of the object-world. In the Parangolé, this logic appears as a continuous interplay between spectator, movement, and environment. The work is not merely seen; it is activated, becoming fully realized only when worn, carried, or moved through space. In this condition, the spectator is transformed into the participating subject, whose bodily action discloses the total phenomenon of the work.

From this emerges what Oiticica describes as a “transobjectivity”: the artwork becomes a “trans-object,” no longer an object in itself but an event unfolding in time, inseparable from spectator participation. The Parangolé thus inaugurates a new understanding of environmental art. It proposes a spatial totality that grows from experimentation rather than predetermined rules—an art that develops in contact with urban, suburban, and rural environments, and draws from the “primitive constructive nuclei” of popular structures without reducing them to folklore.

Within this environmental logic, the Parangolé reveals a convergence with familiar objects like banners and tents, not because it imitates them, but because it arrives—through movement and structural necessity—at similar solutions. This convergence is not imposed after completion; it arises “a priori,” embedded in the spatial logic of the work. As the participant moves, walks, or dances, the Parangolé becomes a dynamic, unfolding structure whose objective clarity is revealed through action.

Oiticica also situates the Parangolé within a broader context of architectural, urban, and environmental experimentation. The work contributes to what he describes as “environmental totalities”, creative spaces that must be discovered and constructed in alignment with the necessities of each work. In this sense, the Parangolé anticipates an art concerned not with objects but with environments, relations, and lived experience.

Ultimately, the Parangolé proposes a verification of art’s primordial structural essence—an essence obscured throughout the history of Western art but gradually recovered in modern experimentation. The work is neither symbolic nor mythic, though it may appear to carry such resonances. Instead, its true power lies in provoking a transformation in the spectator’s behavior, in stimulating a new relation between perception and imagination, between the body and its environment.

Oiticica concludes by suggesting that the Parangolé opens the path toward a deeper theoretical inquiry: an ontology of the work of art, one concerned with the genesis of the work “as it is.” In the Parangolé, the artwork’s existence becomes inseparable from experience—simultaneously structural, perceptive, and participatory—revealing a new horizon for the future of artistic creation.