[ii], artist and researcher
Translated by Denise Pierrotti
The images that I am going to talk about have kept me busy for some years. Most of them emerged during the experience of one performance that turned into two, or even more, I don’t know yet – and is it possible to know what a is going to be a performance for a performer?
It has been a long time since we talked to each other, but I´m dying to tell you that I´ve decided to take the risk of putting together some memories. I’m afraid of having penetrated, noisily, parts of me that were in an enjoyable sleep, but don’t worry, because if I´ve woken up my monsters, I’ll play with them again.
A decade is a period of time that both approximates and keeps at a distance the proposals of “artistic-performatic operations”[iii] from A Coisa em Si (The Thing Itself) – that was performed between 1997 and 2002 – and Plus Ultra – begun in 2007 with no set date to finish – the events of which are, respectively, the ingestion of a soup (made of stones) and rowing along (urban) rivers.
Before partially presenting the details of the proposals (structural and imagetic), I call your attention to the structure of its relations, by means of this obvious game of similarities:
- The “water” element – amorphous, fluid, sliding and undetermined – is a determining factor in the constitution of the events before, during and after the performances;
- The crossing of space-time heightens the continuous recreation of landscapes and inscribes the desire to live to the immeasurability of the world: the performances are corporeal experiences given in departures and arrivals, travelling and drifting around Brazil;
- The artist-body acquires territories and takes them in while a field of action: a machine unfolding events in differentiated orders of environmental-corporal relationships;
- As strategies of performance records, cartographic operations are carried out, conducted by the differences of the body’s “places” in its territorial experience. Internal, visceral maps prevail in Coisa em Si; in Plus Ultra they are superficial, epithelial. To the cartography we can add the video recording that together, attempt to take them to the physical-fixed spaces of the plastic arts the territorial swaying lived. The records are also performances – others – and not just video-performances.
I insist that you don´t worry. I spent a long time away, I know, things have changed places, I know, but now I´ve got the agility to move, for example: sitting on the arrow, I understand the distance travelled, but here, where the outside and the inside meet, time is different: I feel the hot liquid taking over my body and furthermore I see myself on a flat and incarnate face.
1. A Coisa em Si (1997 – 2002)
The ingestion of a “stone soup” is the event of the performance, which always takes place in a facility named Barco (Boat), where the repetition of the meal ritual (sitting down at a table, serving yourself, using cutlery) is different to others that, in turn, relocate several objects in the environment.[iv]
The “stone soup” is the result of a “mixture” of stones belonging to the place where the performance takes place and stones collected from the sites of previous presentations[v]. Its cooking time is about half an hour (before the presentation), being exposed in the facility in the big cauldron for its preparation.
Conceived as a ritualistic locus, Barco deals with the mediation of the audience, remaining as a work on exhibition, and with the alterations occurring after the presentation. A multimedia piece of work, distinctly exploring the hypnotic potential of the audio-visual when repeating, in a continuous way, the same single content. The audio is reading, for an hour, the following text written by myself:
“Taking something from one place to another and putting it in a place. The place where this thing will be kept is no longer the place – it is the thing. The metamorphosis of space into material? Is the place pure any longer? Things are not pure. Does the place depend on the gesture that points it out to exist, on the line that delimitates it, on anything that fills it? Do things, in turn, need the place that shelters them, which makes it necessary, which identifies it among so many other things? Is there a space to be filled? There is a huge space. And things are occupations of spaces…And gestures locate-dislocate- relocate things in space. In this place, this thing, in this gesture? Places chase things and gestures, things chase gestures and places; gestures chase places and things… This and that sometimes consummate each other and other times cancel each other out. There is a record of the transposition of information: a warehouse – a place without questions and answers; occupied by the uncertain, by handling and overcomings. And is the thing in a place that is not fulfilled? It is possible that a place remains… Another thing-place. A meeting is given and I repeat, repeat, repeat – I chase: another gesture that turns into a thing, turns into a place, turns into a meeting, I inform: by symbiosis, by developments. I don’t do anything, things are done, they are in the world – it is reduplication.”
The spinning of the reading transforms the gesture of the performance into an imagetic reproduction of simple actions, producing in the audience an uncomfortable expectation of something: estrangement in face of the apparent repetition of the same, which I learned from the different looks I got when I was eating the soup. I started to call the audience “mobile landscape” because I didn’t know where I would cross - enigmatic laughter in Fortaleza, political discussions in Belém, spectacularization in São Paulo and others reactions in different places. I made the last soup for some friends, locked in a small cold house in Paraná. They didn’t know it was the last one. All of them thought that I was very strange, maybe because I had asked them to talk and to forget I was there, that something was happening.
The scratches caused by the last infection haven´t totally healed. But the muscles are more evident. One day I was surprised before a huge, sublime, jacaranda framed mirror – there were veins popping out of my right arm. I almost kissed what I saw, but I preferred to throw a lead bucket at the reflection and feel what is muscle power.
2. Plus Ultra (2007)[vi]
Being in the middle of damp requires balance and strength – this is the experience of the river. Plus Ultra proposes a geo-virtual experience, conducted by my image rowing along different rivers. The idea is to provide different overlapping landscapes along the constant flow of rowing down rivers, connecting imagery of physically distant territories, juxtaposing landscapes of other rivers, other strokes, the most recent stroke. Flowing water, clouds, vegetation, people, animals, urban constructions, everything that comes before a boat that´s passing by. This is a cumulative operation: a nearby water-city overlapping this and so on ad infinitum.
From what I achieve while rowing, a camera captures what I don’t know – the back of my head: a braided hairline, bulging back muscles; arms opening and closing, wielding the oars. The technical exercise is a repetition of the same, a crystallized image in minimal silence, if this image weren´t to its opposite – the changing landscape.
Five years after ingesting the last soup, I got into a narrow box to slide through the murky waters. A way of escaping the interior invisibility, exposed on the outside – body turned over, from the entrails to the members. I was surprised when I realized what had happened over the years exposed to a variety of art audiences – I was polluted with the doubt of others on the appropriateness of action and artist-body, what I was doing there, just having a non-existent soup? And I did this now: what I do there, transfigured as an athlete, crossing rivers? I was soup and I am a bridge – and the inverse. The muscle fatigue reminds me of a large and sometimes heavy stomach after tense presentations. I don’t know how long my body will bear tearing up landscapes and I have the intuition that this is the reason for being here. Yes, that’s the question – for how much longer? – do I take on this brief report. Exercising the intention of the memos I came to avoid the imminent disappearance of what was and is lived. For here, in the field of the arts, of these arts of the body, the time lived is both revealed and hidden in the magical precariousness that is so evident in the short-space-time of a performance.
I thought I was a fool for not listening to the master warning me of my fragility and that I needed to protect my body. Is it really necessary to protect your body? But how? I preferred to take the risk, or I took the risk without realizing it? I thought I had died and that I wouldn’t feel any more landscapes around me. Then, in my blindness, I began to dance and to realize that others were dancing with me. There is nothing as beautiful as skin landscapes of bodies in the dark.
[i] This text was published in the Annals of the V Congresso Brasileiro de Pesquisa e Pós – Graduação em Artes Cênicas – ABRACE, 2008 (GT Territorios e Fronteiras) (V Brazilian Congress of Research and Post Graduation in Scenic Arts). In October 2008, I read this text as a participant in a round table at the XII Encontro Nacional dos Estudantes de Arte in Belém. (Universidade Federal do Pará) (XII National Meeting of Art Students).
[ii]Plastic artist, PhD in Communication and Semiotics at PUC – SP. Professor of the Design Department at the Federal University of Pernambuco.
[iii] This nomination derives from, in my production in plastic arts, the performances leading to a creative input generating a series of works in different languages ( photography, sketches, objects, paintings, facilities, vídeos, artists´ books, etc.).
[iv] The activities take place with no pre-set sequence and are limited to: sitting down at the table; putting your hands on the table and looking at the objects; taking the lid off the cauldron; standing up and going over to the “stove” (TV shows an image of a stone in flames inside a birdcage, swinging to and fro; a cauldron on top of the TV full of the soup); putting the cauldron lid on the table; putting a ladle in the cauldron; filling the dish on the table with soup; ingesting the soup; taking the dish and pouring the rest of the soup into the “filter” (a quails´ cage with a sound system. On top of this is a glass aquarium where the rest of the soup is poured); wrapping the dish in sheets of carbon paper; putting the dish wrapped in carbon paper in the filter; taking the stone out of the cauldron and putting it on the table.
[v]The stones are common pebbles, found on riverbanks. The mixtures of soups were: João Pessoa-Recife; Recife-Rio de Janeiro; Rio de Janeiro-Belém do Pará; Belém do Pará- Fortaleza; Fortaleza – São Paulo; São Paulo-Recife; Recife-Fortaleza; Fortaleza-Porto Alegre; Porto Alegre-Americana; Americana-Faxinal do Céu.
[vi]Between 2007 and 2009 Plus Ultra was performed in Rio Capibaribe (Recife, 2007); Baía de Vitória (Vitória, ES, 2008 – at the VII Salão Bienal do Mar prize-giving ceremony); Baía do Guajá (Belém, PA, 2009 – Premio SIM de Artes Visuais-2008 prize giving ceremony); and, throughout the first semester of 2009, as part of the of the award-winning project from the program “Bolsa de Incentivo a Produção Artística- FUNARTE- Minc- Artes Visuais: Southeast region, 2008”, at five locations/waters , in the five regions of the country, those being: Rio Negro (Manaus, AM), Lago Paranoá (Brasília-DF), Rio (Lago) Guaíba (Porto Alegre, RS), Lagoa Rodrigo de Freitas (Rio de Janeiro, RJ), Baía de Todos os Santos (Salvador, SP).
