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An exhibition by Fernando Mota for Galeria Portas Vilaseca

With Ayrson Heráclito, Berna Reale, Bianca Turner, Jorge Soledar, Lenora de Barros,

Lyz Parayzo, Maria Noujaim, Mano Penalva and Mauricio Ianês

Rio de Janeiro, February 13th to March 14th, 2020

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The following text is a support material, it does not serve as an expographic leaflet; the works and the exhibition speak for themselves. Read only for poetics, not politics.

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“The creative writer rushes ahead of political developments.

(What is literature, becomes politics a little later.)

Robert Musil – Flypaper and Other Texts

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[INTRODUCTION]

 

Many thinkers over the centuries have poured extensively over the concepts and examples of poetics and politics in human behavior, with Aristotle's essays probably the best known among them. However, the definitions of poetics, as well as those of politics, seem simple in the face of the complexity of reality. Being political or poetic is not always a conscious choice, we are both every day. Our actions, our words, our silences, and even our thoughts, unquestionably have some political degree, invariably distill some poetics. What changes is the perception of this politics/poetics before the eyes of the other. To what extent do our intentions reach the interpretations of others? Corpo poético/político [Poetic/Political Body] proposes to embrace and shuffle possible readings on the metaphorical and representative role of the human body in today's poetics and politics. Through the direct image and the testimonies left by the body, a series of questions are raised around the inherent meanings and implications derived from what is considered poetic and/or political today. We know that the body has both political and poetic potential, without it these concepts alone would not be sustainable. Is there a clear division between a political act and a poetic act? When we make politics, do we involuntarily do it in a poetic way? Do our poetic manifestations have political roots? There are countless ways to question and interpret the intersections of these two foundations of human nature. The exhibition intends to explore nuances of this old discussion, investigate these lines and provoke the clash of different opinions. 

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Poetic/Political Body is an exhibition in the most literal sense possible: it exhibits an action. The etymology of the word exhibition comes from “expose”, which comes from the Latin exponere: to present in view; ex = "outside" + ponere = "to place". That said, we can consider this exhibition a single symbolic body revealing itself through the exposed parts of different human bodies. There are three rooms, superimposed like a column, each with its own narrative and all three interconnected through art – in a plural and transdisciplinary format. In each work and in each environment, the human body is exposed in a certain way. In all of them, this body is poetic; in all of them, it is political.

 

[ACT 1]

 

Upon entering the exhibition, we are faced with two works featuring hands. On the left we have the video Acordo [Deal], by Mano Penalva. We witness on screen three actions that happen simultaneously, without cuts, all referring to the power of realization of the hands, to the way we relate to others, to the material world and to ourselves. From these poetic gestures we make politics, we make deals. The wall on the right is entirely occupied by the series Mão Dupla [Two-way], by Lenora de Barros. They are diptychs of photographs in which hands covered by clay masks gesticulate randomly. The first pair of hands is covered with two white masks, the folded fists point to two sides. Would the same hand be seen from different angles? Subtlety leads to doubt. In the sequence, one of the hands exchanges the white ceramic for a black one, and thus we see a composition game between four pairs of hands interspersing themselves in colors and gestures along the length of the wall. The hands seem to carry out dialogues with each other, while the clay masks allude to the social masks that we often use in everyday life. It is the visual poetics and conceptual politics of that old saying: “life is a two-way street”. Two other works by the artist are positioned soon after. In Só por es-tar [Just for be-ing] we visualize the ends opposite the hands: four photographs of pairs of feet with the title of the work written on the soles. Here we can think of another popular expression: “be careful where you step”. In Sonoplastia [Sound design], we see the internal image of a glass cup resting between an ear and a wall – we are accomplices in an act, at first, politically incorrect. How many filters and intercepts does the information we receive pass through? Is hearing an instrument we use selectively, meaning, do we hear only what we want? In this case, when we hear something we shouldn't, how do we position ourselves? The installation Nucas [Napes], by Jorge Soledar, completes the first half of the room with the same question: how do we, both as individuals and society, behave in the face of events around us? Six photos of heads lined up side by side on a wall, each with a piece of wood propped up against it extending to the floor. We don't see the faces, they are like bodies that turn their backs on us: the wood alluding to our rigidity, to our absent body; the back of our necks referring to our weaknesses, to our convenient blindness.

 

The second half of the ground floor is composed of works where the body disguises itself, plays roles, leaves clues. In A sombra do sol [The Shadow of the Sun], Berna Reale stands at the center of a desert setting dressed in black with a red cloak over her arms, her blurry reflection mirrored in the water that fills the bottom of the photo. We don't know exactly if we are in a quarry, on a cliff, or what the geographical location of the scene is. What we can say with certainty is the enormous dimension of the environment compared to the present human scale, reinforced by the contrast of the white background with the silhouette of the black figure in the center. Here, in the middle of nowhere, the human body is nature's sidekick; it appears simultaneously as a messenger as well as a threat – its aesthetic form evokes poetry while its physical presence evokes politics. To the side, another covered body manifests itself. The video-performance Uma, by Bianca Turner, presents an overlapping of time/space by projecting several bodies onto a single one. The artist appears with her body painted white, literally serving as a projection screen for the portraits of all the presidents of Brazil. Gradually, she cleans herself, while the images of the other bodies disappear one by one, until only the artist's body remains, clean, free, naked. It is important to highlight the statistical fact that the highest position in the Republic continues to be overwhelmingly occupied by heterosexual white men and, regardless of any ideology, it is a fact that our politics as a nation is mostly guided by this “majority” – which, numerically speaking, is a minority. Thus, Turner lays bare her own body in a poetic gesture to affirm a political need to recognize our past and the consequences of this history in our present for the planning of our future. On the central wall of the room, Mano Penalva returns with Porta Bandeira – Ensaio para resistência [Flag Bearer – Essay for Resistance], a four-part photo-performance. The artist appears in prints on fabric that allude to flags, where his body appears holding poles in four official poses that follow the protocol to honor this national symbol (1 – Conducted in a parade; 2 – Resting position; 3 – Arms shoulders; 4 – In salute). In none of the images there is actually a flag, which suggests a mismatch between theory and practice. This absence evidences the disciplined body, but without purpose. The poetics of our bodies often do not match the policy adopted by them. Finally, in the other corner of the room, five drawings from the Suspiros [Sighs] series, by Maria Noujaim, describe a body in transit. It is the only time in the exhibition that we do not directly see the figure of the body, or part of it. The drawings in India ink and oil pastel on paper, sometimes similar to ideograms, are a foreshadowing of Noujaim's performance at the end of the show. In each of them we glimpse records of an action. The artist develops a study of the body as our main form of expression, in which the visual language of gestures and the movement we develop in space are part of the construction that we create as a civilization. In the drawings, the artist's fingerprints remind us of a primitive relationship of the human being in search of means of communication; both doing and reading these poetic traits naturally turn out to be political acts in themselves.

 

[INTERLUDE]

  

On the way to the middle floor of the house, we can see the video performance Fato-Indumento [Fact-Indument], by Lyz Parayzo, in an upper corner before the stairs. On a small, almost imperceptible monitor, we see on a surveillance camera the image of Parayzo's body, with her back to the camera, facing a public road, being gradually covered by a pink paper popularly known for its low quality and cheap price. The paper forms a volume that finally becomes a dress on the artist's body. Throughout the video, several people pass by and stop to watch her on the sidewalk, just like us, observers of an alien body from a distance. When climbing the stairs, Guarda Nacional [National Guard], Parayzo's second video, finds herself behind a bathroom curtain in a small room. This time, to the remixed sound of the national anthem, we watch Parayzo in an intimate moment, brushing her hair in a bathroom. After previously coming across the image of presidents and the reference to the national flag, we find another explicitly political element on scene, the national anthem, once again in direct confrontation with the bodies in the works. There is a conflict between the rituals preserved in the private sphere and the ceremonial aspect imposed by public life. The positioning of both works by Parayzo in the exhibition space denotes a representative political condition of a body that disturbs, whose presence is avoided. Indefinition, as well as gender transition, is (still) a huge taboo for our society. They are bodies that must remain hidden, watched, cloistered. They are bodies that we reject, objects of voyeurism, marginal object-bodies.

 

[ACT 2]

 

In the middle room, the works are records of performative origin, like a thread establishing a connection between the ground floor and the upper floor, reinforcing what we have seen so far and setting the tone for what is to come on the top floor. Quando todos calam [When everyone silences], possibly Berna Reale's most emblematic work to date, is an instant captured by the camera of a performance that lasted hours. In the image, the artist is lying completely naked on a table covered in white in the outdoor area of ​​the well-known Ver-o-Peso market, in Belém do Pará. Her body is under pieces of viscera, while just above and in the surroundings, vultures fly over and wait for the right moment to approach. There is a balance between poetry and politics that strengthens the work – the beauty of vulnerability combined with the need for resistance. Ahead we have another example of persistence through inertia: A Morte do Boneco [The death of the Mannequin], records of performances from 2019 by Jorge Soledar. In the first photo (Homenagem a Federico García Lorca [Homage to Federico García Lorca]), a man dressed as a mannequin in uniform is sitting on a wooden bench reading a blank book, and we see his double lying on the floor at his feet with the pages of the book spread out. In the second photo (Oração a Ogun [Prayer to Ogun]) the composition of the image is repeated, only now we have a woman dressed as a religious mannequin sitting on the same bench, a bouquet of Saint George's swords in her lap, with the double and the bouquet smashed to the floor. Both performances lasted one hour over five days, in a fearless exercise of immobility. The scenes present a theatrical and sculptural aspect, revisit literature and philosophy through the figure of the double, and mix in the same characteristics at first considered opposites. The juxtaposition found in both is political, poetic and above all human. In the same room, two works from the series Sangue Vegetal [Vegetable Blood], by Ayrson Heráclito are on display: Barrueco Colar [Barrueco Necklace] is the image of a black neck wearing a pearl necklace smeared with palm oil; in the photo, we see the oil running down the man's upper chest, like blood from a lethal cut. On the wall to the side, we see the Barrueco installation, composed of a white platform with round glass containers in a half-moon shape containing the oil itself hovering like a dark layer over a light mixture of water and salt; through a mirror positioned close to the wall, the image of a circle closes, alluding to the necklace of the adjacent photograph. We are invited to participate through the angles from which we view both works. We shine and dirty ourselves repeatedly, daily, while the ornamental pearls of some serve as bargaining chips for others – blood has always been and always will be a source of politics and universal poetics.

 

[INTERLUDE]

 

We then ascend to the top floor, and in the ascension we see the fall. Yaô, by Ayrson Heráclito, is a vertical photograph of a black man covered in palm oil, from the series Banhistas [Bathers]. The work is positioned on the wall parallel to the stairs so that this body appears to be falling as we go up or down. Above the photo, in the architecture of the gallery, there is a round skylight; on the sides, two points of light, which provide a spatial illusion with the work: in what resembles an altar, physically the highest point of the show, we have a “baptized” black body. However, this body, fallen from the sky, also suggests that it came out of the earth, “muddy”. With that foreshadowing, we come to the final act.

 

[ACT 3]

 

The top floor, the largest room, is dedicated to the body in its most complete state: flesh, mind, soul. It is in this room that the body meets its oldest acquaintance, the eternal unknown: time/space. Here, three bodies develop poetic, political, human actions. On the opening night of the exhibition, Bianca Turner presents the multimedia action O agora ou os infinitos caminhos a Deus [The now or the infinite paths to God], in which the artist condenses into an act of approximately twelve minutes the infinite search of the human being for the now, the encounter with the present moment. A large clock with the time updated in real time is projected onto a piece of paper stuck to the wall, where the artist follows the second hand, marking it with a piece of oil pastel until it is completely used up. In the end, what remains is the clock designed by Turner as an indication of the action of the body and the passage of time, which must remain in place until the end of the show. On the same day, the unprecedented action LAMA [MUD], by Maurício Ianês, begins, in which the artist proposes to reside in the space reserved for the action for a week. During the gallery's operating period, the artist will remove the first layers of the wall in order to write the word LAMA (portuguese for “Mud”) on it; when the word is finished, he will restore the wall and begin the excavation work again, and so on in a Sisyphean work, until the seventh day, leaving the wall fragments piled up on the floor. Wearing the same black outfit from the start and incommunicado throughout the action, Ianês embodies the density, ambiguity and obscurity of poetics and politics. The action comments on the contradictory relationship constantly present between the ephemerality of the situation of the sensitive, of the productive artistic work, in contrast to the system, represented by the market – which he himself drives while trying to subvert it. Mud, a natural element of strength and potential, a meeting place for materials, can also be seen as a point of accumulation, of dirt, a symbol of (environmental) disaster. There is a peculiar connection between the action of Ianês and that of Turner: while the clock of the past of one faces the future of the other, the two artists obsessively repeat a single act, as if they were mantras, which intrinsically place them in the present; the spiritual ascent and the body's fall into the mud – we've seen this before. In the last week of the exhibition, Ianês returns for one last epic, repeating the same act for four more days. At the end of her action, on the same night, Maria Noujaim presents the performance Suspiros, in which she interprets with her body the signs previously left on the third wall of the room as a score. So, like the drawings seen earlier on the ground floor, Noujaim developed a sign language of her own, they are marks of blue pigment made with her fingers, this time directly on the wall, like hieroglyphics, pictograms, or cave drawings. In the closing performance of the exhibition, Noujaim investigates for sixty minutes the language of the body in and through space, as in a dance, where the body translates the writing on the walls. The artist's search for the original source of language, her research on the evolution of writing and our relationship with space, alert to the political and poetic urgency of a new spatial recognition. The body teaches us to walk in different directions and, in a dialogue with Turner's initial performance, we can thus question the linearity of chronological time through space. It's minutes, days, hours. Although the three bodies do not simultaneously occupy the space with their actions, they all leave traces of their presence, filling the void with evidence; they are poetic traces, political traces. We thus face, in brief sighs, a unique and shared experience of the body, of time, of space.

 

[EPILOGUE]

  

We then make our way back. What was political becomes poetic, and vice versa. However, before leaving the gallery, next to the door, a last breath and a final deal: “One times two divided by one. Is duplicating images multiplying or dividing ideas?” – the question appears next to the duplicate image of René Magritte's self-portrait. The work Duas Operações [Two Operations], by Lenora de Barros, uses a poetic game of image and words, a familiar artifice of surrealism, to question us once again. The betrayal of images, in this case, of the body: an old political trick practiced through poetics.

 

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“By resemblance we demonstrate and speak across difference.”

Michel Foucault – This is not a pipe