PROLOGUE
Ficções [Fictions] is the name of a book by Jorge Luis Borges. I thought that it would also make a good title for my exhibition. After all, Borges has been with me ever since the beginning of all this. And all of this has always had to do with fiction. Make-believe. Whimsy. Delirium. Utopia. Art. In short, lying.
Nothing of what I relate below came in the order listed or in the state described. In fact, none of this came in any order. Every process is a current; we never really know where it’s going to take us. In the beginning it is intuition. And at the end it is pure fiction.
Let’s begin, then, with the cover. Or better, let’s start at the front: the façade of the gallery, which has already been so many things. And if the façade were to be transformed into a giant book, Um grande livro, Vermelho [A big book, Vermelho]? We would all feel tiny, but we would see that there is a door, that we could go inside. And, like Alice, we would enter.
There inside, we would find images of an open book. It would consist of two identical and different books. A rather large book, but actually it is we who would be small. It would blend two languages: Ulyisses. This is the book I would invent.
In the back we would be able to see some huge letters. They would seem to emerge from the floor. We would be able to walk among them. It would be as though the things and the landscapes could speak: the floor, the sky, the wind, the cities, the houses, the walls. Because the words are everywhere: between us and the other, and the outside, between us and the world.
We would return to our normal size upon seeing two people playing crosswords. But they would be invisible, we would see only their hands. As though they were our hands. The strange thing is that the words would also be invisible, but the hands would play as though it were an ordinary game. Would this be a senseless game? One never knows for sure what is guiding O movimento das Ilhas [The movement of the Islands].
We would then hear a strange sound. The same hands (yes, they look like the same ones) would be using machines to write a long piece of Correspondência [Mail]. As though there were no email! Or as though what they were writing were actually an email. Or as though we were in another time. As though we were someone else.
Once I was in Mexico. I had just seen giant letters being born from concrete. I noticed a used bookstore that was called El Laberinto – Librería de las Utopías Posibles [The Maze – Possible Utopias Bookstore]. I thought to myself: and what if it were possible to find them, these possible utopias? And what if they all together formed a new labyrinth, wherein we would become lost, miniscule, among all of those attempts to get to know the world, to draw its maps, topographies and histories, to understand them and change them?
And what if in that same room, the scrivener began a huge file of phrases Com palavras de palavras por palavras, palabras [In words of words for words, palabras]?*
And what if all of this were an exhibition, and it were called Ficções, like the book by Borges?
Marilá Dardot
São Paulo, winter 2008
Marcelo Cidade in his new exhibition at Vermelho, A Ordem dos Tratores não Altera o Viaduto, investigates the poverty of urban social life. From the displacement of ordinary objects, such as concrete blocks, metropolis, consumerism and utopia are discussed.
The starting point of the exhibition Silêncio! is a song by Caetano Veloso entitled De Palavra em Palavra which was recorded on one of his most avant-garde albums : Araça Azul (1972). This text was written by Veloso after he came back from his exile in London. Dedicated to Augusto de Campos, it draws explicit references to concrete poetry. This piece uses typographical layouts, puns, palindromes, phonic mirrors and other visual and sound experiments and reaches its climax in a scream. This scream, uttered in the context of a dictatorship, blows full contradiction as a gap appears between the speech (the word “silêncio”) and the action (the scream).
The exhibition focuses on scream and its status within language: from a sound which is not yet an articulated word, from a primal expression, to a dramaturgy of speech. While the most famous representation of scream in the pictorial field is, no doubt, Edvard Munch’s eponymous work, it sets back the viewer into frightening muteness. Here, the impact of the image appears where the sound itself is absent.
Through an understanding of the scream as a vector between body and language, the aim of this exhibition is to work around forms of resistance that are linked to a physical, performative and linguistic experience such as shouting the word “silence”. The relationship between words and images may then be tackled differently.
As such, this project mingles several approaches. The physical approach was inspired by Antonin Artaud’s “xylophenic body” – the idea of a to and fro between orality and writing, between written form and sonority, between the body stigmata and the shape of the voice – and it was nurtured by a core work, absent from the exhibition but nevertheless its keystone: Manon de Boer’s Resonating Surfaces (2005).
Through the portrayal of the Brazilian psychoanalyst Suely Rolnik who fled the dictatorship after she was imprisoned, this work evocates what can lie “encapsulated” in the speech and bursts out through the voice. It evocates the vibration of a vital energy where lies the resistance to the violence of the political power.
The exhibition evolves from the body, taken as a sensitive surface, where singing slowly yields to the primal scream in Joseph Dadoune’s Score N°1 for Three Moments of Origin (First Circle) to the primal fears that are triggered by Mauricio Ianês’ installation that traps the viewer, through the voyeuristic staging of the visitor who is turned into an unwilling accomplice of a fictional incident with Laurent Fiévet (Happy Scream, 2006)
At this point, sound and mute experiences are actually the two faces of a same coin: from the body struggling with the natural elements in Anne Durez’s Donnant (2006), to the body entangled within a self-centered exercise – placing one’s breath during a theater rehearsal in Manuela Marques’ Situation 3 (2005).
These mute experiences draw us towards more purely linguistic ones, such as the ordeal of silence and the attempt to record it through language in Marilá Dardot’s Sob Neblina (2004-2008) or the failure of communication at work in Manon de Boer’s Switch (1998) where the surface and the meaning of the language clash.
We move from a concealed meaning to a forbidden meaning with Nathalie Brevet_Hughes Rochette’s series Somebody Says (2008). Other puns, other linguistic new interpretations show up in Angela Detanico & Rafael Lain’s animation White Noise (2006). The phrase “white noise”, which refers to the light spectrum, draws into a clash two registers of language: one related to sound and the other to the image. Another influence of concrete poetry is revealed in Mauricio Ianês des-pe-nha-dei-ro’ (2008) sound poem which is reminiscent of the “xylophenic body”.
Each of the works mentioned above is shown in echo of other works by each artist – the latter having been especially created for the purpose of this exhibition.
Following the verbivocovisual poem by Caetano Veloso, the exhibition is built upon resumptions, repetitions, new interpretations; it is built upon plays with mirrors which can be distorting…
The scream could recede for yet unknown data… These are anthropophagic attempts, geographically unbound.
Galeria Vermelho presents, from October 23rd to November 15th, 2008, FORTUNA E RECUSA or UKYIO-E (the image of a floating world), a solo show by artist Ana Maria Tavares (rooms 1 and 2), and A Ordem dos Tratores does not change the Marcelo Cidade Viaduct installation (room 4). At the same time, the CÍCERA renovation project for house number 364, on Rua Minas Gerais, created and developed by the Mexican artist Héctor Zamora, will be inaugurated. The location will house studios and, in the future, an artistic residency program.
Ana Maria Tavares (1958) has a long artistic career on her CV that involves exhibitions in the most important museums in Brazil and around the world. Her works belong to important institutional and private collections, and the artist is frequently invited to participate in discussion tables and lectures.
FORTUNA E REUSA or UKYIO-E (the image of a floating world) is the artist’s first solo show at Vermelho. Tavares’ work establishes a clear relationship with Brazilian modernist architecture, creating a dynamic flow between drawing, design, sculpture and architecture. Recently, these characteristics have become even more intense with the introduction of elements that, on the one hand, transformed the conventional characteristics of the object/sculpture into functional parts, called by Tavares “support structures for the body”, and, on the other, made the exhibition space a familiar and recognizable place, at the same time as suspended in time/space, aligning itself with a virtual reality.
In her recent production, the artist has been inspired by elements taken from spaces such as hospitals and gyms. She also appropriates elements found in passing spaces, such as subway stations, airports, living rooms, waiting rooms and shopping centers. The research into these transit locations, used daily by a large number of people, can be considered structural in Tavares’ work, and reveals collective behavior in environments regulated by stable rules. Distraction and indifference seemed to be the most common state of inhabiting such places. As a consequence, simulations of environments composed of functional pieces (benches, armchairs, columns, etc.), moving images (videos and 3D animations), and sound pieces, suggest to the observer a state of rest, suspension or simply reality. frozen, as if it were possible to inhabit a still life. These spaces have acquired a disturbing nature and have become places where visitors can ask themselves: “where am I?”; “what am I doing?”; “Where I go?”. To such questions the artist suggests the following answer: “we left, but we haven’t arrived yet”.
In FORTUNA E REUSA or UKYIO-E (the image of a floating world), Tavares added elements of Japanese culture to the installations and videos that make up the exhibition, creating floating spaces that break with the linearity of daily dynamics, proposing a territory of suspension, a crack in time/space. In the installation, Massage for eyes in Rio de Janeiro (2008), for example, eye massage masks and stainless steel benches create a place where visitors can relax their vision, clearing their eyes of daily ailments.
From this, the artist invites the visitor to observe the space suspended between surface and volume that appears in the series TAN’MONOS (Delight), OBI (Deny), and OBI (Desire), created from pure Japanese silk used in the manufacture. in kimonos. Or in Fortuna (2008), an installation in which Tavares compiled words taken from English such as fortoken (omen), foretell (to predict), foresee (to foreshadow) or forecast (to prognosticate), all with the character of foreseeing or presaging future events and actions. The title of the installation not only refers to the meaning associated with the material goods that an individual can eventually accumulate, but mainly, to the character of good luck or misfortune, of fortune, success and adversity that the word concentrates. The installation was created with 25 cut-out acrylic plates superimposed on a mirrored surface that resembles a “fountain of desire”, suggesting the paradoxes of contemporary life.
Tavares also presents the work OBI Mantra (2008), composed of 40 modules of stainless steel tablets measuring 5 x 5 cm each, forming small frames measuring approximately 40 x 50 cm with a silver aluminum frame. The set of Mantras was inspired by the geometric OBI silk pattern. On them, the words desire – deserve – delight – ukiyo-e appear engraved in polished stainless steel, and which, due to the engraving technique, disappear at certain angles, reappearing as the observer moves.
Vermelho presents, from October 3rd to 11th, 2008, É claro que você sabe do que estou falando? [Of course you know what I’m talking about?], collective exhibition curated by Luisa Duarte, which features works by Amilcar Packer, Cadu, Carla Zaccagnini, CINEMATA (Cinthia Marcelle and Tiago MM), Fabio Morais, Keila Alaver, Gisela Motta and Leandro Lima, Leya Mira Brander, Lia Chaia, Marcelo Cidade, Marilá Dardot, Matheus Rocha Pitta, Maurício Ianês, Nicolás Robbio, Rafael Assef, Virgínia de Medeiros and Wagner Morales. For the opening of the exhibition, curators Suzy Capó (Festival Mix Brasil) and Jürgen Brünning (Pornfilmfestival Berlin) created the OPEN CALL program composed of films and videos that will be projected onto the gallery’s facade.
Of course you know what I’m talking about? is the result of research by 17 artists, selected by curator Luisa Duarte and Vermelho director Eduardo Brandão, on the topic of sex. According to Duarte, the desire to address this issue arose from the observation of the absence of the theme in current art, and can be summarized in the following question: how is the representation of sex in the production of young Brazilian artists today? With the intention of lining up exchanges, ways of seeing, listening and saying, the artists were asked to read texts by Georges Bataille, Octavio Paz, Sigmund Freud, Severo Sarduy, among others.
Sex, its developments and categorizations was a highly discussed and studied topic in various areas of knowledge in the 20th century. In the field of art, from Duchamp to the surrealists, passing through poetic and literary production, eroticism was also the center of attention. From the 1960s onwards, the so-called sexual revolution began. The introduction of contraceptives promotes a radical change in behavior patterns, revised in the 1980s with the arrival of AIDS. An artist who condenses this historical arc in her work, including the debate on multiculturalism and the micro-politics of minorities, is Nan Goldin.
Currently, pornography seems to replace eroticism. It gives rise to visibility, and eroticism shelters a game of imagination that hyper-accelerated time has difficulty supporting. In the 21st century, the fear of AIDS was replaced by a kind of ideal of complete freedom regarding sexuality, as if it were not marked by the unique history of each subject’s formation. In a world where it is important to turn everything into merchandise, people and their respective sexualities come into play. The logic of market society requires that everything make sense so that it can be recognizable and gain consumer value. Part of contemporary art understood this system and made this understanding its leitmotif.
A different stance to this can be found in the book that inspires the title of this exhibition, by writer and filmmaker Miranda July. In it, there is an eroticism of the clumsy, of lovers, more than of the loved ones. Pedro Almodóvar also puts on stage a repertoire of characters with great ethical and political developments, full of sexual desire and driven by love, and almost always allowing a glimpse of vulnerability, the desire that ignores the law, the humanity that knows and recognizes its flaws. The lack of purpose present in art and eroticism is in every way contrary to a world that seeks precision, competence, productivity, correction, the right place, even for that which is constitutive of each individual and sometimes a mystery. for himself.
Vermelho presents, from August 19th to September 27th, 2008, Casasubu solo exhibition by artist Vera Chaves Barcellos.
Casasubu brings together 92 photographs taken in 2006 on a beach in the state of Espírito Santo. The houses in the village of Ubu caught the attention of Vera Chaves Barcellos due to the variety of materials used in their construction as well as their different architectural forms. However, the photographs presented in the exhibition are not faithful copies of these buildings, but an unfolding that highlights the transience of photography itself. Through digital manipulation, the artist superimposed images on each other, creating a vision that points to this mode of construction in which different materials merge, thus producing a new conception of the nature and foundation of photographic recording.
Vermelho presents, from August 19th to September 27th, collective Provas de Contato [Contact Proofs] that presents works by Rosângela Rennó, Claudia Andujar, Rafael Assef, Jac Leirner, Odires Mlászho, Cia de Foto, among others.
The idea of the transience of the photographic image appears in Provas de Contato, an exhibition that also brings together the concepts of appropriation, accumulation and cataloguing. The exhibition presents works by several artists who use these ideas in their work, such as Rosângela Rennó. From the artist, part of the VULGO series will be presented, created with images from the São Paulo Penitentiary Museum. Carried out in the first decades of the last century by the Department of Medicine and Criminology of the São Paulo State Penitentiary, the photos of inmates are evidence of possible physiognomic research, but one that goes beyond the traditional criminal identification system. The glass negatives of such images were destined for oblivion, distributed throughout the various basements of the Carandiru Complex and later gathered without any packaging or archiving criteria, in a room entitled “Penitentiary Museum”. Such images had an already defined origin and destination: they were produced to be archived and their referents forgotten.
Vermelho presents, from July 29th to August 23rd, 2008, Baralhada, a solo exhibition by artist Lia Chaia.
The relationships between man, nature and urban space, a recurring theme in Lia Chaia’s work, appear in the installations, photographs, collages and videos that make up Baralhada, the artist’s second solo show at Vermelho.
A title taken from the pile of cards left on the table after the first discard, Baralhada presents nine new works created between 2007 and 2008, which reveal Chaia’s versatility in dealing with different media.
Composed of around 400 hula hoops, Esfinge is the installation that occupies the facade of the gallery and creates a geometric structure that vibrates and suggests an enigma to the eye. Circular and organic shapes reappear in other works in the exhibition, such as Borbulhas. In it, boxes containing small circular units cut out of paper refer both to the fluids of a pipe and to the chain that permeates collective relationships.
Organic forms also appear in Pelos Tubos, an installation created with tissue paper glued to the wall. To create the work, Chaia used shapes taken from a technical template of hydraulic pipes, building a circulation network on the walls of the exhibition space. This pipe, which sometimes breaks, leaks what is inside.
Circular elements also appear in the video Argolas, in which the artist creates a choreography of flows and rhythms given by the movements of her own body. In Ruínas the artist uses pieces of marble to address issues related to the circularity of time, also pointing to the fragments of a shattered civilization.
In addition, Baralhada also presents the works Presa Predador, a sculpture based on an ancient Roman image; Pata de Elefante, a diptych composed of photographs of roots that cross iron bars, and which allows us to think about the permanent struggle of beings for survival; Ascensão, a video that presents the displacement of the masses within urban space; and, finally, Amigos Animais, a series of photographs in which Chaia emotionally relates to representations of artificial animals found on the city streets or inside houses.
Created in 1995 by artists Barrão, Luiz Zerbini and Sergio Mekler, the Chelpa Ferro group presents in Jardim Elétrico a combination of objects, drawings and sound installations created from speakers, lamps, cables and electrical circuits.
This is the case of Jungle Jam, an installation created in 2006 for the exhibition with the same title, which took place at FACT (Foundation for Art and Creative Technology), in Liverpool, England. The work is made up of thirty identical engines, arranged in a horizontal line on the walls of the exhibition space. Each motor is connected to a pin, and this to a bag. When activated, the motors rotate the pins and, with them, the bags, which hit the walls and produce sounds.
The command that activates the installation comes from a box lit by small lamps placed in a corner of the room, called by the header group. The device controls, via computer programming, the activation and shutdown dynamics of the engines. Like a conductor in front of an orchestra, the head activates the engines at different times, creating, from the same element, varied rhythms, timbres and sound textures.
In addition to Jungle Jam, Chelpa Ferro also presents a series of new works created from the same principle. This is the case of Jardim Elétrico (2008), the work that gives the title to the exhibition composed of colored lamps, speakers, nozzles and electrical circuits.
As stated by curator Moacir dos Anjos in his text for the catalogue, the Chelpa Ferro group “does not propose a unification of the meanings with which the world is understood, limiting itself to indicating the possibility of translating them into one another, without defined hierarchies and in an inescapably truncated way. Instead of advocating the erasure of the differences between the faculties of looking and listening, what the group does is offer, to anyone who approaches their work, a sensorial mix-up.”
An exhibition proposed by Argentine artist Ivana Vollaro, Vermello is part of a larger research project begun in 2000, entitled “Projeto Portunhol”, which researches the mix created by the adaptation between the Portuguese and Spanish languages.
The exhibition is made up of videos, photographs and objects developed from subjective testimonies, experiences and experiences of people in transit between the Brazilian border and other South American countries whose language is Spanish.
Vollaro understands Portunhol as a playful, fun, invented language that generates words that are constantly lost in oral speech.
After the closure of Vermello, the Porto project will remain in Tijuana and will have the characteristics of a work in progress, thus expanding the possibilities for exchange, being able to incorporate other experiences and proposing meetings that are not limited to the scope of art.
Melhor de Um [Best of one] is Leandro da Costa’s second solo exhibition at Vermelho. In the first, entitled Quarto/Sala (2006), the artist presented excavations almost imperceptible to the naked eye, on the walls of the white cube. The evanescent tone that characterized the installation, and that permeates da Costa’s work as a whole, points to the ephemeral and transitory characteristic of current art, suggesting not only the end of the object, but also the reinvention of artistic action.
Da Costa weaves his critique of consumer society through graphite or ink drawings, photographs, videos and objects taken from everyday life, re-contextualized family images, suggesting the relevance of the individual’s relationships with the surroundings.
Fabio Morais presents My 6th Solo Exhibition an autobiography that covers four months on four pages of a diary. From the moment the exhibition was scheduled, in December 2007, Morais began to write a diary, in which he noted formal and subjective questions about the future exhibition. Subsequently, the artist chose fragments that form the four pages that make up the exhibition.
My 6th Solo Exhibition talks about art exhibitions that do not present a final product, a finished formal result, but that address the doubts that permeate the creative process of any artist. According to Morais, the exhibition represents a counterpoint to the idea of vernissage, a French word that means applying varnish over a painting considered ready. The vernissage was the moment when, finally, the artist had something ready to say. In the case of this project, the vernissage will not present a finished work, but rather the land from which it could have emerged.
A galeria Vermelho apresenta, de 01 a 26 de abril, de 2008, a exposição individual Bifurcações e Encruzilhadas de Carla Zaccagnini.
A série de trabalhos que compõem a exposição Bifurcações e Encruzilhadas de Carla Zaccagnini (34), artista confirmada para participar da 28ª Bienal de São Paulo, em outubro de 2008, faz parte de uma pesquisa desenvolvida pela artista nos últimos anos. Nela, Zaccagnini investiga eventos ou elementos que a primeira vista podem parecer idênticos sendo na realidade díspares (bifurcações), ou que, por outro lado, parecem distintos mas obedecem a princípios semelhantes (encruzilhadas). Trabalhos anteriores como Jogo de memória (2004) ou Museu das Vistas (2002/em processo), e até mesmo o conceito da última individual da artista na Vermelho Até onde a vista alcança, em 2004, baseada na idéia de simetria aproximada, já apresentavam tal foco de interesse.
Muitas são as oportunidades de descobrir que duas coisas, a princípio idênticas, são distintas após uma segunda e mais atenta mirada. É o que ocorre na série de fotografias Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias: casas gemelas, trabalho desenvolvido em Havana (Cuba), em 2005. Nela, Zaccagnini apresenta grupos de casas da capital cubana construídas de forma idêntica, mas que em decorrência do tempo, das mudanças de gosto ou de hábitos, ou para atender a necessidades e possibilidades de seus habitantes, se distanciaram de seus pares. Para lá de um simples jogo de erros, a série parece propor uma síntese entre elementos heterogêneos, apontando para o valor do remake e da transformação, articulando usos e colocando em relação formas distintas. Sobre esse fundo cambiante, o observador se vê confrontado com o processo de constituição de sentido e de uso que determina o estabelecimento e a codificação de suas relações com o entorno.
Do mesmo período em Cuba, Zaccagnini apresenta também a serigrafia Sendo Dados… (2005), trabalho que nivela a tridimensionalidade do objeto (dado) a uma superfície chapada, onde todas as variações numéricas do jogo de azar se tornam possíveis em uma única jogada, questionando o emprego das formas do objeto, a saber: no que se converte o uso habitual do objeto quando transformado pela mão do artista?
Uma e três casas (projeção), 2008, é o resultado de um estudo desenvolvido por Zaccagnini sobre a história dos três sobrados que atualmente abrigam o prédio principal da Vermelho. Com o levantamento frontal feito pelos arquitetos antes do início da reforma que transformou o trio de casas, em 2001, a artista devolve o desenho à atual fachada da galeria. Uma e três casas (prospecção), 2008, revela, no verso da mesma parede, na parte interna da galeria, as estruturas originais das mesmas casas.
“Sobre la igualdad y las diferencias II: a casa ao lado”, foi criada para a exposição Cité-Action, em Assenede (Bélgica), em 2006. O projeto foi desenvolvido em colaboração com as arqueólogas Liesbet Sablon e Sofie Geelen. Ele consiste numa investigação arqueológica de artefatos encontrados em duas casas desabitadas, localizadas na mesma rua de Assenede. As casas, desapropriadas pela municipalidade, permaneceram fechadas por alguns anos, mantendo em seus interiores os objetos deixados pelas últimas pessoas que as ocuparam. Além de documentar os objetos encontrados, as escavações tinham como foco identificar artefatos similares encontrados nos dois contextos diferentes.
Seguindo critérios arqueológicos, a semelhança entre os objetos está associada às funções do próprio objeto/artefato. Lado a lado, esses artefatos estabelecem índices das necessidades, hábitos e gostos dos indivíduos ou das famílias que habitaram essas casas, próximas no tempo e espaço. Essa aproximação, entretanto, aponta para peculiaridades de escolhas pessoais que fazem parte da história.
Além disso, Zaccagnini apresenta também, Correspondência, 2007-08, coleção de palavras escritas com rótulos originais de cerveja, Todas las descripciones son comparativas: grandes felinos, 2007-08, desenhos decalcados de uma enciclopédia de animais destacando o texto em que a descrição se faz por comparação, Kleuren, Knippen en Opplakken A, e B, 2006-08, dois conjuntos de seis livros de colorir iguais, pintados por 6 pessoas, utilizando conjuntos iguais de cem canetas hidrográficas.
O tema das igualdades e das diferenças aparece também nas obras que Zaccagnini criou para a publicação da exposição e que os visitantes poderão levar para casa. Nos textos que descrevem segundos encontros com desconhecidos, no relato envolvendo dois guarda-chuvas semelhantes, nos três testemunhos díspares de um mesmo episódio, ou ainda nas imagens que os acompanham, a artista aborda a questão dos encontros e desencontros que permeia a exposição como um todo. Nestes trabalhos, a artista contou com a participação de Keila Costa, Marina Buendia e Mila Milene Chiovatto. De maneira análoga, os textos críticos de Kiki Mazzuchelli e Thaís Rivitti partem de um mesmo universo de obras para criar discursos que se aproximam e distanciam