“Time is an invention, or it is nothing”.
Henri Bergson
Ana Amorim’s first exhibition in a commercial gallery in Brazil,
26032022-6744-281-65-01/30042022-5904-246-65-36 constitutes public evidence of the passage of time.
Mobile and changeable, time is the main axis of the exhibition which employs a variety of systems, from different viewpoints, showing the artist’s daily movements which constitute a document of her being in the world.
In the work that occupies the gallery’s facade, Amorim reveals that the basic unit of her entire experience, the day, will be repeated 36 times during the period of the exhibition at Vermelho: 23.970 days lived on the date of the opening of the exhibition, on March 26th, 2022; and, 24.005 days lived on the closing date of the exhibition, on April 30th, 2022.
Days and Minutes Embroidery, 2016, is a chronicling of the number of days and minutes of the artist’s life on a single piece of white fabric. Each square represents the record of a day from 2016, and the numbers in each square, the number of days and the number of minutes lived by the artist until that moment.
A similar procedure appears in Number of Days in My Life, 2021. Positioned right at the entrance of the gallery, a black and white calendar with 365 squares, each with the number of days lived by the artist during the year 2021, clarifies that we all live the same time.
In search of a personal way of documenting time, Amorim created, in 1989, the performance Counting Seconds. The performance consists of counting – one by one – the seconds of one hour. For each second, the artist traces a line in a notebook, which thus becomes the record of the action. In addition, for each minute, she notes the total number of minutes lived by her up until that specific moment.
This practice also appears in Almost Free from Time, 2021. The artist worked with two black canvases. On one of them, she drew a mental map of her movements on June 30th, 2021. Since, on that specific date she did not leave the apartment where she lives in São Paulo, the small canvas has only a square that represents her home, the time, temperature and date. On the larger canvas, small white dashes register her counting seconds for one hour. For the first 30 minutes, the artist strictly followed the clock, and for the remaining 30 minutes, she followed her own pace, finishing 10 minutes earlier.
Although chronological time is crucial in the artist’s practice, the show does not follow the same logic, but organizes techniques, subjects, figures and ideas in order to reveal the artist’s various practices. Looking at these works means looking at time and what was recorded in it.
From 1988 onwards, Ana Amorim created the routine of drawing her mental map of the day, every day, before going to sleep. This exercise, which resembles a logbook, and feeds several of the processes produced regularly and simultaneously with other works, appears in several works in the show, such as the 24 maps on black paper cut out in Black Cutout Study, 2018, Large June Embroidery, 2018, 70 Days, 2020, and 60 Days, 2021.
In Sobreposição 1 [Overlap 1], 2021, the artist places maps grouped into four quadrants with seven maps each on a large sheet of paper. After finishing each map, they are immediately covered with liquid paper. The process is repeated seven times in each quadrant accumulating and overlapping layers. The maps stem from the period between 1st and 28th of February, 2021.
2020-3, 2020, reveals Amorim’s mental map for the year 2020.
In this work, made up of 12 linen-cotton tablecloths measuring 140x235cm each, the artist reproduces handwritten news – a procedure she has incorporated in her work since 2017. The written word is appropriated from various news sources that reach her daily and function as noise within the maps. It is an impulse, an immediate response by the artist to the paradoxes of everyday life.
“News is always an appropriation, it is always the voice of the other. In 1987, I created a performance called Three Stages in which I stated: I know I have something to say. I know it’s very important, but I forget what it is, so I decided to keep trying until it hits me.” Amorim takes up this concept in the 2000s when she declares: “I have nothing to say, what interests me is to give voice to the other”.
This is what happens in O extermínio programado dos povos isolados [The Planned Extermination of Isolated Peoples], 2019. The work reproduces the full version of the text, as well as images, published by CIMI – Conselho Indigenista Missionário (Indigenist Missionary Council), that reports the land invasion of isolated peoples in Brazil.
Over of the map created on March 6th, 2021, the artist transcribed in the work Tragédia de Brumadinho [The Tragedy of Brumadinho], 2021, an article published on that date on the website of the magazine Carta Capital blaming mining companies for the recent environmental catastrophe in Minas Gerais.
Prejudicados pelo acordo bilionário, 2021, constitutes a critical comment on the compensation agreements for the victims of the disaster in Brumadinho that Amorim reproduces with white ink on top of her map for February 10th, 2021.
“All cartography is constitutively intentional, meaning that it is produced with the purpose of appropriation and control”, says the first sentence of the text that integrates Cartografia Neocolonial, 2019. The work combines the map created on October 15th, 2019, with a text about the use of cartography as a strategy of power.
In Amorim’s time-practice, there is a certain indeterminacy through which the unforeseen arises. This is because time is not a simple sequential repetition of what is already present. If this were the case, there would be nothing new. Perhaps, only through intuition would it be possible to approach the idea of duration that Amorim’s practice encompasses. After all, words and concepts are not always enough to reveal the inner life of this artist, who has dedicated more than 30 years of her career looking for ways to show her own aging.
1 CIMI’s note on the extermination of isolated peoples: at least 21 indigenous lands are invaded.
2 Federal Police report points out Vale’s guilt in the Brumadinho tragedy.
3 Damaged by a billionaire agrément, affected by Vale`s crime in Brumadinho trigger STF.
4 Neocolonial Cartography of Mining Power in Latin America/Abya Yala: The Territorial Planer
“Time is an invention, or it is nothing”.
Henri Bergson
Ana Amorim’s first exhibition in a commercial gallery in Brazil,
26032022-6744-281-65-01/30042022-5904-246-65-36 constitutes public evidence of the passage of time.
Mobile and changeable, time is the main axis of the exhibition which employs a variety of systems, from different viewpoints, showing the artist’s daily movements which constitute a document of her being in the world.
In the work that occupies the gallery’s facade, Amorim reveals that the basic unit of her entire experience, the day, will be repeated 36 times during the period of the exhibition at Vermelho: 23.970 days lived on the date of the opening of the exhibition, on March 26th, 2022; and, 24.005 days lived on the closing date of the exhibition, on April 30th, 2022.
Days and Minutes Embroidery, 2016, is a chronicling of the number of days and minutes of the artist’s life on a single piece of white fabric. Each square represents the record of a day from 2016, and the numbers in each square, the number of days and the number of minutes lived by the artist until that moment.
A similar procedure appears in Number of Days in My Life, 2021. Positioned right at the entrance of the gallery, a black and white calendar with 365 squares, each with the number of days lived by the artist during the year 2021, clarifies that we all live the same time.
In search of a personal way of documenting time, Amorim created, in 1989, the performance Counting Seconds. The performance consists of counting – one by one – the seconds of one hour. For each second, the artist traces a line in a notebook, which thus becomes the record of the action. In addition, for each minute, she notes the total number of minutes lived by her up until that specific moment.
This practice also appears in Almost Free from Time, 2021. The artist worked with two black canvases. On one of them, she drew a mental map of her movements on June 30th, 2021. Since, on that specific date she did not leave the apartment where she lives in São Paulo, the small canvas has only a square that represents her home, the time, temperature and date. On the larger canvas, small white dashes register her counting seconds for one hour. For the first 30 minutes, the artist strictly followed the clock, and for the remaining 30 minutes, she followed her own pace, finishing 10 minutes earlier.
Although chronological time is crucial in the artist’s practice, the show does not follow the same logic, but organizes techniques, subjects, figures and ideas in order to reveal the artist’s various practices. Looking at these works means looking at time and what was recorded in it.
From 1988 onwards, Ana Amorim created the routine of drawing her mental map of the day, every day, before going to sleep. This exercise, which resembles a logbook, and feeds several of the processes produced regularly and simultaneously with other works, appears in several works in the show, such as the 24 maps on black paper cut out in Black Cutout Study, 2018, Large June Embroidery, 2018, 70 Days, 2020, and 60 Days, 2021.
In Sobreposição 1 [Overlap 1], 2021, the artist places maps grouped into four quadrants with seven maps each on a large sheet of paper. After finishing each map, they are immediately covered with liquid paper. The process is repeated seven times in each quadrant accumulating and overlapping layers. The maps stem from the period between 1st and 28th of February, 2021.
2020-3, 2020, reveals Amorim’s mental map for the year 2020.
In this work, made up of 12 linen-cotton tablecloths measuring 140x235cm each, the artist reproduces handwritten news – a procedure she has incorporated in her work since 2017. The written word is appropriated from various news sources that reach her daily and function as noise within the maps. It is an impulse, an immediate response by the artist to the paradoxes of everyday life.
“News is always an appropriation, it is always the voice of the other. In 1987, I created a performance called Three Stages in which I stated: I know I have something to say. I know it’s very important, but I forget what it is, so I decided to keep trying until it hits me.” Amorim takes up this concept in the 2000s when she declares: “I have nothing to say, what interests me is to give voice to the other”.
This is what happens in O extermínio programado dos povos isolados [The Planned Extermination of Isolated Peoples], 2019. The work reproduces the full version of the text, as well as images, published by CIMI – Conselho Indigenista Missionário (Indigenist Missionary Council), that reports the land invasion of isolated peoples in Brazil.
Over of the map created on March 6th, 2021, the artist transcribed in the work Tragédia de Brumadinho [The Tragedy of Brumadinho], 2021, an article published on that date on the website of the magazine Carta Capital blaming mining companies for the recent environmental catastrophe in Minas Gerais.
Prejudicados pelo acordo bilionário, 2021, constitutes a critical comment on the compensation agreements for the victims of the disaster in Brumadinho that Amorim reproduces with white ink on top of her map for February 10th, 2021.
“All cartography is constitutively intentional, meaning that it is produced with the purpose of appropriation and control”, says the first sentence of the text that integrates Cartografia Neocolonial, 2019. The work combines the map created on October 15th, 2019, with a text about the use of cartography as a strategy of power.
In Amorim’s time-practice, there is a certain indeterminacy through which the unforeseen arises. This is because time is not a simple sequential repetition of what is already present. If this were the case, there would be nothing new. Perhaps, only through intuition would it be possible to approach the idea of duration that Amorim’s practice encompasses. After all, words and concepts are not always enough to reveal the inner life of this artist, who has dedicated more than 30 years of her career looking for ways to show her own aging.
1 CIMI’s note on the extermination of isolated peoples: at least 21 indigenous lands are invaded.
2 Federal Police report points out Vale’s guilt in the Brumadinho tragedy.
3 Damaged by a billionaire agrément, affected by Vale`s crime in Brumadinho trigger STF.
4 Neocolonial Cartography of Mining Power in Latin America/Abya Yala: The Territorial Planer
