Nome ao ar é um objeto instalado no pátio da galeria.

Um moinho catavento, cujas 18 hélices têm inscrições em serigrafia de um conjunto de adjetivos que remetem a modos de extermínio de corpos LGBTs, que, ao longo da história, tem seus substantivos próprios sublimados e massificados.

Assim, entre termos como “arremessados”, “empalados”, “fuzilados” e “suicidados”, que nomeiam aniquilamentos de ontem e em curso, também gira, de acordo com a intensidade do vento que circula pelo pátio, a palavra “vi-vos”, grafada assim, hifenizada pela sílaba tônica.

Letter to the wind is a sound piece that composes an installation alongside Nome ao ar. It is a letter addressed to Tibira do Maranhão, a Tupinambá man who was sentenced to death by cannon in 1612 or 1613, being the first victim of homophobia recorded on Brazilian soil. The proposal is that the wind energy generated by the windmill runs the audio, which unfolds one of the main axes of the artist’s current research, which is proposing texts in which historical times are mixed, inserting the listener into a joint exercise of political imagination.

Sound piece, 5’

photo: Amanda Melo da Mota

[One Pledge, Another Payer]. In this dual-channel video work, on one of the screens Elilson is seen descending on his knees, step by step, the staircase of the Catedral da Sé, in São Paulo, and, on the other, the perspective of a GoPro camera reveals a poem being written in chalk. The artist is revisiting another performance, his first in the city of São Paulo, as a visitor, in 2016: he inscribed on the steps of the Catedral the poem À Memória de um Francisco [To the memory of a Francisco], by his friend and poet Jonatas Onofre, written in tribute to Francisco Erasmo Rodrigues de Lima, who, in September 2015, on the eve of the Independence holiday, gave his life to save an unknown woman held as hostage by a kidnapper. The tribute to the man who had his anonymous life converted into public death, televised in real time, was made in a haste by the artist, fulfilling a promise made to the poet, that he would transform the text into action. Now, in 2022, the action gains other narrative layers, though located on the same staircase, a historical heritage in which monumentality and impunity intertwine to highlight the histories of the “jaw-city” postcards.

Author of cited poem: Jonatas Onofre
Audio and vídeo: Lorena Pazzanese

A cart measuring 2.75m in length and 1.70m in height with 6 iron handles on one side and a mirror on the other, containing the phrase “History never presents itself directly”, circulated around the Avenida Paulista. The pullers/performers wore gray shirts in which letters stamped on the back formed the words O outro [The other]. The original phrase – “The other never presents itself directly” – collected by the artist from a printed text by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty found on the street, is put into play with the variation “History”, echoing one of Elilson´s main practices: walking backwards collectivly as a desecration of the first and absolute expression of order and progress: walking forwards. The cart, the video recording of the action and the set of t-shirts form the exhibition’s installation nucleus.

A cart with 6 handles on one side and a mirror on the other, containing the phrase “History never presents itself directly”, circulated around Avenida Paulista (São Paulo). The pullers/performers wore gray shirts in which letters stamped on the back formed the words The other. The original phrase – “The other presents itself directly” – collected by the artist from a printed text by the philosopher Merleau-Ponty found on the street, is put into play with the variation “History”, echoing one of Eilson’s main practices: walking backwards collectivly as a desecration of the first and absolute expression of order and progress: walking forwards.

A Invenção do Sudeste [The Invention of the Southeast]. In this object, a cargo cart in platform model has a cement base and a neon sign with the word “Regionalism”.

Slanted diagonally, inserted on the cement like a tombstone, the word ignites a play of ideas present in a year marked by ephemeris and regional debates made official as national by the fact that they are historically located on the São Paulo-Rio de Janeiro axis.

If the word in neon still represents a term insistently used to “classify” the art coming from or produced outside of this axis, the materials used in the work provoces a dialoge with two regional marks of southeastern art.

[Even a right clock is broken twice a day]. In this 8’ video, an everyday and affective collecting is projected: a walking-search for broken public clocks. Restricted to the function of decorative artifacts or ignored by a frantic and incessant mass that has become used to not noticing the façades of the buildings, these clocks, located in business establishments, public institutions and uninhabited buildings, seem to testify, with their stagnant hands and on strike against official hours, that time is an invention. In the title, changing the order of the terms “right” and “broken” in the popular expression, the artist highlights the uncertainty and paralysis of time, thinking above all of a popular custom today as lost as the function of the clocks: stopping its hands whenever someone dies.

Nome ao ar é um objeto instalado no pátio da galeria.

Um moinho catavento, cujas 18 hélices têm inscrições em serigrafia de um conjunto de adjetivos que remetem a modos de extermínio de corpos LGBTs, que, ao longo da história, tem seus substantivos próprios sublimados e massificados.

Assim, entre termos como “arremessados”, “empalados”, “fuzilados” e “suicidados”, que nomeiam aniquilamentos de ontem e em curso, também gira, de acordo com a intensidade do vento que circula pelo pátio, a palavra “vi-vos”, grafada assim, hifenizada pela sílaba tônica.