Enclosed City Nelson Brissac Peixoto Nelson Brissac Peixoto An horizon of concrete, flat against our eyes. The wall of buildings is similar to the sidewalks' stone pavement, and the opaque mirrored façades hinder any transparence. Things that refuse to go away, sedimented, piling upon each other. Everything is packed, spaces are profusely occupied by layers of plaster, wooden divisions, iron beams buried under improvised constructions, remains of rails and debris, jumble and dust. A palimpsest formed by the varied uses things once had. The barns of the ancient Vila Mariana Slaughterhouse conceal a subterranean, somber world. A space deprived of memory, whose solely remains are the factory structure and the mechanical residues of a forgotten activity. Thick brick walls, iron beams, sealed doors and windows, exert an oppressive weight. A machinery universe marked by corporeity, where the plow fends the earth and the lever moves the gears. A humble effort against a world coerced by gravity. Contrarily to the contemporary pull toward transparence and lightness, to the effort of denying world's compaction by way of towers and skyscrapers, we have a straight confrontation with matter's smashing volume. The artists gathered here act on the thickness of things. Rather than an expectation of transcendence, they look downward to what has density and concreteness, what pulls to the ground. An elaborate landscape articulates there, where sight is always partly hindered by obstacles. There is no way of apprehending the whole space at once, which impels us to cross this labyrinth. Walls, grates, mezzanines, and shadows block the view, subtracting the perspective of things to flatten them against the wall. Where nothing stays out, seeing is linked to handling. Everything shares the same materialness: evidence of the operation, of the gesture, of the effort. Hand marks everywhere, setting darkness over light. A world made of dirt, where one acts under the weight of matter, digging the ground, scraping the walls, as an ironsmith striking metal, or an engraver working his burin. These heavy machinery -- references of an anachronous mechanical universe -- are fated to immobility, they don't have the least chance of flight. Even the assemblages that apparently would allow aerial elements -- as those made of photographs, movies, and video -- show dense and charged images. Soil instead of sky. A systemic universe -- paranoid -- resulted from the occupation of the ancient slaughterhouse. Each work contributes to articulate a strange mechanism, a system of communicating vessels, a network of gates, arches and pillars. In each corner, a working device, a darkroom, a contraption for excavating or supporting, a collage of inscriptions, a sonorous installation. The compact space between things, like a thick vegetation, acts as a cement, uniting objects and plans of different dimensions. The city is an impenetrable and opaque wall. From the outset, the architectural structure by Anne Marie Sumner defines with the visitor a relation of evidence and obstruction. Three parallel metallic grids allow a glimpse of the exhibition barns through its superposed meshes, but prevent a panoramic vision of the place. With various lengths, they cross diagonally the uneven terrain, but maintaining the same level, in such a way as to follow its roughness. They are articulated to the surroundings, creating with the sustentation wall and the courtyard an extended space. The grating redesigns the local topography, raising the area at the foot of the slant, and lowering the part of the building that, on climbing the ascent, is seen from the top. Even the perspective constructed by the axes' parallelism is interrupted by a succession of perpendicular plans, completely abolishing the horizon. The entrance -- by definition an open area, of effortless transit -- now requires an itinerary. The work cannot be understood from one only point of view. It requires a route that circles it, that permits its vision from the terrain's different positions. The obstructed windows in the first room don't overlook any horizon. Nothing distinguishes them from others painted on the blind wall: all of them open inwards. By painting them entirely in red, with pure pigment, Marco Gianotti created an environment that, instead of irradiating light -- like the sacred spaces embellished with stained glasses --, absorbs all luminosity on the porous and velvety wall. The light and open environment becomes dense, dominated by a centrifugal motion. A negative space, it is the opposite of the place, architecture's reverse -- a black hole. Its intense chromatic strength is opaque. It is transformed in a darkroom. Here, the theatrical assemblage of Enrique Diaz locates six of Calvino's invisible cities. Two paradoxical storytellers, since they are deprived of experience, narrate cities described in books found in a library. Everything happens in a locked space, this red room of blind windows: the journey is motion on the same spot. Gestures are restrained, speech is impersonal: symptoms of the modern urban claustrophobia. The cities, that only exist as a fantastic record, suggest labyrinthine and anonymous spaces. At the extremity of a room where light is blocked away, boxes of different sizes are arranged or piled irregularly, in a way that their internal illumination diffuses only through rifts. The space created by the assemblage of Carlos Fajardo is the preceding's counterpoint. Here, light comes from inside, fighting the resistance of packages and of space. Confined by the weight of darkness, absence gains material density. As if the sculpture were everything it is not: the space existing between it and the walls, massively invaded by darkness. A sculpture of shadows. While the first environment absorbed light, this one avoids its expansion: in both cases, studies of constraint. The lighter and kinetic elements may be agents of gravity. Deprived of vision, the visitor experiences the same spacial disorientation that assaults him or her from the entrance, with the grating that redesigns the terrain positions and points of view. He or she is obliged to establish a tactile relationship with the place. Palpating darkness reveals that it is material. The holes excavated by Carmela Gross start a descending motion, conditioned by the place's brutal physicality. As if those larval perforations could be a search for new horizons, an attempt to insufflate some air in a suffocating environment. But these perverted windows are directed to the ground. Each hole is meticulously designed and located in a blueprint of the place, as in the ground settings for a surgical or military operation: not by chance one of its references are the autopsy paintings by Rubens, artist of the massive drawing and bodily firmness. Disposed according to a grill, these holes make a negative mapping of the space, indicating everything that is not, that cannot be seen. At the opposite extremity, a panel made of reproductions pasted on fabric, a sort of veronica of these perforations, seems to try to elevate what inexorably points down. Paradoxical lightness, that only bolsters the weight that makes the ground sink. The photographs by Antonio Saggese face the same tension between lightness and weight. In the first series, photos of a dismantled statue. The images of a massive bronze figure are amplified -- mutilation amplified in computer-composed pieces --, and lifted in the air. Large printed panels in light paper hang loose. The images, textured through technical reproduction, are volumes that occupy the hole picture, and witness the materiality of photography itself. In the second series, photos made through the mirror of a car parked in street corners, of people in the rear car. People confined in vehicles, submitted to the inertia that obstructs movement and blocks vision. What is static, the monument, seems to be in motion, and what is mobile is seen in suspension. The photos, taken through the mirror, mix what is ahead with what is reflected, creating surfaces of great visual density. The compositions, made in "peixero" & paper, are pasted directly on the wall. Heavy paper adherent to the bricks, with images of an emblem of transparence: the human physiognomy. Nothing more opaque, though, than faces in transit. The anonymous and commonplace images, serially reproduced, use the language of cheap show posters and electoral propaganda, poorly printed and ephemeral, that cover the city walls. The barns' pamphleteering recreates the visual noise of urban landscape. But these accumulated posters, whose strength comes from their own tenacious and chaotic presence, can also engender, in any given moment, a dissimilar and informative image. Arnaldo Antunes retakes the technique of the popular street photographers ("lambe-lambe"), show posters and signs of jobs and services that enwrap the city, accumulating on the walls successive layers of paper. Swollen by humidity, crested by the sun, the paper sheets gain consistency and weight. The theme is decay, caused by the glue, by exposition to the weather, by grime -- the visceral quality of this material, endowed with something organic. They are poems printed in traditional presses, each word impressed in a different poster, in a way as to mix randomly, creating new constellations. Like an "Oracle" (a wider work being made by the artist), it affords a random reading of the city, as a collage of events. The posters are overlayed, then ripped, making multiple layers. The tearing has a significant function: it allows words to emerge, permitting new arrangements among each other, partial readings between pieces of paper. Each poster is taken in respect to the one below. As in the case of show advertisings or electoral propaganda, the point is always to conceal the other one. It suggests transparency, but the many layers generate opacity, a crust that blends with the wall itself. At the limit, the images could be emulsioned directly on the wall, renouncing to the photographic paper smoothness. The large panel by Cassio Vasconcellos -- made of interlining -- is an urban panorama articulated through disproportional forms and unbalanced perspectives. A compact horizon, whose materiality mimics the concrete skyline. These photographs -- even though a mere chemical pellicle -- provide the same density of the paper walls. The image absorbs decayed plaster, penetrating in the wall's gaps. Opposite process of the photographer's, who, as much as the painter, throws light: he operates as an engraver, tearing the wall with his cutting tool. Here, the photographic image does not reveal itself -- this horizon doesn't have transcendence --, it lays darkness over the city. As if it were the vestige of a fresco, a strangely modern one, that slowly fades on the spoiled wall. Projected directly on the soil, the images of Eder Santos emphasize the "optic thickness" of video. The images' rare material consistency -- of the same nature as those captured in photography -- is related to the treatment given to time. Scenes of trains in motion are decelerated, making perceptible the figures in the cars, seen through the windows. A disheveled woman contorts herself. Recorded at six images per second, her face practically dissolves in the landscape that passes behind. Bodies mix with the surroundings. Either the breaking or the speeding affect the figures, sheathed in unexpected concreteness. The speed -- generally associated to kinetics -- begins to feed the thickness of the video image. A geology made in slow motion, an inscription of time in space. The stalling imposes on images layers of optical matter. The space is also dense with noises, that have structural volume. Music, the noise of machine and projectors, tracks, recordings, and ambient sounds make the place even more opaque. Sound intensities and rhythmic beats as those typical of a factory environment. The sound assemblage of Livio Tragtenberg -- approximately a hundred loudspeakers distributed in about eight nests on the barns' floor -- act as mechanical conveyors, carrying sound masses from one spot to another, distributive systems that mix sounds and control their intensity. Recorded speeches of discussions, phone conversations. Electronic city: cash register sounds, subway announcements... Sound doesn't go beyond three meters of each source: the relatively low volume afford to perceive, due to the distance, a small delay from one nucleus to another, generating a sort of wave from the nearest to the farthest. A sense of motion. Volume and density gradations (high and low pitches): sonority is treated plastically. Sound has mass, the same unexpected materiality presented by video. It does not expand the space, but fills it up. It makes the environment heavier. "Hell", by Arthur Omar, deepens the descent to memory's torments and to nowadays' violence, started in the first room's holes. Any chance of transcendence is denied to these figures that yearn for redemption. Two series of TV monitors suggest a spiraling space: the circles of hell. Above, clouds pass by. Below, old amateur images show the artist's mother in her youth. This hint of purity is followed by scenes of abandonment and madness from the Carnival in Rio, and later by the luminous throb of images made from inside a moving train, until they convert in flames. The itinerary of damnation is configured. Everything is put in terms of transportation: where do souls go? Nowhere, because heaven and hell are right here, we are condemned to stay in place. In this mechanical world, flying is not possible. The video is an electricity conductor, a lightning-rod that leads to the depths of Earth. The choreography of Susana Yamauchi installs its creatures in the same interstitial spaces of this purgatory. Larval beings emerge from holes or peel from the walls to the ground. They mimic the ruined walls, acquiring their ragged and uneven texture. People encrusted in shells, surrounded by concrete, as those who live under viaducts, or in apartments along expressways. Dwellers of a Brueghel-like hell -- though very contemporary --, dressed in rags, with masked faces. Moreover, an intent to explore the recurrent gestures of dance, the mechanical gestures of serial production that had dominated all other assemblages. The great number of dancers create an impression of multitude: everybody moves in unison, like one compact block. A rude and amorphous mass, as the city itself. The "short movie and & fenaquistoscópio", by Jorge Furtado, treats movie as a recomposition of movement, through a disc with fixed images. Movie when the sudden linking of images still allowed to notice the mechanics supporting the optical phenomenon. There are two separate devices: in the object, the muscle-man, the machine-worker, the treadmill-woman. Faceless people, just body and movement. The cinematographic record of this "slave work" is an almost infinite recurrence, chained gestures that correspond to the industrial systemic. Beside it, in a projection, a kaleidoscope of the city appeals: packing machines, buttons in retail, pressure cookers, stickers, and other things advertised in the poem "Services' Journal" ("Jornal de Serviço"), by Carlos Drummond de Andrade. Each of the ninety offers of the poem conforms to an image -- xerox, polaroid, slides, cartoons, digital pictures, drawings, paintings... Inside the object, the illusion of motion is given by the stroboscopic impression of the object's motion. Outside, the stroboscopic light fixes for instants the object's moving image. In both cases, thanks to the effects of retinal persistence, the syncopic rhythm constitutes the mechanics of image. Movie is an art of the industrial era, with gears similar to those of old amusement parks and slaughterhouses. Another device of assembly and disassembly was engendered by José Resende. A crane is programmed to uninterruptedly compose structures with elements found at the site. From a basis made of randomly scattered stones, project metallic tubes, wooden beams and concrete shafts. Following a somewhat configured script, structures will be successively erected and dismantled, each repetition serving to adjust the drawing and to find new variations. The point here is a study of the articulation of objects and materials. A search for unforeseen joints and adjustments in the parts, unpredictable in the materials. Connections that suggest an architectonics, but that demonstrate the tensions between precariousness of sustainment and the material's weight, the limits of construction. The gesture of suspension -- effected by a machine, in a way as to subtract any personal connotation, any artistic intention -- is contrasted by the gravity force. As in the Tower of Babel. A problem-ization of verticality, which the artist also effects in his sculptures. A relinquishment of the constructive impulse, a continuous recovering of the effort to erect the unbearably heavy. Not by chance this itinerary ends in another grid, leaving no option but to walk in circles: the works here assembled make a perpetual motion. A hazardous course through an obstructed terrain, a scanning of the abyss. The point here is not to perceive the invisibility of things, but restlessly confront its unattainable and irreversible presence. Enclosed
City Nelson
Brissac Peixoto Agnaldo Farias We are beginning today the series of lectures related to the close of the first stage on the Arte/Cidade project, conceived by me and Nelson Brissac Peixoto. I intend to present you the project's general conception, the issues involved in its formulation, some of the many hindrances we have found to carry it through as well as to make some comments about the results achieved with this exhibition here. Naturally those comments will be only pointers, since I have no time to make in-depth critics about the works as they well deserve.. The Arte/Cidade project was born due to a very favorable state of affairs that we, Ricardo Ohtake's consultants -besides nelson and me, his consultants included Guilherme Almeida Prado, for cinema, Marta Góes, for theater, Rodolfo Stroeter, for music, and Clarisse Abujamra, for dance -, found during his administration towards developing an experimental project, leaving behind the Department's routine schedule. It looked interesting to us taking advantage of this opportunity to break, through some multi-language activity, the silence and cloister-like life in each of the areas of artistic expression. I'd like to say, meanwhile, that it is important to stress that this tradition of dialogue between arts was lost -we had a lot more debate and exchange of ideas in Brazil in the past. But, regarding the favorable situation we found out in the Department, the point to emphasize is, we had the right to fail. Well, working under this kind of guidelines guarantees to any project the right to dare, and gives it an experimental tweak that is always desirable. Talking about arts and cities is talking about a very complex duo, that is being worked upon in a very conscientious way ever since Modern Art was born, specially by the artistic avant-garde in between the two world wars. This fact makes us aware our work is not original, and we don't presume to be inventing something out of the ordinary. If there is something above the common, the plain, it is our attempt of recreating under other circumstances a kind of discussion that was strongly felt in Brazil, in São Paulo, up to the beginning of the 80s, but that was drowned by this wave we're going through now, the key point of which seems to be dismantling all cultural production, a crisis made more acute by the complete wrecking of all cultural institutions during the Collor administration. Thus, I believe that we -officials, artists and critics- simply took to task here, with no nostalgia whatsoever, a rethinking of this duo, but avoiding anachronistic stances, evaluating and taking advantage of previous experiences. The Arte/Cidade project is born under the sign of impossibility, it is born trying to create ways out for a series of complicating situations which run round each of the terms in this duo. The first point, that I would term a key one, is related to the very complexity of the urban notion, that is understood nowadays in a very enlarged way that is not to be confounded with the strictly physical city limits. On the contrary, the notion involves everything the word may mean: the more or less invisible webs that go through and involve all people, without distinction. This status quo leads us to a key dilemma: what, in a city, we should choose to think about? What, amongst all things that make a city, is to be seen as most important? To keep abreast of this issue, theater man Enrique Diaz developed here a work based on a reading of Italo Calvino's "The Invisible Cities". There is a moment in the book, which tells us about the imaginary meetings between the great Mongol emperor Kublai Khan and his favorite ambassador, Marco Polo, when they talk about this impossible situation, the need to define, regarding a complex system such as a city, what is the most important angle. The scene has the emperor casting doubt about the existence of those extraordinary cities Marco Polo is telling him about, and saying that each of those cities in fact reflects one key aspect of the only city Polo knows well, that is, Venice. In his brilliant answer, Polo says one should not mistake the city for the words which describe it. That the thing which exists between those two notions is only a relationship. The fact is, this is the only thing that exists. Butt this is really all we need. Another impossibility is arrived at when we find out that there is no regular urban plan anymore, a clearly drawn and rational plan able to guarantee each of the city's inhabitants equal enjoyment of its pleasures. We know that this concept, one of the most important inheritances of modernist thinking, is just a big utopia, that São Paulo's map is unfair in its own lines. The fact that it is impossible to keep believing urban planning is the solution, the fact that we just can't idealize this city no longer, is maybe the main reason for our giving new value to urban ruins such as this slaughterhouse where we are today. However, we are aware that for some time there has been a certain compulsion regarding preservation that would transform spaces such as this in a vast number of cultural centers, most of them useless, and that this, operating coherently under the system's dominant logic, means always expelling the people who occupied the space beforehand. The last point is another impossibility regarding the enjoyment of an work of art within these calming environments planned to that end. I mean but that museums and suchlike institutions. In fact we think it opportune, without however denying the current art diffusion system its due value, to enlarge it, so we decided to put works of art architectural spaces which would not be able to hide its power. But I must say that we don't think that using this slaughterhouse is a way out of any stalemate related to the artistic milieu. That means, it's not necessary to use it. Thus, its use will be only transitory, what is demonstrated by the Arte/Cidade project's own schedule, with a next stage to be carried out at Downtown São Paulo.. After considering all these aspects, I may thus claim that the Arte/Cidade project does not think about the city as a theme, but as a supporting medium. his way, the idea of selecting the slaughterhouse is justified by our notion that none of the invited artists will treat the city as something external to his/her work. Each one of the works exhibited incorporates elements present in the city, and bring them on as part of the language they employ. Naturally this coherence comes from the fact that each of sensitivities involved in the project was perfected in an urban environment. On the other hand, I might say also that this means works of art are thought about in their own autonomous fields, what goes contrary to a certain naturalistic trend still strong amidst us that requires works of art present explicit references. The Arte/Cidade project will happen in three stages, and each of them will be ended by an exhibition with works of all involved artists. This first stage involves 15 artists and four theoreticians, besides Nelson and me. It took three months of discussion, sometimes tense sometimes very fun, always about the same theme, and culminating in the exhibition you see here. Well, I'd like to stress that the many times-much more than nelson and me would prefer, I swear- the discussions were not about the theme "Windowless City", a notion I will now explain to you. To begin with, it is necessary to know that the concept of a Windowless City come upon us as a kind of sign to allow the involved team to see more clearly what would be common conceptual ground everyone would be treading. That is, out aim was to guarantee an equal denominator, a common point that could preserve the group's heterogeneity but making it milder, and more productive than the Babel-like scene we live in nowadays. It's true all artists invited were invited in the first place due to their personal poetic searches, searches that from our standpoint -and this is where our guidance will show through clearly- were in tune with one another and, notwithstanding the different techniques involved, were also in step with the stage general concept. This way, we arrived at the idea that each field of expression has a language and concepts of its own, and we offered each one of our guests a list of words related to the universe we intended to treat, in the knowledge that every one of them would get closer to one or more words in this list. Please find below the expressions suggested: Buildings, blind walls, façades, alleys, dead-ends, skyline, impotence, loneliness, cloister, angst, opacity, saturation, accumulation, arteries, waste, ruins, leftovers, rubble, concrete, mud, stone, metal, mineral soil, archeological, porous, thickness, mass, weight, gravity, full, , closed, hard, gray, amorphous, sluggish, peeled, dirty, used, volume, superposition, intertwining, articulation, noise, indistinction, pile, agglomeration, coupling, joint, expansion, surface, plan, epidermal, arid, dryness. As you can see, it is more of a cloud, a conceptual cloud, than a clearly-limited field. In fact, limits are so fragile that some of these words belong on the following stages. It was very exciting to perceive the effects this pan-artistic meeting had, albeit sometimes there was a feeling of angst all around us. I think that artistic production in its several fields is so sophisticated nowadays that anyone, even an artist. that doesn't work on a certain field as a direct producer or at least as a systematic observer, ends up feeling like a layman. It's a common thing, and I guess you would all agree with me about that, meeting an architect who knows nothing about music, a musician who knows no painting and so on. Thus the insecurity generated by our meetings. Arcane codes, which didn't allow any dialogue, were frequently employed. It took much time, and I don't thing we were entirely successful, but we have to bear in mind that this was a first experience, a first attempt. But there was a very important element that guaranteed we didn't end up producing noise only and misunderstanding one another: this slaughterhouse. Since most of the time we spent together involved discussing how to occupy it, it looked as if we were fleeing the proposed theme. It was during the whole time, or at least most of the time, the big trick, the alibi, but curiously it allowed us to discuss the theme indirectly, since thanks to its situation it was in perfect harmony with the theme we had chosen. The slaughterhouse was a much better solution than we would have thought at first. Its characteristics were fertile ground for the development of the artists' projects. The fact that it is a space without memories, albeit imbedded at the center of the urban fabric, a space that has no relation whatsoever to the activity once carried out here. The physical presence of its thick, heavy walls, mid-way to destruction, was a key piece for the creation of all works here exhibited now and to get us forward with the debate In fact, finding a place where time is present in such a condensed and grave way, as if it was enclosed in a dark room which refuses to open itself to contact with the city all around, was a decisive step. Enclosed
City Nelson
Brissac Peixoto Ismail Xavier The works presented at Matadouro (the Slaughterhouse), according to the main proposal of the Arte/Cidade Project, dissolve the audio-visual's idea of unconnected areas. Involving myself in movies and video, I don't face films or video-art in the traditional sense, something restricted to the screen rectangle. I examine assemblages and their various forms of exposing materials in an environment. André Klotzel juxtaposes a movie screen and a poem-poster. Eder Santos projects three adjoining images on a soil mound: is it a video on an irregular surface or a sculpture, on which certain lights fall? Arthur Omar lines up thirteen horizontal video monitors close to the public, and on a higher level, fourteen monitors in cross, in a citation of geometries as revealing as the images' content. Jorge Furtado uses two rooms divided by a curtain that reminds acts from the 19th century's fairs: at one side, a 1994 version of the & "Phenakinoscope", created in 1832; at the other, the 16 millimeter projector. The "work" here is the confrontation space of different illusionary techniques. The singularizing of technical data, the juxtaposing of languages, and the concentration on the materials' textures bring the devices to foreground, assert their opacity. Exposing their formation law, they reveal affinities of procedure with other works in the exhibition, including the incidence on the video-assemblages' creation of the actual state of the Slaughterhouse architecture. This is a privileged space, capable of crystallizing suggestions in the constellation of generative words that conducted this phase of the project. It has been noticed that the works assumed the space and its ghosts, in a theatrical touch that gains vigor in Arthur Omar, but becomes, in a certain way, a general condition, since the contiguity imposes scenic vestiges to each "performance". By presupposing the encrusting of works on the surfaces, photographers were as penetrating as the plastic artists. Refusing frames, Saggese and Cássio Vasconcelos occupied passageways, or corners without relief, focusing the city more explicitly, either in the weaving of planes and reflections, either in the portraits of confined figures, or in the photo-assembled panel whose making doesn't hide the wall's texture and patches. Passageways: Alice in the Slaughterhouse Video and movie, integrated on the art exhibition's circuit, tend to search what Maya Deren defined as the verticality of poetics -- the juxtaposition and thickening of specific situations -- as opposed to the narrative's horizontality. Such trend includes solutions such as that by André Klotzel, supported by the direct interaction with literary text. Klotzel reproduces, in a poster, Lewis Carroll's poem "Jabberwocky", translated by Augusto de Campos, while on screen he makes Zezé Macedo slide through the Slaughterhouse space and recite the same poem. The actress experiences the poem as a coquettish girl and, like Alice, glides in the journey to the other side of the mirror. This, as a crossing point, is put as a metaphor of movie, a world that since Jean Cocteau (Poet's blood) defines the reflecting surface, not as a return of the other side's world, but as a doorway to other dimensions crossed by the actress in describing the folkloric adventure of the poem's hero, posing as an urban girl, properly dressed (as a British schoolgirl), involved in books and fantasies. From this scene, it has been noticed the junction of modern poetry and high comedy, because of Zezé Macedo's presence, but more interesting is the gesture of composing passages inside passages, in an abyss game where time doesn't seem to go on. The plunge of the girlish lady into the poem's & diegese is the moment of ecstasy, a repeated voyage between two recognitions of the mirror-camera's presence. In each return at the end of this glide through the suitcase-words of Lewis Carroll, the end of the text redirects her to the Slaughterhouse, stranged. Time warps: the optical unconscious of images in motion The idea of time that doesn't progress acquires plasticity in the triptych by Eder Santos, a moment in which light, instead of the mirror, meets the uneven barrier of the soil mound. It results from an unstable form/background relation, and the variety of procedures turns difficult to recognize what goes on in front of the camera. In the central image, the point of departure is a classical situation of an observer and a train in state of analogous motion. However, the recording speed changes, the editing schemes and superpositions exploit the windows' frames and the bodies in motion, creating a new field of perception, a synthetic time-space that makes the train's arrival in the station an experience detached from Lumière's record. What is evoked here is a dynamics tuned to the Cubism: the plane cuts and simultaneities somewhat freeze the moment, creating a pulsation of geometric figures. Aided by the music and its recurrence, this pulsation becomes obsessive, an instance of repetition in the apparent motion. The image at the right brings a lateral motion that suggests a car ride. Near the camera, a woman moves briskly; her face is almost imprecise, her hair, her hands, and the purple fabric of her clothes are inserted in a game of tonalities, in a nervous facture of light and shadow. The speed changes create effects that remind Jean Epstein's theory about image in motion and its analytical ability of revealing microstructures imbued of a certain "personality", an individual motion (as the hair, in this case). It remains the suggestion of individual orders that, in their related autonomy, suppose a discontinuous space-time. There is constant motion, but there is no teleology, nor the passage to another state; the different "local realities", turned visible by the device, compose a fragmented field that cannot advance. In the left image, the camera moving through the city at night is more readable: stimuli are rarefied, but the passing of lights and surfaces indicates an urban world of concrete, street and avenues, structures, empty spaces where the camera advances. There is a neat subjectivity of the glance, through the constant movement of the hand-camera that explores textures. In the swing, therefore, between exploring geometries with discipline and constructing this glance-projection of a subject, the three images of Santos retake avant-garde researches of the 1920's: to franchise the limits of perception, to turn visible what is not offered to the unarmed glance, to tension the field of visibility, to question common sense, and to invite to a new experience of the city. The images' restlessness indicates an overriding dynamics. And dissension makes of this itinerancy of the glance not exactly a "flanerie", but the confrontation of a radical opacity. The façades of Marco Giannotti define the matrix of the video "Free Sky", by himself, Eder Santos, and Nelson Brissac, a plunge in the force field of saturated colors. Here, the surfaces' texture becomes paradigm, and the video approaches Giannotti's pictures exhibited at the São Paulo Art Museum (MASP) -- walls of decaying buildings, bricks and windows of the Slaughterhouse. The itinerancy has points of rest, and there is the observer's shadow that imposes itself at certain moments. The images' cadence defines a more contemplative relation, and the smooth slidings, although supported in a medium that is basically color vibration, don't exclude harmonies, couplings that find support in Haroldo de Campos' poem, and in Lívio Tragtenberg's music. Some color frequencies greet the glance; others tighten it, giving an impression of brief advances and regressions of the image. But saturation privileges the surface, and the title is pure irony: there is no horizon in this work that begins with the plane of a floor sprinkled with dead leaves, and starts transforming the landscape into façades, walls into pictures, and reversely. The dominant red and the interferences on the landscape of one color into the other create drama, in a chromatic dynamics quite opposed to that of Arthur Omar's majestic universe of blue -- here, the "free sky" is absent. The right side and the rear side: the political unconscious of serial images In the & "fenaquitiscópio" by Jorge Furtado, time is also deterred. The images' parade originate from the device's rotation, and at each cycle everything is repeated, because the illusion of motion is created from pictures observed through gaps in the revolving cylinder. As in its model from 150 years ago, Furtado's device presents, in its internal surface, a sequence of still images of an action different stages, reproducing it in an apparent continuity: a mason carries material up a ladder, a housemaid cleans a kitchen floor, another mason uses a hammer in a demolition. Three working gestures that underline their mechanical side through repetition. Nevertheless, outside the cylinder, there is another collection of fixed images whose disposition doesn't aim at the illusion of motion. This collection passes at each cycle as a unpretentious group, requiring an effort of focusing, since its lateral motion doesn't favor the glance. And the device's main effect is the illumination system: opacity and transparence depend on the light's incidence angle on the cylinder; either the "normal" light falls in an angle that enhances the internal part and hides from us the exterior, either a stroboscopic light falls on the external part and heighten the fixed images, generating a swap between interior and exterior. The outside has old ads, almanac symbols, pictures of consummation goods, illustrations of scientific information, pop emblems. The opposition of two homogenous collections, one referring to manual work, the other to the fabric of images that compose the social-urban surface. In its structure, the device configures the classical articulation of alienated work and fetishism, opposing the production world and that of images-merchandises. The ingenious geometry is charming, and there is a ludic dimension in this archeology that remakes the apparatus; at the same time, there is a graphical exhibition of a concept imprinted in this dynamics that counterpoints the carrousel's two faces. In the adjoining room, the 16 millimeter film recomposes the opposition between external and internal, now exposed in a linear succession. The external series advances in the cadence of a Drummond poem -- "Newspaper Service" -- where images from the cylinder combine with street planes and traffic signs, constructions, images of objects and services sold in the newspaper, gadgets, trivialities and exoticisms altogether, the visible mesh of merchandise that parades on screen, at the command of words. The ludic-mechanical aspect of the series becomes denser through the precise synchronism of word and visual illustration, in a game of deciphering that recalls old newspaper or magazine pastimes and its hieroglyphic cards. Everything moves at the sound of factory gears, whose cadence is imposed with satirical intention: sound and image narrate, juxtapose, and through repetition end up by creating the effect of a complete system, drawing a social anatomy sensed as a comedy of automation and mechanics. The city and its collections converge on the newspaper mosaic, which the subject examines without forgetting the somber zones, the corrosive facts that he ironically notes. In the second part of the movie, its "interior side", we have the precise repetition of the images seen in the cylinder, now superposed on images of clock hands, underlining the mechanical time measurement. On the audio, it is read a fragment of a poem in prose by João Cabral, inspired by Drummond's "Quadrilha". Jorge Furtado chose the passage spoken by someone deceived by love, not of a named loved being (Maria, Teresa, etc.), but of love as an entity that corrodes, expands and engulfs the subject, "eating" the portrait, the name, the collection of numbers that qualify personal objects (clothes and shoes' sizes). That is, the emptying of the self is signaled by the abolition of signals that mark an individual as member of a series. The difference between this enumeration and that of the "newspaper service" is that now everything revolves around a subject devoted to expose the dissolution from the "internal side". One goes beyond the implicit irony of the first part and, little by little, a time irreducible to serialization is introduced: "Love has eaten day, night, winter, summer -- my headache, my silence, and my fear of death." In opposition to the preceding series, this one converges to the dimension of non-transferable experience, and subverts the mechanical flux of succession. It generates pain, fear, death, qualities of experience that find echo in the masons' and the maid's gestures, repeated ad nauseam. From the flux we pass to an oppressive tone and the movie's second part concludes by undoing the pop effect of the first one. This way of introducing the contradiction recalls the effect generated by the notion of liberty at the close of Flowers' Island. There and here the game is undone when it is introduced what doesn't fit in the series' internal logic. That is to say, what resists to decay in factors supposes an interiority, a living time that transmutes satire in drama. To our glance, the mechanical rhythm, the clockwork cycle, and the images' string mark a recurrence system that levels the devices, the & fenaquitiscópio, and the movies. With one difference: the old contraption gives us liberty, because we "fish" the passing images, choosing this one or that one. On the contrary, the movie monitors the succession, closes the mesh; in it, the flux of stimuli becomes denser, enhancing the power of images on the spectator. If there is allegory in Furtado's device, it is to evoke a world that advances technically, without being able to link the "homo ludens" to the "homo faber". High and low: the "other scene" of beautiful images In the device made by Arthur Omar, cyclic time, recurrence, and series articulate in new terms. The video monitors' arrangement defines a contrast between high and low, even before images start working, through their content, the duality heaven-hell, abyss-beauty. On top, four monitors disposed in cross bring the same calm image of a blue sky and white cloud, but the whole doesn't have the effect of serial recurrence, since each monitor has its axis changed in 90 degrees in respect to the next one, creating a 360-degrees' turn when one walks through the assemblage -- the clouds seem to move in circle, the cross pattern becomes impregnated, composing a global image, and not the sum of four similar images. The change of axis, an apparently simple gesture, is a rare moment of creation, a so-called "finding", for it produces gestalt, it stabilizes the form as a closed universe, with its own time, a centripetal field of force, in the tradition of a certain painting, detached from the "centrifugal" vocation of movies and video images. The cross inside a circle made by Omar modifies the field and outfield relationship, emphasizing the difference of its formation law from the one that presides the lower series. This one is composed of thirteen horizontally lined videos, with thirteen versions of the same image, generating a serial effect. This does not prevent that fire, the dominant image, achieves unity in the diversity of images, like a pyre that illuminates the public's faces, while the music, saturated of extreme frequencies, creates a strong tragic tone, enhancing the images' effect. From far or near, the device is imposing: the cross-shaped sky above and the fire line below configure, in geometry and in chromaticity, a ritual scenography. And the lined monitors receive a double image of sacrifice: in slow motion, and thus in a specific cadence, parades the slaughterhouse violence, from beginning to end, from the blow on the cattle's head to its meat being torn for consumption, that the slow edition intercalates with images of Carnival in the streets, and old family scenes. The slaughterhouse images, as much as those of processions and dancing masks, emerge and dissolve as if consumed by fire. They share, therefore, the minimalist touch crystallized in the cleanness of blue-and-white, and the accentuated excesses of Carnival, of murder, and of the horizontal line's flames. The slaughterhouse scenes define a paroxysm of violence, observed in detail -- the horror very near, slowly. Next, the artist dilates time and burns the images he produced: those of Carnival are from a previous movie by him, and those of family groups belong to the affectionate memory -- it is his mother as a child who we see in the last images dissolved by fire. It singularizes, therefore, the present time of exorcism, transforming it in a theater of cruelty, where the cattle's sacrifice -- this Eisenteinian appeal -- emerges as a metaphor referring to the own artist's experience. Eye right in the eye of the sacrificed animal, the cameraman signals a movement of identification that suggests this limit-experience -- where are annihilated identity marks, memory, and work -- as a condition for the outgrowth of the new. Violence and convulsion, the data in the device's lower side, are not actually excluded from the world of the beautiful images. High and low make two required poles of the same process. Shifting the paradigm, its opposition wouldn't happen as a heaven-hell duality in the Christian sense, but as a figuration of the Apollo/Dionysus dialectics, or as a figuration of the Nietzschean formula of art as a "sublimation of fear": the experience of pain and the contemplation of the abyss as a condition for conceiving the Olympus, the classical world of beautiful images. In this key, the spirit of geometry and the shocking experience of the ritual are united, so that serenity and convulsion, equilibrium and violence, find here their limit figuration, as two concerted faces of the same process. The genesis of good form happens then as drama, risk. It involves the surpassing of horror and excesses, the confrontation with the horizon of annihilation. To synthesize, what this sui generis coexistence of antithetical poles offers is an image of the creation time. As if it were "another scene", Omar's ritual mobilizes geometry to express the forces of a cyclic time, strange to the flux and order of mechanical progressions. As in other times figured in Arte/Cidade, this search is about a thickening of experience, the refusal of an automatic prose of the world. Enclosed
City Nelson
Brissac Peixoto |
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