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ERRATA: Ao contrário do divulgado na nossa newsletter, este texto é de autoria apenas de Fabíola Salles.

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This text was originally published at the website of GRiD-CCSP (“São Paulo Cultural Center Interdisciplinary Reflection Group”)

Image on the left is Yves Klein’s Leap into the Void, a photomontage from 1960.

Sunday, tonight I decided I can´t wait. Not wait until Monday. (And expect that these words help visualize a non-linear meaning). Each one in this suspended community, in a circle of friends, acquaintances, strangers and relatives, a cycle of people I summon before the candle to care for… each one is probably at their home and inside their home: thoughts, projects, chores, for next Tuesday, Wednesday… the days organized like the moon. We, along with it, stuck to earth through gravity. Me, stuck to you. Fulfilling roles? Desire.

How are you?

Here we are: in the city of long distances, of anonymity and disbelief. Of fragility, of fear. Also, and mainly, of meetings, of the possibility of living together, closely, in the same territory: speculate. Going to a barbecue restaurant and dancing samba to keep a smile on our faces. The masks. I just learned (and this sentence was the only one written on Monday) that on Saturday, playwriter Mario Bortolotto was shot in a bar in São Paulo, on the same day in which I witnessed a very rich dance and improvisation meeting at CCSP. Schizophrenia. Difficulty understanding what is in front of our eyes.

The subtleties of the fields’ surface: possible entrances. The public spaces and the private ones. Tenderness and forced entry. The moment when hierarchies and frontiers in practice are questioned. Homeless wills, without ground and wide opening of intimacies. We don´t have a revolution, a war, and we have all revolutions and wars in different scales. We have a perspective from above, the panoptic, Google Earth and also the yellow pages. We have detailed maps and the volume experienced with 3D cinema. And if I allow myself to model clay, there is still this handicraft time the body is able to follow/feel, enlarged. Anesthesia, synesthesias.

Between the speed of thought and feeling there must be a place.

The time the bullet took to reach the target.

Where does intuition fit?

Groping around my house, if the lights are out, I live in a wrinkled surface, dusty, specially on Sunday. I breathe enjoying the taste of the air. I remember news that could be in the papers: today. December 6, 2009. Few hues are noticeable when one desires a glimpse. The show is criticized but revelation, appearances, becoming visible is desired. Knowing more about life. I remembered cornstarch crackers. It must have something to do with this.

Childhood images are usually silenced for stating what we call naive. Our time on earth. The childishness of the artist today.

I place myself, on a table, in an unknown room, after ingesting some substance, or not. Me and 4 women lying down. Actually I wasn´t lying down, I was naked in front of a mirror. It was a mirror that distorted me as if I was swimming in psychological waves. The surfaces of skin.

Silueta Works, Ana Mendieta, 1974 a 1981

In that place made of paper, someone’s blood was running and it created a drawing. Startle. Under the bed I found a last name. On top of you I was in waves. Twilights of little stories. Lovers: those who must work everyday to feed their kids later. Health centers and emergency rooms. The arm of a woman who manipulates strange objects, infected by bacteria. Smoke and helmeted guineafowl. Something to lean on that is neither architecture nor romance.

Scaffold

I just invented a word that can´t be written. And what if, who knows, we invented new words so that the images could also change inside us, so that we could rid ourselves from rigid symbols, from habits, to put an end to prejudices, to disarticulate the idea that the symbol is formed primarily through similarity. What is similar? Answer: what we can identify with naked eye as being “alike”. How frail and arrogant of the human being.

Poetic license. We ask permission to occupy an (un)common space, the written paper, in this case, the screen, so that words are (dis)organized to communicate something to our fellow men. Or, to reveal before the eyes of the one writing, something between typing letters and current thoughts. The body of discourse can take a life of its own.

Currently, many times people talk about language creation in the arts environment. We can approach this issue from many different prisms through the study of linguistics, semiotics, philosophy… But I would like to take this debate from one person’s point of view (in this case, myself).

Ricardo Carioba, artists from São Paulo, in a debate about Zona de Risco (“Risk Zone”) that took place in CCSP in the second semester of this year, said he thought not about language research, but rather about artistic research and for that, for him, takes place at the moment when the artist puts himself in doubt about real and fictional. Maybe in the arts realm this fits with the due care and irreverence, but in life the danger is that the limit between real and fictional is lost in serious issues, like violence in the cities and so many other debates that could be raised here. Today I see, in many cases, a state of apathy in people before some very fundamental issues, vital to every day life. As if they were sitting on the couch watching a soap-opera: real and fictional are mutually trivialized.

Often, in current days, art works do not make their intentions clear: they deal with shared processes, very open; or they suffice by asserting the moment in which they speak. In this environment difficult to incorporate “dance” no one knows where to dance, which rhythm to follow, we remain suspended, hanging like in the moment of Klein’s leap/hypothesis. Fictional, real; real, fictional. Fictional, real; real, fictional. Fictional, real; real, fictional. Fictional, real; real, fictional. As if we were entering a frozen state: impossibility of perception/knowledge. No, reality is not two-dimensional. We must get out of the suspension state and become prospectors of signs that can generate meaning. Was synthesis forgotten? Are poetry and synthesis no longer walking together?

In the book A Arte Brasileira Hoje (“Brazilian Art Today”), Agnaldo Farias says we must accept as contemporary art every piece that generates meaning today and it could have any format, material or date.

Reflection and request to remain skin deep. Attention.

I like to follow artists in their lives, not in their work. I mean: I like to follow the life of a work that follows the presence of the body who makes it. The extension of our hands in the world, our gestures are maybe our “total symbols”, our language complex and hiperdisclipinary, transdisciplinary, multidisciplinary, shattered.

Shattered, for disciplines for me evoke science and maybe this place where frontiers are lost is the place of intensity and not of classification, analysis. And that intensity is not understood as a single light that blinds, but as a complex mass of relationships, feelings, heritages, projections and trivial actions. When a circle is created, like that on a Saturday afternoon, at CCSP, with artists and the most different people are dancing together, its seems to generate meaning. Yes, I think it was art. A creative, life, meaning.

But a bullet hitting someone’s body… it´s intensity that blinds.

Contemporary images of a Saturday: the bullet and the circle.

This makes me think we have to work a lot. All of us.