Notes on classification desires and other creative annoyances
Marcelo Moscheta
There is a time inherent to the work of art, a way of operating that does not meet deadlines and demands, but rather a pleasant and, at the same time, agonizing process of winning curiosity. When you travel - and I use displacements and confrontations with a place as fuel for my creation -, the very transformation is not seen at the time, because the trip reverberates within the traveler for a while, and his travel notebook becomes complete only when he goes back to the place he left. Back to the studio after the dislocation throughout the world is having a constant attempt to get over the relationship with the place and measure the landscape and the experience on another scale, even though it has to be done on millimeter by millimeter. About poetic fight between macro and micro views, there are the man and his constant desire to dominate everything on the Earth, its time and its memory.
In the work Linnaeus - pivot for all the works in this exhibition -, all desire to understand the world is wide open. Written on paper labels ready to be attached to their corresponding things, the world remains empty of meaning until someone takes the attitude of naming it. So it was with Adam, the first man, who had a divine commission to appoint and separate the animals and their correspondents, and we remain like him to this day, giving names to what we do not know exactly what it is. We remain curious by the world, with the force that drives us into the unknown, the strange and the different.
The names bring things into existence. What was nonexistent becomes presence by the word force given to the form. In the empty boxes waiting to be filled by "collections", examples of the known world, we read that in the beginning was a garden. However, he is still there, awaiting discovery and the identity of a landscape that seems to never end.
I like the idea of a latent existence, something that is not revealed completely, that it is there, perhaps invisible or incomplete, but that is not perceived at first distracted contact. This presence devoid of visibility reveals itself as power and then takes on an expanded space in time, because it occupies the future in its revelation, the present in its message and the future in its non-materialization. In this space/time of the work, the ghosts live, subtracted from sheets of carbon paper, transferred to other surfaces, migrant par excellence from an equally changing landscape. Evoking a presence through absence is making a building exercise through contrasts - and this is my way of thinking on art making. The geometric place of the self, as Italo Calvino would say, lies at the intersection between the horizon line - the landscape - and the vertical line contained in it - my body. From this intersection, the result is the necessary steps to build a space/work founded on the landscape as a reference for the self.
The act of collecting stones and transporting them to another site is perhaps one of the first traces of a civilization that is no longer nomadic and start thinking about private and individual spaces, in contrast to the communal space. This is the moment in which man finds himself transforming his surroundings, so that he gains the power to interfere with the Creation and to manipulate natural elements for his demands. Thus, private ownership is drawn; you can move a rock to make a wall, cut down a tree to make a fence, manage an entire system of planting, seed dispersal and scheduled harvests. The landscape then is modified not only due to large volcanoes and earthquakes, but also due to the hand of man, who draws his story on the planet's surface.
I see the landscape as a counterpoint to measure myself, an external reference that can give the exact measure of the size of the self. It a romantic notion that pays reverence to the latest great explorations of the 19th century, when the poles of the planet and the tops of the highest mountains were, of course, a discovery of a place and, at the same time, the man's own limit. My relationship with the landscape lies in a first attempt to build an ideal place, an imitation of nature as a true picture of the relations of perfection and balance. Therefore, I want to cover all the possibilities to understand a place, not only by sensitive ways, such as drawing or photograph, but also through rational ways of understanding the Place: latitude, longitude, altitude, mathematics and technical/scientific references. The mysteries of the force that secretly acts on nature are recreated sometimes brutally, in other times, in a delicate and almost imperceptible way, in an act of understanding in a complete manner the material we are created from.
text for the catalogue Carbon 14 on exhibition at SIM Galeria, 2015.
