Wanderer
Gabriel ZimbardiGaleria Vermelho
Marcelo Moscheta is a walking artist. Artists that incorporate the act of walking into their practice has always been present in the fabric of art history. Beyond the artist interested in exploring, mapping, observing, and interacting with the environment, movement as part of creation has occupied artistic practices since traveling artists joined artistic and scientific expeditions in the Americas from its invasion in the 16th century. Or those who chose, for the first time, to leave the studios to paint outdoors. After the Situationists in the 1960s took on the task of transcending art as a specialty to understand it as part of everyday life, walking was embraced as a practice of wandering – a walk without destiny. The artist who opts for the act of walking then subverts the order and establishes public space as a place of creation and subjectivity. Walking is performative and investigative and creates the possibility for new comprehensions of what space and place are through conceptual maneuvers. Artists like Richard Long, Hamish Fulton, and Francis Alÿs created works that transformed landscapes (urban or natural) or the way of observing them through their walks.
Representing movement becomes a path, and Marcelo Moscheta is an artist committed to this path. In 2007, in Arctic Circle, Moscheta created an installation that sought to displace the viewer to the far north of the globe with manipulations of digital images that resembled the Arctic but that were in fact photographs of ice cubes taken on the sink of his studio. The images were organized in incomplete circles, requiring the viewer to complete the images with their imagination.
In 2011, Moscheta participated in a residency in the High Arctic, in Spitsbergen. His work then deepened in its articulations based on empirical evidence. Like travel notebooks or poetic documents, his production sought to translate the experience of being in the Arctic. From this experience, comes the series Photochromatic (2012), where black-and-white photolith films are juxtaposed with Pantone® color code tables, suggesting to the viewer the task of filling in the landscape with the offered colors. Besides transposing the “being in the territory” to works that travel to other localities, being in the Arctic inspired works related to the Land Art tradition and based on interventions in the landscape.
In A Line in the Arctic (2012), a line made of red adhesive tape is stretched on the ground in an attempt to follow the exact parallel and meridian to the north, south, east, and west. Due to the pole's interference in GPS readings, doubts about the action's precision arise. The work reflects on man's attempts to measure, delimit, and frame the world and the inevitable failures of measuring the immeasurable. The images that document the action are displayed in Styrofoam® frames, referencing the thermal boxes used to transport elements requiring a certain temperature. There, the subject's displacement in the territory and the displacement of the experience are signaled.
Experimentations with various ideas of displacement also permeated Moscheta's expeditions to Brittany (2007), the Atacama (2011), the border region of Pampa (2009-2010), and to traverse all 1100 km of the Tietê River (2015) – among many others.
In 2021, Marcelo Moscheta moved to Portugal to develop his doctoral research. Being an immigrant establishes another form of displacement based on a constant state of transit and exile. From this new position, Moscheta produced a series of new works based on seeking recognition of this new land, including his first permanent intervention in the landscape.
In July 2023, the installation The Invisible, from the Conic Infinite Project was integrated into the landscape of the Grande Vale do Côa, in Portugal. In the intervention, Moscheta used local woods, corks, and rocks, planning their natural decomposition, which will allow their evolutionary process to return them to the landscape without environmental impact. The work, organized as two mirrored large cones, besides creating visual framings in the landscape from the top of a hill, also allows different thermal and sound experiences due to the natural characteristics of cork. The installation was developed from an artistic residency in partnership with the Municipality of Sabugal, with the FCT - Foundation for Science and Technology, and with Amorim Cork Insulation.
This set of experiences and experimentations informs his new exhibition at Vermelho. Precisely titled Errante [Wanderer], the exhibition deals with spatial and temporal displacements.
Portugal has some of the oldest megalithic monuments in Europe. Most of them date back to the Chalcolithic period, from 3300 to 1200 BC. Interested in rocks as poetic representations of a permanent history, Moscheta is fascinated by these millenary stone monuments. Driven by this fascination, he seeks to replicate the experience of witnessing one of these monuments, the Dólmen da Arca, located in the municipality of Viseu. Dolmens are structures composed of large vertical stones overlaid by a horizontal stone that were generally used as tombs. As a kind of shelter, their structures proportions forth see the body as a scale. To transport the presence of the Dolmen, Moscheta decided to make a frottage of the monument. For this, it was necessary to find a soft and resistant material, as papers could not withstand the friction with the granite of the Dolmen.
Thus, another of his fascinations was accessed: the Tyvek®, a highly technological, lightweight, and durable material. Tyvek is a breathable, water-resistant, abrasion-resistant, bacterial penetration-resistant, and aging-resistant non-woven material. It is produced by DuPont, the same company that collaborated with NASA to develop materials that allowed humans to land on the moon, including the materials for astronauts' suits.
Tyvek would allow the chalk to friction against the granite, ensuring the integrity of the drawing. More than that, Tyvek would enable the displacement of something as immobile and fixed as the 5000-year-old Dolmen da Arca's structure from its imprint. Moscheta then began negotiations with different forums involving Portugal, the United States, Brazil, Spain, and Uzbekistan. The permissions and documentation needed for the work's execution spanned a month of exchanges with 7 archaeologists and representatives from different departments of architecture and archaeology in Portugal.
All stages ensured the work's execution and the preservation of the millenary monument's integrity. Moscheta then had three days to execute the frottage with the help of an assistant.
Finally, with the imprint of each stone that composes the Dólmen da Arca recorded on rolls of Tyvek, Moscheta could consolidate the work 1:1 (Dólmen), which occupies the main room of his exhibition. The installation flattens the Dólmen da Arca, allowing the public to move through its referent. The work is given as icon and index, as map and footprint. The work is based on the resemblance and real relationship with the original.
In his multiple expeditions, Moscheta collects rocks, fossils, documents, and a myriad of elements. Part of this material forms the series Autopoiesis (2024), where elements from different walks are articulated in a production grounded in articulations of conceptualistic characteristics, such as the intervention and combination of elements, the use of texts as images, the use of documentation, and the contextualization of components. On a reduced scale, these works bring different experiences closer together as a glossary of possibilities tensioned in new combinations. In biology and philosophy, the term Autopoiesis describes systems capable of creating and maintaining themselves.
In Substância [Substance] (2024), Moscheta inserts a salt rock into a photograph taken during one of his expeditions to a salt cave in Colombia. The work simultaneously documents and transports his presence in the cave.
In the series Parábola [Parable ] (2024), Moscheta proposes another temporal displacement from a photograph taken by his father during a collection in the Horto Florestal de Maringá (Paraná, Brazil) in 1981. A botanist by profession, his father recorded a colleague, accompanied by his son, with a pruning rod. The work operates through the repetition of elements linked to logic (the slate blackboard grid, the linen grid) to investigate the moment of playful learning recorded in the photograph and to elaborate compositions where learning and freedom are approximated. In the work, experience and orality overlap the formality of the blackboard represented by the slate stone.
Questions about the nature of time also guide Sedimentar [Sedimentary] (2024). Moscheta's series of paintings is made from the sedimentation of limestone from coccoliths. These calcium carbonate masses are produced by algae as a form of protection. When the algae die, the coccoliths are released into the marine environment. Moscheta makes washes with coccolith limestone powder to paint surfaces prepared with acrylic gesso. The artist moves this paint across the black field until it is sedimented on the support. Moscheta returns the coccolith sedimentary rock to water and returns the algae's elasticity to the material. The painting's image resembles murky bones, proposing a multiple path between matters. The temporal and material play in Sedimentar raises questions about the nature of creation and destruction in art.
Marcelo Moscheta's various walks and works present themselves as a logbook of his journeys, where issues touching aesthetics, ethics, and art history are reflected in the history of human displacements and settlements in the world; in their ways of being and thinking about spaces, and in the forms of domination they exercise over the landscape.
The mobility of man between spaces is thus celebrated in the work that opens the exhibition. Jeremias (2024) has a prophecy found in the Bible, in the Book of Jeremiah, Chapter 35:7, written on shards of ceramics from various origins: "Dwell in tents so that you may live long in the land where you are foreigners." Like an archaeological excavation, the work suggests the ruin of the condition of building and material accumulation in favor of a constant state of displacement.
text for the exhibition Wanderer at Galeria Vermelho, september/october 2024