In his short story Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius, Jorge Luís Borges shows how reality is constructed, changeable and how the truth is easily reinvented. In the story, a single copy of an Encyclopaedia Britannica indicates the existence of a country previously unrecorded. Then, an entire enyclopaedia describes the beliefs, ideologies, kind of language, literature, counting system and other aspect that form the planet of Tlön.
The reports of this fictitious land, however, start to assume possibilities of actual existence when they are no longer subjected to challenges for being registered in an object that contains, in itself, the legitimating power of knowledge, and gain even more credibility when the story is spread by the press. The documents end up binding reality to fiction.
In the same way that books carry the stamp of knowledge, photography has striven, since its emergence, to support the dogma of being irrefutable proof of the truth. Art, in turn, has helped it to relativize this status and calls on it as a platform for creation and reinvention.
This tension between document and fiction is poised in the work presented by Garapa. This collective, formed in 2008 by the journalists and photographers Leo Caobeli, Paulo Fehlauer and Rodrigo Marcondes, takes the factual as its starting point: historical events, relations between cultures and countries, private or public files. Although imbued with concrete contexts, they transcend their original meanings and reach a territory where doubts reign over the certainties unbroken by the images and texts that compose the works.
This feature is even more striking and recognizable when one considers the works developed by the group in 2013 and presented here. A Margem, Dissonante,vago, Calma and the previously unseen Doble Chapa are hypotheses about the real that are diluted among reticent proofs, imagined stories and fictitious characters. Stuttering, unreal evidence, but nonetheless not false. Capable of provoking the interlocutor into being healthily suspicious of the images and trusting more in the unique capacity of the fiction expressing the reality.
Joan Fontcuberta says that reality merges with fiction and that photography can "return the illusionary and prodigious to the plots of the symbolic, which usually end up being the genuine boilers where interpretation of our experience is cooked, that is, reality is produced.[1]" While photographic objectivity loses its doctrinal strength, we are living in a world that is increasingly communicated by images. It would, therefore, seem extremely necessary to ask ourselves:so, how much trust can we place in them?
By seeking to question what is understood by the construction of reality in different works, Garapa outlines a small geography of its creation. It elects works of overlapping layers, that dissect a theme and break through boundaries, of genre and of language, seeing as exploring the capabilities of the image is a fundamental part of the collective's studies. It is, thus, a timely opportunity to bring their first film to the public.
Produced in partnership with the Uruguayan collective Dokumental, Doble Chapa talks about life on the border between Brazil and Uruguay, territories separated by a political and symbolic line, but that makes little sense in everyday life, in the formation of identities, in the relations between people. An insistent line that tries to set apart that which does not differ.
Borrowing the term from Euclides da Cunha, Ficção Geográfica [Geographic Fiction] questions the tangible character of reality and of documents, arranging them as, in this case artistic, constructions.
Ágata, 2014