To be paid | erased
[...] the vertiginous view does not even need an explicit crack to deliver itself.
Luciana Paiva, Precarious, fragility and instability in the image.
Could this dispersion of objects, so banal and precarious, be assembled as an unusual graphic constellation? Mere papers (or just its images), at times anchored on the wall, as small ordered chasms, and at times emerging indifferently to the ground, as uncommon tectonic objects; either way, the density does not dissipate: nothing seems to redeem these receipts from their condition of remains / trail depreciated from a commercial transaction.
The record of purchase as a silent membership that is recorded: the tickets, customer copies, the receipts, issued by computerized debt and credit bank systems, reiterate the commercial dimension of the daily experience. Copy: semantic dubiousness between the record slip and the preterit vision / obsolete view ... maybe a route? Cash/Debit Payment: an immediate form of invoice or that which adheres to the scopic field. We experience, as of now, this fraying, this condition of memory as landscape.
That the artist chooses this support, in its quality of urban trail, does not cause astonishment; Iris Helena has been exploring this for years amid her investigations about concepts of construction, representation, registration and reinterpretation of urban memory as an affective and social phenomenon. However, here she apparently renounces the intervention through the printing process. Where once there was an interest for the plot of record overlays (series ‘arquivo morto’ [2014]), for the image of the city that will house, willingly, all kinds of temporary writing supports (post-its, page markers ... the coupon) or of debris (series ‘casa pré-fabricada’ [2016]), now there seems to be a fascination with suppression, with the stratigraphy of registering. In any case, we are subject to the entanglement of memory: here is our own magic block, in which records are plotted and are unnerved, and where all deletion is experienced as a surface event. After all, the ephemerality of registration on thermosensitive paper makes this evanescence a condition of these by-products; evidences of a commercial regime conditioned by the transience of the record, having program obsolescence and ephemerality as a supposed guarantee of security / confidentiality (and, ultimately, as a metropolitan ideal of anonymity).
The heaping of these receipts is normally incidental and its systematic accumulation happens for evidential purposes. But here, it is neither. What justifies this collection? Would it be the same mysterious motivations of collections, driven by its perpetual incompleteness? Would it be the strict conduct of laboratory collection? Would it be the archival impulse in the creation of an unusual collection of slips, in which all existence is poured into such tiny ruins of consumption? We could also, driven by the inconsequence of our reveries, dream of shoals: think of the saline deposits of stalactites, the complicity of the grains in a sand dune, of the ancient affinity of twinned rocks on a mountain - in short, imagine all sorts of light-weight geologies. After all, the consumer receipt is also a chromatic occurrence, with atmospheric shades of blue, dimmed morning yellows, and lilac-crepuscular horizons as curious orthogonal auroras, a mechanical expression signalling but the end of the gauge.
The transience of the printed information contrasts with the persistence of the institutional / bureaucratic information which is stubbornly recorded. The fragility of the support causes the simple manipulation or reckless packaging to produce new textures, to suggest new plasticities (fold, tear, crumpled, fibrous fractures) ... and thus by artifice of the artist, the topographies of disposal are revealed, which convert these small depreciated remains into subtle poetic events, into geological accidents, vertiginous landscapes, architectures obtained by the unlikely engineering of creases and folds. On the trail of consumption, dreams the paper geologist, to whom all prominence is imminent deletion or complete obscuration of the word in the night (as shown by one of the objects of the series ‘indícios’); every tectonic rumor insinuates itself in the inexorable confrontation between the wear texture and the textuality in a state of disappearance.
The abandonment (a poetry not exactly of the debris, but of matter left to be) is converted into a constructive system in which the texture fills the entire surface, occupies the vacancy of the text and is suggested as a deed of the unceasing. It is these indexical landscapes (as suggested by the title of the series), these archaeologies, mythologies, these quadrants, that constitute a universe of reminiscences, in which the simple precariousness is mobilized and resists the greedy fury of good functioning [SOUSA: 2007, P. 12].
Matias Monteiro
Brasília, 2016
COURTOISIE, Rafael. Estado Sólido. In: Jinetes del aire: poesía contemporánea de Latinoamérica y el Caribe. Santiago, Chile: Ed. RIL editores. 2011.
PINHEIRO, Luciana Paiva. Precário: fragilidade e instabilidade na imagem. Brasília: Universidade de Brasília, Instituto de Artes, 2010.
SOUSA, Edson Luiz André. Uma Invenção da Utopia. SP: Lumme Editor. 2007.