Sob o luar fotográfico: Jardineiro André Feliciano

What we photograph, what photographs us: art glow worm

"Hey, see that can, you can see it because you're looking at it, but it doesn't need to see you to look at you." (Jacques Lacan, Seminar 16)

Photography is a doubt. Photography is a reflex. Photography is an instinct (of preservation?). The cultivation of the nature of art by the Gardener André Feliciano culminates, in this exhibition, in a set of works less about florescence and more about photography. More specifically, it's about what has happened to that language since Neo-Post-Post, a manifesto written by the Gardener in 2001, when he was considered a Modern artist. Spontaneous photography has given way to simultaneous and almost obligatory photography, taken by an act of reflex as naturalized as the act of squinting when in a very bright room.

The garden cultivated for presentation at Zipper Galeria is a day garden. But it is a frozen image, also of a garden, that first meets the visitor from afar, as if offering a glimpse of a representation of nature within the most traditional "landscape" standard. From a distance, we are faced with a tableau on the verge of becoming a painting, or photography. Close up, we experience the Lacanian inversion exemplified in the allegory about the fisherman who sees a can of sardines floating in the water: we do not just see something, we are also observed by the object that returns our gaze.

The photographic nature has also radically changed over the last eleven years: the Gardener wrote in his manifesto six months before September 11, the event that resembles the apex - and the beginning of the decline - of politics as image, as fiction, as spectacle. Al Qaeda adopted spectacular Hollywood language to plan its attack on the liberal-imperialist culture of the west, whereupon it established a generalized doubt in relation to politics, to image, to reality and fiction at the same time.

A new photographic subjectivity was forged in that event, in the instant when the second plane hit the World Trade Center and the television broadcasters, screening events live, inserted a subtitle reading "these images are real". The capacity to distinguish between fiction and reality was blunted by that point. But eleven years later, with the acceleration and ubiquity of mediated life (today we spend all our time connected to digital networks - internet, banks, twitter and the like), particularly for generations that were already born immersed in this context, doubt is a constant in our lives.

We start to doubt every and any photographic image, to the point that artist Nan Goldin, known for the radical nature of her pictures, asserts that the technological revolution has left her work in limbo, as people no longer believe they are looking at something real when they see her photos. In a world where every image is constructed or manipulated, the fruits cultivated by the Gardener of Art return to the doubting subject the suspicious gaze with which he regards things. These flowers and these animals are watching and photographing me too: is the resultant image of this gaze real?

The monkey-photographers can be seen as a metaphor for people, mimicking the behavior of the strange beings who frenetically take pictures of them in the zoo or on safari. But, thinking like Lacan, anthropomorphism is not included here for trivial mimetic meaning, but rather as a notion aimed firstly at a metapsychological level of intelligibility that draws us closer to the paradigm of the formation of unconscious, as Georges Didi-Huberman instructs us. This bronze tree where animals steady themselves to photograph us and this photographic garden do not "represent" anything at all; they present us with something new. A new collective - and photographic - unconscious is announced.

Juliana Monachesi