It is still astonishing that time is something unrecoverable, which seems to be revealed as the very sense of time: in the insistence on removing it from the achievable efforts of daily life, or in the filling in the gaps of the unknown with its residues, as if in an attempt to break the fears of the experience yet to come. Man divides space into regions, with such sections being in the range of speech, of sight, and of the tasks of the body. The horizon is thus stable, things have geometries, there are places which happen as utility – the place of action, of inhabiting, of logic, of work, of passages – places so certain that they nearly disappear amidst regularity of the use of the tools organized within them.
Time/space are parameters (illusions) to measure changes, appeals; they are ways of stating the extensions that live side by side in the world, have been transformed into habit: "If, however, no one was looking (...), if the whole complex lives of many people go on unconsciously, then such lives are as if they had never been” (extract from the diary Leo Tolstoy, 1897). Life disappears, becomes nothing, and subjects are swallowed, as are its objects, its furnishings and even their "fear of war." Hence, what might one think of the islands of absence conveniently situated amongst us as space and as sense of temporality?
Flavia Mielnik formulates denominations for thinking of space. The word naming her arguments arises as initial poetic dimension of the process: stairs wall, street wall, room wall which is not known, gallery wall. The artist works on the outskirts of time and space and on its filigrees, so as to add to them other perceptions. And performs a shift to language which is simultaneously inserted into its more elementary dynamics. It decants, it barters, it observes while drifting.
To be able to see wall and stairs: a concentration drawing. Thus so, stairs wall return as cognates of themselves, etymologically similar, as if their starting places were the same, but, in the journey, their geographies were shifted and their confinements broken. Flavia Mielnik affirms space from the construction of links - among its conjunctures and its wanderers, without hierarchy or stable formulations. She proposes that space continues to coexist, so to speak, in contamination processes, not as an exception to everything.
What is the meaning of architectural formulation and delimited layout? To some extent, these words seem to indicate a calculating intention, and a forethought of an ability to draw something necessarily simple and without complex requirements, arguing for a program to be somewhere which is projected. The artist enters these assertions, perceives the unstable and, by leading it to the line, the strap, the trace, builds the world from both the inside and the outside.
It is necessary to point out: this is neither a representation nor a hermetically composed design, which is reflected, and thus to be seen as something that varies upon itself. Walls, gaps, corners, bumps expand while also exerting traction as space, supporting itself as a whole.
In this sense it is possible that the drawing is something like a voltage cable, variably transacting wherever it goes (?), gesturing a probable constituency. As a narrative effort, as cuts and links of the subjects of space. Thus forcing things and spaces, pouring (de)limits, reducing and creating distances and frictions between everything that was disposed, the artist intersects the inside-outside of the exhibition space. It abolishes polarities. Thus street wall is an impermanent hic et nunc landscape, architecture, background, line, street and subject. It is also the place where the artist suggests intervals to be lost, among orders of heterogeneous realities, in which, however, space can be created for/in each of its inhabitants.
It seems that in this experimental process by Flavia Mielnik none of it could be different. There is a lucid understanding about her drawings set in ruins, in abandoned places, such as interventions in the urban fabric of the city. They linger there. To bring them to the exhibition space only as photographic records would be almost like forging them, like putting them inside a quiet and restrained frame. But yes, documentation exists and is important. It is just that the artist sees it as less of an appendage to the interventions, but more as the visual unfolding of the experiences where they take place.
From this elucidation a fertile impasse occurs. Flavin Milena reinvents her process and enhances the discussion on artistic gesture which, in a generalized manner - and easily revisited in the history of art - can be understood as a formulation of bridges between life and the specific environment of the art: the artist pinches the outside and brings it inside, as art.
The artist chooses the crossings and circulations between these instances. For such, not only taking advantage of the elements of the exhibition, like a musical score, but combining them as fictional elements: stone, post, stairs. All of these components work together with their surroundings in a space narrative composed within itself, causing the audience to shift as much as from the whole as from all of its fragments.
Gallery wall is not certain, nor white light in white cube, even if one structure or another has something mechanical, a feature sometimes noticeable when a slight lag in relation to its occupation occurs. Flavia Mielnik intercepts these structures with a kind of film of events that can take place there, these are the links. It is in this "in-between" that the artist tracks and permeates the nullity of void, and plants deviations in the look of those who walk by there, those who experience and live there.
Time is matter, space is matter, and expiring these two is the translation of matter. It is not a simple use of space. It is to occupy it, in the plural, as a practice of inventing hybrid micro fields, further thickening its edges. It is the task of putting everyone in dissonant relation, under the order of risk, situation time/space in which space and subject are attracted by its conversations and environments.
Galciani Neves