The body and I: diaries about distance
A deed of the body comes about in the crafting of time. In casings that are not meant to hide, but just to be; in the drawing of the aeroplane or within itself; in vestiges scattered around the house and in the desire to launch oneself into the world, Patrícia Araujo manipulates happenings to then coat them with what causes that which is afar. Her first solo exhibition brings a voyage in which the image is a device that equates to and, at the same time, is allowed to be traversed by files as a metaphor for episodes and performative expressions, based on distinct actions: sweeping spaces and memories, reconstituting them into existence, self-confessions structured as narrative, dynamics in which one is placed at risk.
Patrícia Araujo's process is aimed at finding the becoming of actions, the way in which facts are accessed and the spark which reignites them as the present. Her processes include rearrangements of times. In this temporal translation, the artist weaves fictions surrounded by a reality that subverts the limits of time/space/subject. And from a body-home, she causes the places she has visited to overflow, the time spent in being, the political and affective dimensions she has experienced, demonstrating narratives and instances of now, of something still occurring.
Thus, she makes her body attain other codes and instances of unpredictability, shifting between the possible and the imagined, announcing marks and meshes of the presence of that which might precociously fade away. The body becomes a dictionary of temporary actions and conducts, a map of places. It retains rivers, fissures, arid hinterlands, skies, disguises, rocks that deny the description of landscape, as they suggest an environment that breaks from the mere and chronological use of time as representation of our perception of space, creating and unstable compendium of experiences to be shared.
Like bottles in the sea, taking in and allowing to be taken out by currents, Patrícia Araujo uses the state of migration as both procedure and raw material. It is in these experiments with traffic, with not landing, with intense wandering that the artist explores the borders of photography, of the image that does not strive only for the index of a passage. This is her territory of language, of experimentation: what it shows are sketches of times, a supposed exteriority and "presentness" of photography. In this game there is a statement of fusion between that which arouses a memory, objects and gestures that (re)enact dramas and the effort to continue in a state of surveillance: returning, rewriting, giving form to the words, to the home, to the voids, to the shifts, to the body itself forever moving from places.
Galciani Neves