Memory and resistance are sisters. There is no doubt that the work of Romy Pocztaruk affirms this parity. Her poetic program, built over the last decade, presents us with a research that critically appropriates the past aiming to reconfigure our gaze at the present and, consequently, our perspective of the future. In this sense, the artist touches on the historical materialism that was so well defined by Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) in the first half of the twentieth century.
In On the Concept of History (1940) we find a textual articulation of a dialectic image: "There is a painting by Klee called Angelus Novus. An angel is depicted there who looks as though he were about to distance himself from something which he is staring at. His eyes are opened wide, his mouth stands open and his wings are outstretched. The Angel of History must look just so. His face is turned towards the past. Where we see the appearance of a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe, which unceasingly piles rubble on top of rubble and hurls it before his feet. He would like to pause for a moment so fair [verweilen: a reference to Goethe's Faust], to awaken the dead and to piece together what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise, it has caught itself up in his wings and is so strong that the Angel can no longer close them. The storm drives him irresistibly into the future, to which his back is turned, while the rubble-heap before him grows sky-high. That which we call progress, is this storm."
The historical materialist has his eyes turned in one direction: that of what needs to be saved. Here he appears transfigured as the angel of history. He is turned to the past, and he does not see without surprise the reality that lies ahead of his gaze. For where the classical historicist sees a chain of events, he sees a great catastrophe; where the historicist sees a succession of victories, he sees a heap of rubble. He wants to stop, collect the rubble, gather the fragments, wake the dead, and save. But he cannot, the storm that stops him is too strong and drives him into the future. The historicist, in his progressive drive, is leaving behind rubble on top of rubble. The rubble is the transfiguration of the losers' accumulation of suffering. The historical materialist works to reverse this process, and transform history into a field of struggle, instead of complacency. The new temporality proposed by Benjamin is the mechanism that propitiates this transformation. Here, the act of accessing the past has as a compass the urgency of the present. For only in view of this prism is it possible to withdraw the historical object from the continuum of time, thus enabling a modification of our time. By appropriating the past as it flares in a moment of danger, the materialist historian has the opportunity to "awaken in the past the sparks of hope." This moment of danger is the inflection that defines the difference.
The body of research Bombrasil, shown at Zipper in its current version, brings with it this benjaminian ethos. As we enter the gallery we are faced with an aseptic environment. Four metal structures house different black and white images that, laid out in different ways, are hung in a way so as to evoke the display of something like a science fair from times past. The photographs on display show images of laboratories, computers occupying entire rooms, or even women and men in white lab coats, who accurately handle test tubes. We also see indecipherable machines and anodyne environments that address us, such as the photo of a reception room that has the inscription: "Angra I".
Around this apparatus, the walls hold enlarged posters that show, in a visual language that appropriates a certain knowledge of constructivist graphic design, the following words: Secret protocols exist; Brazil prepares site for nuclear test; Brazil does not want the atomic bomb but wants submarines; Brazil should have its first atomic bomb in 1990; Itamaraty denies the plan for the bomb.
The headlines relate to a Brazilian atomic program initiated during the military dictatorship and whose end we still do not know. The exhibition space is marked by a wooden bench attached to the wall that carries a sail, just like that of a boat, at its tip. Lastly, the space is adorned with different types of plants. This "scenography" evokes a booth sponsored by CNEN (National Commission for Nuclear Energy) in an exhibition entitled Atoms in Action in 1959.
Thus, the artist intentionally shuffles the cards. What is an archive? What is a current image? Is it still possible to believe in an image? We are in the midst of an investigation into the ramifications of the nuclear arms race in a time marked by the military regime in Brazil. The artist/historian, Romy spent months between fieldwork and archival research in order to scrutinize this blind spot in our recent history. The Trans-Amazonian highway, which was the subject of a historical and poetic review by the artist, whose construction began during the Medici government (1969-1974), never having been completed, echoes the Brazilian nuclear project. Both are symbols of our most faithful entropy.
It is important to note the courage implied in the artist's choice of an object so far removed from the visual eloquence of her Trans-Amazonian project. In Bombrasil, the colourful photographs that capture the melancholy of a post-utopian time leave the scene, and a discreet labyrinth of black and white is made present, powerful in its conjunction of words and images, with no room for any fanfare. In Romy's poetic program, to go to the rubble of a suspended time does not mean paralysis or nihilism. We have learned from Walter Benjamin the potent dimension of what is doomed to oblivion. To remember the edges of history, according to Benjamin, is to narrate the present against the grain, gazing once more at the sometimes barbaric, sometimes melancholy face of our present. Thus, Bombrasil emerges as a gesture that goes against the flow a society of amnesia, cultivating, rather, a fertile territory for a critical memory to flourish.
Luisa Duarte