Trailer: Katia Maciel

Were it not for the word 

In 2001, visual artist, poet and scholar Katia Maciel shoots the documentary Neoconcretos. The film consists of a series of statements given by artists who had been active within the orbit of the Neoconcrete dissidence, and one of the more salient leitmotifs to be found in the statements is precisely an opposition to the formal orthodoxy, the implacable geometrism and the pure mathematics advocated by Concretism’s “General Staff”. 

At a certain moment, the first artist interviewed, Lygia Pape, speaks of a flow, which immediately brings to mind unimpeded, organic transit. A fleeting mention to Heraclitus and the problem of the artistic individual as privileged avatar for impermanence, freedom, non-fixity is resumed. In the end, we feel compelled to discover who is who in this metaphor. The unstoppable river, passage and accumulation, body that does not detain itself in definitude, a body that is not detained by definitude, a body that organises itself only circumstantially and therefore materializes notions both of the temporary and the elemental – is this the artist? Or is it the artistic process itself, viewed most schematically? 

The river continues to run, placing us before poet and visual artist Osmar Dillon. KM frames him using as background a piece of his own making called Rain. Therefore, the background which “advances” Dillon is comprised of a series of mirrored “crystal shards” over which the artist had the letters C H U V A (the letters for the Portuguese word for “rain”) printed. 

When discussing this piece in particular, Dillon makes two very opportune remarks, which we address here. The first is the statement that the word-rain “activates” the object. The second is the statement that the object “would be cold, were it not for the word”. With these two off-handed remarks, the problem of the poetic object, of one visual poetics, is put squarely before us. The word is seen here as a vitalizing instrument – in “activating” an object it transforms it into its opposite, a “non-object”, poetry; this absence of univocal function deposits it on the world of the living, a land trembling with possibility and suggestiveness. Vivification by means of the word; the object becomes warm, receptive, without foregoing a certain rigour in presentation. Dillon’s discourse seems exemplary to us for coupling meticulousness and formal control to an eros for communication and the interchange of poetic senses – among the interviewees, Dillon is not alone in expounding on the seer’s “participation” as being capital for the existence of the work of art. 

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But our mind is still on rivers. The imagination of what moves, what accumulates vital signs, what breathes, what rearranges itself before our eyes while somehow remaining true to itself. All of this has always been present in KM’s work. Now, after twenty years since the beginning of her activities in the field, we take a photograph of the flux, we try to intuit where it is headed. 

In this bend of KM’s artistic output, we begin to see an objective reframing – that is to say, a reframing into objects – of motifs previously elaborated mainly in the realm of cinema and videoinstallation. Always preoccupied with destabilizing both the image and conventional cinematic situations, KM – to use the words of A. Berne-Joffroy in an 1955 article on the objects of Fautrier – is an artist with a “marked impression that things could be quite different” and who continually provokes us with glimpses of movement, of a life hidden in stasis, cowering in all that is immobile and waiting for the slightest of signals, the slightest intervention, to begin, to proliferate. Here, such a life finds yet another hiding place, another recess to continue waiting. Form reformulates, rejuvenates. We now find ourselves on our way to the object; on our way to the mirrored object; on our way to the object activated by words. What can it mean now, this choice for visual poetry at the expense, for instance, of an unquestioning permanence in the field of the transcinematic? This speaks to us fluvially – it is water finding its own ways, forcing about, not merely thematising vitality but giving concrete examples of it as it wears its transmutations with pride. In this particular case, the option for the object is, in itself, substance for thought, and it can very well signify a move towards the increasingly solid, the increasingly tactile, the increasingly clear and intelligible. What, in the last analysis, takes place in this transformation from moving projections to a still image, from film to object, to visual poem? Has there been an increase or a dwindling of interactive potential? In a river that runs through cinema, installation, poetry and photography, what can this new tributary mean? 

To propose once again, but for the first time. To repeat, but to inaugurate. To retreat, but to advance. Let’s inhabit this: the difficulty in finding a language of retrospective and furtherance, of the river and the matter running with it. In the objects that compose this exhibit, we will find revisions and reformulations of celebrated works by the artist. They are like precipitations, new crystallizations. KM places herself outside her work for a moment to become a “player” of herself. There is a kind of sheet music, yes, but it has been written for the purpose of opening itself up to this sort of reinterpretation. It has been composed for openness. There it is. Availing herself of the freedom with which she has always handled her work (not only the freedom to see, but also, and mostly, the terrifying freedom of what is seen), KM reforms it, occasioning new and unforeseen relations in the context of a thematic repertoire that is absolutely coherent (what could be water in this metaphor?). After years dedicated to demonstrating, with distinctive calm, the fundamental instability of the images around us, KM, herself an architect of images, challenges herself to destabilize her own work by testing it on as yet unexplored terrain. 

Ismar Tirelli Neto