Exhibition: COSMO/POLITICS #4: When the machines stop running
Artists: Catarina Botelho, Eduardo Matos and Vasco Costa
Museum of Neorealism
Dates: 2019-04-27 – 2019-09-29
Curatorship: Sandra Vieira Jürgens and Paula Loura Batista
The fourth exposition of the COSMO/POLITICS cycle refers to the When the Machines Stop Running telefilm by Pedro Belo and Luís Filipe Costa from 1985, a work that recalls a play by the playwright Plínio Marcos, written in the midst of the Brazilian military dictatorship in 1967.
The exposition When the Machines Stop Running, whose fundamental topic is work, meets other pictorial references of the Museum of Neorealism collection, which iconographically transmit everyday life: our labour relations of exploitation, inequality, social exclusion, irrational resources extraction emphasising the need for change into a society where human dignity and the planet are really protected.
In the exhibition, When the Machines Stop Running three guest artists, Catarina Botelho, Eduardo Matos and Vasco Costa presented original projects that explore the permanent dichotomy between need and freedom at work, under different perspectives, widening the scope of issues and problems that prove to be timeless and apparently unresolvable.
In our post-industrial time with technological substitution the weariness of a society of failed individualisms is clear. They became disposable pieces of an unsustainable socio-economic organisation which proposes less employment and more consumption: therefore, more directed to precariousness, survival and violence than to emancipation.
All the political and existential reverberations that follow cannot be excluded from the exhibition: as landscape and territory marks, and as ethical, affective, emotional consequences and failures debilitating human condition.
CATARINA BOTELHO
The artist presents several compositions of images that reflect three key themes of her approach to this exhibition project, giving a contemporary nature to a number of issues immanent in Plínio Marcos’ play. The transition from an industrial capitalism (labourers) to a cognitive capitalism (temporary workers) generates an emerging social class consisting of a growing number of people dependent on ephemeral and flexible jobs, constantly unstable and without the prospect of seeing their cultural, political, social and economic rights guaranteed.
In this context, Catarina Botelho highlights the role played by women as active political subjects, taking up a public or subjective space which is decisive for their empowerment and unbalancing a culture which is still markedly patriarchal. The images of determination, strength, attitude and some irony implicit in the slogans written on the posters mark the young women’s movement of assertion as future cognitive workers who refuse any kind of violence or subjugation.
The dichotomy between the declining industrial landscape (scars of a proletarian past) and the new architecture, new buildings that emerge in the cities, transforming them, giving them new identities, while preserving industrial remnants is approached by Botelho in a critical reading of the various gentrification processes that are unfolding in one of the neighbourhoods which she used to observe.
The poetic reading of a space or landscape that was once industrial and is now invaded by nature, in an anti-capitalist cry of plant resistance, perhaps because it does not abide by the rhythm of work, but rather by the rhythm of nature, according to Botelho’s perception, shows us the dimension of the territories that subsist with their dualities, metaphors of a rutted past which is now a discontinuous present, subject only to the rhythm of nature.
EDUARDO MATOS
Diversion_The interval between things results from a field work practice, the structuring axis of Eduardo Matos’ creative process. This exploration of a variety of territories that are visited encourages the search for the intervals between the images and the objects on display.
In When Machines Stop, the artist presents an installation with two video projections and a table with several items, addressing the theme of the exhibition as a geography of work and, simultaneously, as a possibility of transformation. This force of transformation, intrinsic to the suppression of the social imbalances that permeate and nourish expectations in the face of a need for change, is also present in the echoes that the territories captured in the videos emanate, whether material or tangible, whether imagined or submerged. But there is a substance, a matter common to everything that determines impermanence or transformation: water. It’s in its flow, in the case of the video Throat, that we discover impermanence, transformation, despite the illusory immutability of the industrial scenarios, dotted by factories that are either abandoned and ruined, or ambiguously rural and urban, post-industrial. These landscapes are found in different territories: along the banks of the River Ave; in Sacavém; in the naval yards of Gdansk, in Poland. Despite these intervals, this temporal stillness, where machines no longer work, there is movement. There are sounds, there are signs of mutation, such as that of the objects that have been immersed, swallowed, altered and subject to disappearance, as in the video Interval. Similarly, we’re allowed to symbolically perceive the pause that leads to reflection in the image of the Ave Valley worker that is projected in the installation, which includes several sculptural objects, created from the transformation of common matter, in this case mud from the River Trancão.
VASCO COSTA
The subversive aggravation of a machine at a standstill, this incongruity (or unacceptability), is approached by Vasco Costa in his enigmatic work A Camel in Alaska. Exploring a play of oppositions on the concept of “parody” created by Georges Bataille in his work The Solar Anus, published in 1931, Costa reinterprets and questions the discontinuity, the interregnum, the drift that Plínio Marcos’ text evokes. Motionless and dysfunctional, this strange, exotic, hybrid sculptural body, half animal, half machine, summons the idea of the “absurdity of the standstill” and the “utopia of respite” - however, not only with regard to the machine, but also to the productive subject, confronting its inextricable link to critical situations, forced inactivity, uselessness, precariousness, daily lives constrained by a society focused on production and working times. In these, the erosion of the senses leads to frustration, disorientation, isolation and the feeling of living a naked life, translated into states of madness, alienation, revolt, physical and psychological violence, with serious mental, social, economic and existential consequences. On the other hand, this work leads us to another problem, that of the relation between the body and the skin, the machine and the body, the machine and the skin, cold and hot, the senses, to which we can add the weight of history: the industrialization evoked by the concrete mixer, which, in turn, is associated with the rotating movement and the all-generating gear and the animal skin placed horizontally on the machine, evoking a pre-machine universe, a natural cosmology, which leads us to a vague memory of origin and to a certain idea of purity and warmth. Legacy and symbol of a certain past, these references are mainly significant for the present: a work on the humanization of the machine and its camouflage through an appealing organicity.
