Exhibition: COSMO/POLITICS #3: The World Began at 5:47
Artists: Hugo Canoilas, Miguel Castro Caldas and Tatiana Macedo
Museum of Neorealism
Dates: 2018-11-24 – 2019-03-31
Curatorship: Sandra Vieira Jürgens and Paula Loura Batista
The third exhibition of the COSMO/POLITICS cycle makes reference to the play The World Began at 5:47 by Luiz Francisco Rebello, written in May 1946 and taken to the stage early the following year in the newly-created Salitre Theatre Studio.
In this fable, created in a historical context of enthusiasm, in the post-war period, the author reflects on the exploitation of man, the human and social condition, idealism, the end of a world and the possibility of building a new one, countering a pessimistic view and regarding theatre as an art for resilience and emancipation, in a piece of writing that owed much to the values of the time.
The three guest artists – Hugo Canoilas, Miguel Castro Caldas and Tatiana Macedo – answer the questions suggested by a contemporary reading of the play by creating original works specifically for this exhibition.
In a way, the latent question in Rebello’s fable about what is in decline and what is to come, raises a reflection on the worlds that are about to die and the ones that are about to be born. We can certainly think of new worlds based on equity, economic equality and social justice, ecological sustainability, solidarity, horizontality, democratic inclusion and, certainly, on the voices that cannot be captured, the central question of the rereading made by the artists represented in this exhibition.
HUGO CANOILAS
In this exhibition, the artist presents an installation composed of several pieces and paintings that show the questioning and problematization of current issues, reactivated by the deep projection based on Luiz Francisco Rebello’s text. After reading the fable, Hugo Canoilas was led to rethink the role of the figures that hold the power and that of their subordinates, the divide between classes and the abuse of power in different spheres of society, both in politics and in the artistic community.
Another issue raised by the artist is human self-centeredness that has largely determined the destruction of ecosystems, creating an unsustainable ecological crisis, in light of which the selfishness of the present generations, judging by the legacy left to future generations, is both unquestionable and startling.
The installation of Canoilas’ works reverberates and territorializes space through the way in which the objects and paintings are arranged, but above all by the fact that their names, filled with meaning, are included in the titles, inspired by phrases from Luiz Francisco Rebello’s play. They are negative spaces, as Canoilas calls them, like the one in the leaked picture with stereotyped shapes that appeal to the conservation or protection of the work: Curl up even more, if possible; or the lack of intellectual and artistic courage of the cultural community, reflected in the work Before crossing, looks to the right and doesn’t see me coming from the left (based on Silly Symphony by Walt Disney), suspended by a winter night on a traffic sign in Viena, the city where the artist lives, an initiation process that takes place before the arrival to the exhibition. In short, Hugo Canoilas appeals to the risk we take when we reduce a social critique to the comprehensible, since by relativizing and approaching this plausible understanding, we are succumbing to a somewhat dangerous conformity.
MIGUEL CASTRO CALDAS
Writer and playwright, Miguel Castro Caldas has expressed in his works a fundamental interest in issues related to theatre and performing arts, and has been developing a way of thinking about writing, text, actors and characters, which integrates a critique of what is acquired in language.
Because this project of the COSMO/POLITICS cycle emerges from the desire to read and re-read the play The World Began at 5:47 by Luiz Francisco Rebello, we invited Castro Caldas to establish a dialogue and a reflection on the play and to visit a different territory artistic, developing a specific intervention in the exhibition space, which reconciled plastic and performative aspects.
This invitation resulted in Foliation, an intervention that brings together an original text based on aspects of Luiz Francisco Rebello’s fable, and a device for the installation of sheets on which the narrative is written, which serves as scenery of the ground that the author presents on the opening day.
In the text, among many other issues addressed, the idea of voices that cannot be silenced or captured and which are greater than the bodies that emit them stands out. A totalitarian state may imprison people, but the cry for freedom endures, because collective voices resist and are not imprisonable.
On the ground, we can read the text while sheets repeatedly pass by, as if, like the voices, these too might pass from the scene to the public.
This action entails as doubt as to what is more important: what is written on the sheets or the gestures that makes them pass by, freeing them from a mere subordination to the support on which the text is written. As a courage which is a principle in itself, and whose meaning precedes revolt.
TATIANA MACEDO
Tatiana Macedo focused on the title The World Began at 5:47 to take a new look at her image archive. Following a method characteristic of her creative process she designed a visual essay composed by eight images.
Through a work based on research and editing, the dimension of this look is built through an accumulation of layers that give meaning to her worldview. For this exhibition, the artist selects, from her archival corpus, a series of images captured in different locations - London, Macao, Beijing, Hong Kong and Lisbon - and at different times, between 2004 and 2013. These black and white and colour images, presented in strips and arranged in compositions, necessarily establish spatio-temporal relationships and show aesthetic, human, power and class relationships. The series includes images of houses, streets, people, instants, and more or less private moments that reveal this look, which is also critical.
The Tuxedo Men portrayed in Rebello’s are indirectly evoked in the images of the store with black smokings, empty of meaning and essence. In the fable, the monopolize power and manipulate everything to ensure that the status quo remains unchanged, precluding a new world.
The image of a photograph taken in London where we read Female Workers of All Lands Be Beautiful together with the Arabic translation, in addition to being enigmatic, enables a deep reflection on gender issues. In a way, Tatiana Macedo’s compositions refer us to the themes underlying the androcentric discourse of Luiz Francisco Rebello’s play, be it the objectification of women or their reduction to traditional feminine roles.
