I\u2019ve seen it.
Faz parte moved me. As soon as I left, I sent Carlito a message sharing my joy from the Fradique Coutinho sidewalk. A text message, full of typos and disconnected thoughts. I think it was because of this SMS that he asked me for a talk, saying he wanted the impact without intermediation. Raw, like when I came out, still swooning, raw like: look, this is marvelous, thanks. He asked me to recount that moment, without any critical or historical constraints.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
ROOMS<\/p>\n\n\n\n
What I saw when I entered the two galleries were rectangular rooms made of white translucent fabric. I entered spaces with clearly defined dimensions and limits, solid spaces with right angles and corners. These rooms were not wombs, nor were they ships or airplanes, they were rooms.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SKY MOBILES<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sway of the sheets lent the rooms mobility, bringing to mind the term sky mobile. Not mobiles in the sky, but slivers of sky in motion. Standing there, inside, I watched a room glide, like you\u2019d watch Calder\u2019s mobiles or Fred Astaire\u2019s feet. Except the mobile-room is not made of parts that balance in movement, but rather of a single piece, which is what is so intriguing about the way it composes and discomposes, and the way it is one but never whole. It is part of a whole whose size and nature cannot be divined. Maybe that\u2019s why it struck me as a mobile of\u2014rather than in\u2014the sky.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is not that the draft in the gallery makes these rooms form and un-form. In fact, what forms and un-forms is the air itself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
DRAFT<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The draft bellies the sheets and makes right, pleatless angles dance, which is strange, because the fabric is not a curtain and it does not hang on a window. A rectangle of sheets, with no pleats, no folds, no drift, but which allows itself to pleat, a pleated wall-skirt, a languid structure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I walk the narrow corridor between the wall and the fabric, and the breeze created by my movements opens the way, delicately swelling the space between wall and sheet. I toy with it, moving my arm to make the sheet accompany the dance without touching my skin. I displace the air, and its existence between myself and things becomes clearer than ever before, the initial surprise becoming almost an awareness of a second skin inter-facing between myself and the world. I think of the Jews crossing a parted Red Sea. I imagine the firm ground flanked by walls of water, shored only by Divine will. Here in S\u00e3o Paulo, the sheet withdraws before my wind, clearing my way, ushering me somewhere sheet after sheet. If I feel like it, should I stop, the air will flow back and the sheet will engulf me.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
SEA<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Then I thought, why sky and not sea? I mean, sway is the sensation you get on boats. But I opted for sky because I didn\u2019t sway, I was still me and on firm ground, the whole time. Nothing inside drives me out of myself; these rooms make no impositions. Nothing dampens intelligence or sensation, except for the wonder and the lack of answers proper to art. If I feel cold, solitude, or if I fly in these rooms, it is I who does it; the rooms of Faz Parte give me these possibilities; they do not drag me out of myself.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
NOTHING<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Nothing is a relevant element of the room. There is nothing more I can say about that, other than that it exists and is important to them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
DUAL, SCENE AND SCENERY<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When I walk down a road and see an empty space between two buildings where a house once stood, I get the feeling that I cannot recall what that house was like, because it is lost to me, no longer present even in memory. So I promise to pay more attention to the houses and buildings on the S\u00e3o Paulo streets I walk each day, but I know I won\u2019t do it, the sensation of death gives no respite. I will keep on losing, always.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
I recall the scene from a film in which a man in a gray suit, bouquet in hand, enters an actress\u2019s dressing room and sees her silhouette behind a dressing screen, followed by part of a pale, beautiful arm as it deposits an item of underwear over the rim.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In these rooms, the sheeting obstructs our view of naked walls.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The outside space is cramped, the inside ample. When seen from the outside, the sheets protect the void. When seen from the inside, they recall the drapery of a theater before curtain-call. There is a world behind them, a world of things, or perhaps a movie about to shine across some hidden screen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Inside and outside there is draft, lightness, light and movement. The white fabric that separates inside from outside is translucent, preventing the gaze from piercing it. It is claustrophobic both within and without: outside is a narrow passage and we don\u2019t know where it leads; inside there are no windows, no contents, just an angular continuum, with no breaches or doors.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The sound reinforces this sense of duplicity, the glue that binds the void and scene of which the environment is made. It is a room, but not that room. The sound belongs to the street, not that street at that time. The street and the rooms that were there before the exhibition continue to exist. In fact, nothing here is virtual, the two sounds and rooms overlap\u2014the existence of one interfering in our perception of the existence of the other.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It is not a question of image or representation. The fabric does not simulate a wall; it is a wall that hides another bare wall.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The walls and ceiling reconstruct the place, but from the inside out. There is no trickery or illusion, though it might seem that way. Here there is something that is not.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Invention of Morel, a novel by the Argentinian Adolfo Bioy Casares (1914-1999), tells the story of a fugitive who goes into hiding on a desert island, where there\u2019s an abandoned house with a swimming pool full of putrid water and undergrowth invading the rooms. There is a woman that every afternoon walks through the flower bed, without even noticing the flowers, and sits pensively on a rock on top of the hill. There she is, every afternoon, pensive and lovely up on the hill. There is also a group of friends fooling around by the swimming pool, now filled with crystal clear water. The fugitive is afraid to show himself, but he fixes up a flower garden near the rock on the hill. Again, the woman walks over the flowers and sits on the rock. In the end, the fugitive discovers that the woman and the youths playing in the clean pool are reproductions of happy days lived in the past. One of the men has found a way to immortalize himself with his friends. Depending on the tides, a mechanism is triggered that allows times past to replay over the undergrowth and abandonment of the present.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The Faz Parte exhibition works a similar overlapping of existences that strike the viewer as if they were different times and even different spaces, somehow unfolding in the same place, at the same time. Even though the sound is a recording of past events, by being played back it becomes sound again, mixed over the present sound coming from the present street. In other words, the rooms and sounds both exist and are reproductions, they duplicate, modify and reinforce what we already know: the sound of the street, the space of the rooms. The walls, like white screens awaiting a movie, are the walls of a gallery with no pictures.<\/p>\n\n\n
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