The exhibition Um berlinde no chão, quase no meio da sala, by Susanne S. D. Themlitz, proposes a journey through transitoriness, through perpetual movement.

Among a suggestion of objects, clustered and aligned on a long bench, we find several fragments: white coral, natural sponges, drawings, broken jars turned inside out, some intersections composed of metal rods in connection with ceramic objects, plinths, mirrors, water bottles with water inside, magnifying glasses, superimposed glass, plastic materials in solid-state. Throughout, there are unifying and deterritorializing tones. Similar objects, others differ in a relevant way. Others, despite opposing each other, maintain a subtle continuity, whether in their geometric shape or in their irregular reticulated form.

The row of objects is composed of an open system, despite the subsets that motivate the perception of small groups or frames.

The installation proposes a linguistic and cinematic mode. A “saturation and rarefaction” is suggested, a play between balance and imbalance, or between geometric and organic.

We can perceive mirrors that multiply these sets and that allow several frames within the frames. This nourishes an idea of depth of field, or extending other fields.

The small fragments or objects are also warped, enlarged or become different, when looked at through lenses that emerge, here and there, on the long bench.

In such a description, one cannot help but refer to the Deleuzian phrase, “an ambiguity between a secondary scene and a main scene”.

The benches lined up in the wide room cover other lower benches, and also planes that intersect and hide other material fragments. In a continuous and discontinuous, heterogeneous and homogeneous game, we are taken to a rhizomatic organisation, where each object or set of objects deterritorialises the other. In a tenuous way or through a sharp opposition, we query potential agencies and the multiplicity of possible heterogeneities, which hatch infinitely.

Small objects are found behind a mirror. One must contort the body to discover others. And, more than that, to be surprised by others that, moments ago, had been kept hidden. On one hand, the sensation is of a continuum, a thread that connects the different objects in their transitoriness; on the other hand, the sensation of having several “out-of-fields”, or an “open and close”, as Deleuze would say, that force the rocking of the bodies, that intense exercise of seeing. Among multiple tensions and balances, straight, vertical, horizontal and diagonal lines. Planes upon other planes, which encompass interiority and exteriority, sets and parts of sets, shadows and reflections of light, multiple points of view, framings, other dimensions of the image. Between the visible and the mental image, between the open and the closed system.

Um berlinde no chão, quase no meio da sala is on view at Casa da Cerca – Centro de Arte Contemporânea, in Almada, until February 20.