“The struggle to think differently, to redo our reductionist culture, is a primary project for survival in our current context.” [1] In the 70s, Val Plumwood, an important name in ecofeminism and radical ecosophy, already warned us about the relevance of philosophy and imagination in ecological issues. The appeal to the political concreteness of thought tells us that Western appreciation of ontology has served and continues to serve a project of division and domination: the same judgement that essentialises and universalises Being, with a capital “B”, is the one that considers Nature as a suspended, impersonal entity, “a generous, faceless mother, […] the inexhaustible material of things”. [2] Unravelling the threads of these yarns, so grounded in imagination and structures, is an essential act of any kind of activism. It requires unlearning and repairing. To start again. To think again.

For over two decades, this has fuelled the work of Gabriela Albergaria, who is presenting the exhibition Desperdícios at Galeria Vera Cortês until June 24. Always concerned with the multi-species experience of a place, with special regard for gardens – usual spaces and images in her creations -, the artist seeks “a kind of substitute for ‘pure nature'” [3]. By dropping any transcendent trait within the natural environment, she also denies any generalization of Man: gardens are like materializations of historical, socio-economic, aesthetic or religious moments; places that produce and reproduce culture; hotbeds of conflicts and coexistence. Gabriela’s gardens have nothing to do with Eden. Although they are beautiful and harmonious, they do not portray an original and innocent union between two uncontaminated terms.

On the contrary, they vibrate and reveal the material contradictions generated by themselves, creating new forms of naturoartificial, minerartistic, vegetacultural life. Goddess in her own exhausted paradise – for not even Eden is wasted, but patched up, re-stitched. The stems are delicately cut (Coupant les tiges avec délicatesse, 2023), the beliefs, the concepts to make them grow more flexible and more resistant. Two imported practices from other geographies and cultures also play this role in Gabriela Albergaria’s show: the Japanese Sashiko – a method of recovering and reinforcing tissues through “small cuts” with thread, in worn-out areas – and the Colombian fique – Furcraea plant fibre, raw material for craft objects and a source of income for about 70.000 families in the country [4]. These sewing traditions, seen in delicate geometric compositions or novels – quasi-maps, quasi-oracles -, unfold, make and remake a relationship that, whether near or far, never gives up the attempt to get increasingly closer. Without a point of departure, without a point of arrival.

In a weaving gesture of someone who is looking, similar to that of composition and poetic inventiveness – an approximation that is possible given the origin of the word “text”, which comes from the Latin “textus”, past participle of the verb “texere”, “to weave” -, we accept the risk of probing the unknown, the invisible, in a body that lives and works without an itinerary, constantly exposing itself to movements, in the contrast between the materiality of the thread and the porosity of the mesh. In the artist’s grand drawings, whose lines and colours are the grammar of a known language, it is as if the memory of the fleeting photographic eye made room for another, based on distinct terrains and depths: the memory of the hands, of the fingers; of the needle, of the pencil; of the line, of graphite. We feel the contours, the roughness and the softness. We strain the wrinkles of the past and the minutiae of the present. We sense the future. And we deceive those who do not realise that this is thinking again. To start again.

Desperdícios by Gabriela Albergaria is at Galeria Vera Cortês, Lisbon, until June 24.

[1] Plumwood, Val. (2009). “Nature in the Active Voice”. In: Australian Humanities Review, n. 46, s/p.

[2] Levinas, Emmanuel. (1961/1980). Totalidade e Infinito. (José Pinto Ribeiro, Trans.). Edições 70, pp. 33-34.

[3] Gabriela Albergaria in an interview to the Público/Ípsilon newspaper. Piece by José Marmeleira, available in <https://www.publico.pt/2010/05/14/culturaipsilon/noticia/os-paraisos-artificiais-de-gabriela-albergaria-256707>.

[4] Rendón-Castrillón, Leidy; et. al. (2023). “The Industrial Potential of Fique Cultivated in Colombia”. In: Sustainability, 15, n. 1: 695, s/p.